I noticed a few errors which I hope I've addressed.
---
Personal Essay II
Anton Carew
English 305, Professor Sewell
Miskatonic University
The walls of the study carrel were paper thin. Not that it mattered much. It was in the library with the others, providing an alcove for study and, to a smaller extent, escape. I spent five, ten, then fifteen hours a day in there as the semester wound on, the dissertation in my head gestating and appearing suddenly on bits of paper, on the computer screen, scribbled into the margins of the books I bought or borrowed. I could shut the door and close myself off from the world, only noticing the scrabble of a pen, the clatter of a forcefully used keyboard, the flipping of dry leaves of paper, the rumble of someone on the floor blowing his or her nose. I came prepared with a thermos of green tea and several sandwiches, though I'd often have more than crumbs leftover and my multiple visits to the café were for nothing more than hot water. The days I taught for my advisor would break the rhythm, but I began to arrive to class later, to emphasize the final paper they were all supposed to be working on, and throw my lecture notes willynilly into my messenger bag and shuffle off. I could feel the weight of their apprehension, their hundreds of pages waiting for me at the end of the semester, and the innumerable hours spent assessing them. Funny how now my writing seems so insubstantial and unimportant, how I would barter to regain those quotidian rhythms with everything but my soul. A soul: something I once set aside as a romantic daydream now feels so central, if utterly deflated.
I'd spent the Saturday in the carrel, noticing more than usual the thinness of the walls and how the neighbor to my left--present, it seemed, as often as I was despite the numerous underused alternatives--seemed to read his research material aloud. Becoming distracted, I realized he must be a student of language, either ancient or exotic if not both, because I could discern nothing familiar in the muffled intonations. Despite the ambiguity, he spoke with a rhythmic, even musical manner that even after I returned to my work I sensed not just through the wall, but behind me as if someone were peering through the small inset window on the door. More than once I glanced behind me expecting a student of mine or some neglected friend furtively standing there, fingers poised claw-like behind the glass. After several such inconclusive distractions, I made an excursion to the restroom; the opportunity allowed me an investigatory glance at the various students--few on a Saturday, but all embedded in their work--and some deliberate spying on my neighbor.
His head bobbed up and down as if in mosque-style prayer as he studied. It gave reason to his rhythmic chanting and I wondered if he were Muslim or had assumed the habit as a neurosis. His unkempt hair was flecked with shimmers of grey and I could see his olive complexion by his widely protruding ears. The small desk was littered deeply with open books: old heavy tomes, many with broken spines and ruddy old covers. One corner of the desk was cleared for a spiral bound notebook, its revealed page thick with a tight, incomprehensible chicken scratch. Something in his motions, his queer dedication, or the admirable mess he labored in captivated me and I stared for longer than intended. I began to discern not just his scribbling, but clearly described diagrams or hieroglyphs of esoteric meaning. In one of the opened books an expansive two page illustration detailed a circle of people in an ancient stone room where braziers' listing fire cast unnatural shadows on the walls and floor. The image assumed some early cubist style, apparently depicting more walls than a traditional vantage would allow, suggesting fleshy and angular bodies that inspired complaints in my empty stomach.
His head jerked up, dragging me from my focus and without thinking I twisted myself away from the window, jabbed my key into my carrel's lock, and slipped in. He was silent for a long time as I calmed my breathing and absently flipped pages. I brushed off the anxiety as the result of overeager snooping, an unusual voyeurism on a fellow student and researcher. He must be analyzing fiction of a bygone era or the language was only an addendum to some sort of religious study, an examination of medieval mysticism or something like that. I had jumped to conclusions and then been surprised when his research was not as expected. Being sly did not come naturally to me and it left me titillated in a surprising and captivated way. The unwholesome thrill unnerved me and I tried to placed it behind me, but no amount of tea seemed to bring me back to my studies. I folded up my papers, slid them into their awaiting folders in the cabinet, replaced my books on the shelf, and locked away my little monastic cell. My neighbor's door had been left just slightly open and against my better judgement I slipped in for uncertain mischief. My heart leapt again to my throat, but the illustration was hidden again between covers. The books were in various languages--one distinctly German, another two or three in Italian or Latin, but most entirely unknown to me. I noticed a small unmarked vial tucked in the bookshelf, containing several orange capsules. The absence of labeling set me off, though I am familiar enough with the contents. His bobbing head made that much more sense.
Considering my predicament in a briefly cleared mind, I left the carrel and made my way to the stairs. I caught the small man at the corner of my eye, but prevented myself from any egregiously suspicious observation. He was Middle Eastern, maybe Indian, or perhaps Egyptian, and seemed overly small, as if trying to avoid attention by curling up into himself. He was a snail of a man--I decided--carrying his literary hoard, his rightful shelter being the pages of ancient books, of times that he managed to understand better than the present. The University was large enough that we may never have crossed paths until that night and if it hadn't been for those paper thin walls I might have gone on blissfully ignorant of this man and his esoteric studies. But I doubt it.
The way home was haunted by suspicions of other presences that refused to dissipate and, upon reflection, became ever more intense. The nights bore that wintry dark which gobbles up the light in its amorphous starless skies. Somewhere above, the moon danced, though its only sign was the infusion of sickly radiance in an ever-shifting formation of clouds while earthbound lanterns flickered sodium yellow. The campus was suspended between the early tittering of youths and the boisterous return of those celebrants; they were somewhere, I told myself, enjoying the night far away from this particular route. Shadows seemed to race on all sides, encircling me and cutting off my escape and as I turned to face them, a street lamp would flicker its unwholesome glow and nothing unusual would be there; a flash of darkness and then the expected outlines of denuded trees and shrubs, walkways and banisters, ivy-covered buildings with shriveled leaves rattling in the night. I wanted to run, to lock the door behind me and turn on all the lights until this malignant mood passed, but I refused the fancy with all the determination I could muster, wishing it away with clenched, pocketed fists.
I was out of breath when I locked and bolted the door behind me. The entry light hummed it's fluorescence warmly and I stood, rubbing my shoulders with my hands, trying to shake off more than the cold. A deep-rooted scientism jostled and jarred with my sentiments, shriveling slightly at this undeniable confoundment. I put water on for tea, but only after letting the lights flutter gradually into life, banishing the shadows only too slowly. The entry light remained on, breaking my childhood habit of turning every light out as I passed; a habit that frustrated my quiet, sensitive mother to no end, though she always affirmed the habit with a wavering smile. I placed a spoon slathered with honey into the tea pot, the water in the kettle stirring to life, and sprinkled loose petals and leaves of jasmine into their silver chassis. Trying to reconnect with my usual absentmindedness, I opened the fridge--an old, polished Frigidaire I rescued from my grandparents' before my sister had the chance to give it to Goodwill--only to blanche at the notion of eating anything. My stomach churned restlessly, though the promise of tea and sleep calmed it once the door to the fridge closed. I flipped on the main room light--a living room and bedroom--and nibbled on dry, salty crackers from the pantry until the water boiled, all the while watching the slow retreat of the dark.
The arm chair wrapped itself around me as I set myself into it, an immense relief sloughing off as I sipped the still too hot tea, relishing the scalding floral sweetness on its end. The days in the library, of endless reading and writing and solitude had gotten to me; that was all. My fellow scholar was probably in the same boat, though our brief encounter suggested a strong, perhaps proud foreignness. My progress on my own work had been substantial and I may benefit from a holiday, rejuvenating myself on more than stale or soggy sandwiches. I had lost weight--a common trend of mine during periods of academic intensity--and allowed friends' calls to go unanswered. Tomorrow, yes tomorrow I would catch up, get a drink or just enjoy some sunshine--if that skulking sun ever showed its face again--and conversation over tea and coffee. I felt my appetite return, but let it grumble as a sort of vengeance on its earlier hesitancy. I thought of rich, swirling cream; a chai latté with a shake of nutmeg, cinnamon, and brown sugar; of the forgiving flesh of the baguettes served at that particular coffee shop, the buttery crumble of a scone at the other. I'll give myself a holiday and allow this little episode to fade.
Logic seemed to surface again as I considered the whole event with greater removal and objectivity. It all could have been a panic attack, the result of those upcoming papers and my poor preparation for handling them, or just some fear of actually finishing the dissertation... When was the last time I met with my advisor? He was out of the country until Wednesday, but we ought to discuss my progress shortly thereafter. It was all a conflation of forces, of the slow tides that I had refused to acknowledge. I had been taken up by a riptide, but was returning to a more comfortable ebb and flow. The waves lapped beneath me as I pulled the comforter over my shoulders, up to my chin, and dozed off.
---
It was nearly a week before I made it back to the carrel. Everything took on a peculiar, distracting keenness. For once I wasn't disheveled as I taught my classes, I stayed after chatting with students, encouraging them on their various projects and passions. I noticed a young woman in the class had taken a liking to me: a short curly-haired brunette who wore an obvious spunk and witty style. Upon reflection, I could recall how she was often eager to participate in class, to stir me from my lecture and develop a conversational, seminar vibe. The second class of the week I let the classroom shift: students spoke up from different corners, popcorn popping in a delightful, chaotic medley of experiences, interpretations, and insights. Students provided novel, perspicacious observations on the readings, on subjects and ideas I had learned four, five, six years before. It was new to them, often radically new, and seemed to stir me from my slumber even more.
After the second class a handful of students gathered at a coffeeshop near campus. It became clear that in my absence they had built up a support web for one another, a study group that gave them the environment they wanted in the classroom; I watched as they bounced around in open criticism and playful condenscencion of one another. At first, I was eager to join in, to offer my own ideas and wizened critique and understanding. In no great length of time, though, I sat back and sipped my coffee--heavy with cream--soaking in their vigor and camaraderie. I inserted small comments, used one of their computers to dig up articles they might find interesting. The brunette--her name I recalled was Jezebel but all her colleagues refered to her as Bel--schemed her way into leading class discussion the next week, staring at me with uncanny confidence. Her fellow students liked the idea and they, with syllabus in hand, began revamping the next month of classes, setting up their own alternative.
Spring had begun eeking its way forward, drawing out the days with pleasant, sunny intensity; but night had set before I left, carrying with it the last breaths of a hesitant winter. I had only my jacket and scarf which I tightened around me. My stomach quaked with sloshing coffee, my fingers jittery with caffeine. Jezebel--I refused to take the more familiar appellation which seemed, somehow, unchaste--caught up to me and offered me a ride. She pointed to a second- or third-hand sedan, the chassis rusted around the wheels and a stubborn passenger window that I assumed refused to wind entirely. I said no, that I was going to work at the library--a short stroll--and put the caffeine to good use. I rarely drank coffee, but something about the evening had suspended that abstinence. She smiled and I responded in kind, perhaps too much so, and walked away with her warm brown eyes on me--I imagined, at least--until I reached the corner.
I quickly regretted the decision. The cold snapped at my ears, at my ankles along my too-short thrift store trousers, and crawled into my jacket sleeves insidiously. I quickened my clip toward the library, feeling a brazen, even malicious intent in the night. Shadows danced as cars passed, taking on brief, perturbing forms just before fading. They took on an unwelcome sharpness, just as everything had since my last late night in the library, and I felt the urge to break into a run. The steady incandescence of the library façade--a brick firmament testifying to the heavenly status of education--apparently banished the phantoms. I tugged at the door with undue force and let the suction drag me in. It was quiet, the public terminals near the lobby almost empty, and one lonely student at the front desk read a half-hidden notebook. It was the Friday just after midterms--from which I excused my students--and the only sound was the faint fluttering of pages and the hushed high whine of the archaic ventilation system. The student at the front desk noticed me and shoved his notebook under the desk in a feeble attempt to conceal this small breach in regulation.
I avoided the wide main staircase for an access stairwell, brilliantly lit by humming fluorescent lights. My quick steps and hard shoes echoed in a mumbling chorus on the linoleum and unforgiving walls. Upstairs, I stepped into the bathroom, the same soft humming of the lights sang as I washed my face and forced my breath to slow. I felt feverish, my forehead washed of its beads of sweat, and my eyes widely staring back at me through the silvered pane. My hands roughed dry on crinkly towels and then tugged at my shirt and jacket--damp creeped along its cuffs--hoping to feign some composure. Laughter lay somewhere inside me, bottled up with anxiety and a strained, unnatural tension. I chuckled with numb ambiguity, unnable to make light of myself. Several deep breaths later I stepped out into the hallways toward my carrel.
I expected his light on but only a series of blackened windows met me. I forced my hand steady as I inserted the key and turned the handle. Everything was as I left it, all in its rightful place, and I breathed deeply again. I pulled out a frayed spiralbound notebook, a stack of books from the shelves, and one of my awaiting black pens. Cracking the topmost book--some critical reading of Tocqueville--and let the words rise up to meet me. They were dense and warm and provided a hard, certain texture to the unnerving ethereal quality that had chased me thence. After the first several pages the words took on a peculiar foreign attitude, somehow modulating on the page the way the ocean floor shifts underneath a passing wave. I could see the words, but as they sang in my mind they took on unnatural yellow tonalities; they became slippery and lolled around with oceanic weight.
I closed the book and opened another, not glancing at the title. The words roiled on the page, intoning themselves in my mind in unimaginable ways. They were the words of dreams, juxtaposed with alien meanings the way one knows Arabic or German in a dream, speaking and understanding in perfect fluent clarity only to wake and feel that knowledge evaporating away. I tried to focus, to read each word with its own anglophone certainty, its Saxon or French root; but letters and syllables built, each on the next, in precipitous architectures of sound. Again and again, even flipping through my spiral notebook with growing anxiety and inescapable surreal fear, the words became a heady, abyssal sound. Alien phonemes of geologic age meant nothing to me but each iteration brought on new vertiginous depths, each haunting me with ineffable meaning.
The door slammed behind me, sealing my keys, coat, and scarf within while the reverberation echoed through the floor. I ran, holding onto banisters and tracing my finger along walls on my way to the exit. Bulbs flickered, revealing the shadows beneath the light, hidden between pages, tucked like bookmarks between the covers in every cranny of the library. My feet tripped themselves in my haste, fearing that I might step on some tangible specter waiting to grab hold. The student looked up, shouted something at me, as I broke into the sharp, cold night--his words chased after me, carrying that otherworldly annunciation--and I felt liberated despite the dark. Icy air stabbed at my unaccustomed lungs as I raced through campus, heading into town, following the trail of street lamps and the raucous vigor of youth.
I stumbled past my apartment entrance, wheezing and frustrated. I checked my pocket for my wallet and strolled, bent half-over, into town. In a dimly lit bar, the dance floor rustling to life at the other end, I downed a double whiskey and grabbed my beer. Someone nearby whooted in my honor, oblivious to my frantic state and confusing it with something celebratory. I grabbed a pen from my pocket and a stack of napkins, thinking I might record the events. My hand seized in stark fear above the napkin, fearful of what letters or strange glyphs I might inscribe. As the whiskey gripped my stomach, I was able to attend to the surrounding sounds, the rumble of words redefined by software and the conversations hollered between friends and strangers. They were clear and comprehensible. Words loaded with their own textired meanings but ultimately a human meaning, something my mind could grasp and comprehend. I sat alone for several minutes, ordering another beer and whiskey that I sipped with gradually steadying hands.
---
I met Elwynn Caldwell in this state. He finished with his second whiskey before he spoke to me. It was clear he needed either clarity or confusion in great quantity. More than I could providem, anyway. I did what I could: I bought him another drink and listened to his story. I have recalled it here to the best of my ability, using his same sobering words where I could. When I sat with him, I had just been turned down by a classmate and made a fool, in a small way but a fool all the same. A night next to this half-familiar fellow seemed better than moping around the bar or chasing after friends out in the chill night.
I met Caldwell at the coffeeshop with his students. Bel and Jacob were in his class and when I saw them bantering loudly in their small crowd, I decided to sit with them. The lanky man that had listened and joked drily with us then was an entirely different creature than this half-frozen, increasingly drunk heap of poorly fitting clothes. He had been mostly quiet, prefering to have others hush when he spoke than to raise his voice. At the coffeehouse he had a monkish austerity and humor to him. He did not cause many laughs, but smiles rippled around the table as he made allusions to theorists he enjoyed and the faculty of the University. Caldwell made no effort to conceal his distaste for some among of the instructors in the humanities; he even chuckled mischieviously as he recounted how he and the younger Professor McEwan had openly condescended against one another the previous year.
If it weren't for his unshakable anxiety in Kiely's Pub, I would have expected a joke of it, that he had simply left his jacket in the restroom or on another chair and was using me for some private laugh. But as his tale closed, I was certain that he was in earnest. The details took on ever increasing clarity and I doubted--though I wanted to believe--he had spent too many quiet hours in the library and was suffering from nervous exhaustion. That sounds like a page out of time: nervous exhaustion. Would I next diagnose an energetic and unpredictable woman with "uterus fever." All the same, I could do little besides take in his story and believe, despite myself, in its verisimilitude.
The library had closed before he finished the narrative, otherwise I would have gone to recover his keys and coat in his stead. His apartment, I learned as he stumbled on my arm, was one of those second floor spaces above a shop. With no clear landlord or neighbor in sight, I sobered up and dragged him to the apartment I share with two others, Jesse and Upton. Caldwell had long since fallen into a stuporous sleep, dragging his feet as much as walking. I plopped him onto the couch, set out a glass of water, and strolled down the hall. I saw the flickering of a computer screen creep under Jesse's door and heard the subdued grunts as he played one of his games. I thought of how Caldwell had said, "the shadows beneath the light," and could not make out his meaning. I decided it was either my fatigue or his. I heard him grumble as I prepared for bed. Something rustled and splattered to the floor.
Feeble streetlights slipped through the threadbare curtains on the window, dancing with the dark of the room. Caldwell seemed to be sitting up: a black silhouette on black. As I focused, I wondered tiredly what might have happened. Other forms congealed out of the darkness. Caldwell was sitting perfectly straight and impassive on the sofa, as I'd left him except for his posture. The plastic cup rolled from side to side in its plashed water as it whispered rhythmically. The water glimmered with a confused, refracted indigo; I could not discern the light's source. A frame of yellow light surrounded the door from the hall, but, I realized, it was not a perfect frame. My eyes struggled between the mundane light and the smudge of unmoving but rippling darkness between the door and myself.
The air was still and I realized Caldwell wasn't breathing. I wasn't breathing. Whatever it was between the door and myself wasn't breathing. Somehow, over an infinite distance I could make out the clatter of keys and remote, monosyllabic mutters. Blood pumped through my neck, pounded in my ears, and the room seemed to flush--sanguine red on inky black--as my pulse throbbed. With infinite care I raised my foot, toe still touching the floor, and stepped back. I repeated the step with the opposite.
It all happened at once after that. The floorboard creaked and a sofa spring sang its queer dirge. Darkness like heavy, stagnant air moved in a tidal rush toward me, split or confused by the two simultaneous sounds. The door opened, its hinge howling against the other sounds. Light flooded in and blinded my dark-accustomed eyes. Upton and the woman with him were caught mid-laugh only to choke on it. My vision blurred, accompanied by a dull thrum behind my eyes as too much light came at me too quickly. Still I could not dismiss the slithering, ichorous darkness as it crawled with wicked speed out the door. Upton's company tripped and fell to the ground suddenly unbalanced and unable to breathe. Caldwell was bathed in the light of the hallwaye. He was bone white, and frozen stockstill.
I remained planted in place. The stark fear of that thing bearing down on me, the creak in the floor, the way it moved without moving, without any clear concept of momentum. I was certain it might return and the only thing I could do was stay still. Then the hollowness in my chest rattled and I struggled to breathe as if the air had been knocked out of me. I saw that Upton was trying to help the woman struggling to breathe in the hallway and went to Caldwell. His his eyes were wide, the whites pierced by pupils dialated grotesquely. His forehead was damp with cold sweat. I feared him dead, or near enough to it, but I felt the thin rasp of breath on my cheek and eventually--though not nearly as soon as I would have liked--he blinked. He was entirely unresponsive to my comments and I went out to check on Upton and the girl.
Upton had been calling to me to get some wet rags or bandages as he held her. When I brought them out I saw why: He'd rolled up her shirt and along her midsection and right side were striated burns--or what I thought could be burns--where small rivulets of blood dripped. She breathing, but with difficulty. Her hands quaked in shock. I grabbed the phone and dialed, babbled something about a burn, an accident, I don't know what. Something prevented me from calling them friends; they were just "people" in my place, hurt and confused and scared. They kept me on the line, though I couldn't think of any way to describe what had happened or how. I tried to run through the scenario but it was only later, only when I tried to write this that it came back to me. A smell had been left in its wake, the smell of scarred flesh and the fear and something like an absence, the way rubbing alcohol smells when it evaporates. I opened the door and tried to coax the air out. The cold hit me like a brick, the sweat all over me suddenly becoming frigid. I shivered fiercely and I wasn't sure if it was the cold or the fear.
The fire truck mutely flashed its lights outside, piercing the night like so many spears, and I led the men in. They whiffed the air and muttered to one another as they knelt to help Libby--Upton was calling her that as he tried to nurse her wounds. The pair of firefighters spoke in unwavering voices. It wasn't until the ambulance came that anyone noticed Caldwell, inanimate on the couch. Libby had calmed somewhat, though I think it was the shock setting in, as they set her on a gurney. Caldwell allowed himself to be half carried by the firemen and set in a tight corner of the ambulance where they secured him in with a seatbelt like a baby's carseat. They gave the straps a hard tug and passed a thumbs up to the driver. Libby was sleeping or sedated serenely on the gurney, looked over by an EMT. They had given Upton and me a look over, saying nothing in the process. The police had arrived by then and the two of us were taken to the station, each in his own cruiser, for a statement.
The officers handled us softly, all things considered. We had two people in our apartment requiring urgent care while we were shaken but physically fine. The deputy said something about a burglar--which I wanted to deny but failed to--that was scribbled into the report. A couple of younger officers tried to argue with the deputy that we ought to stay over night, and I was clearheaded enough to see they thought we were, in some manner, quilty. The deputy presented a stoic face, took the two aside and spoke plainly to them out of earshot. They grabbed their coats and scurried out. Upton and I didn't speak about what happened when we were driven home, nor the next day.
On the second day, Upton went to the hospital to see Libby. I stood in the hallway and listened as he tried to get her to talk to him. Walking past the door to the bathroom I glanced back and saw the bandages running all along her side. The crisp linen folded neatly under her arms. She stared at him, anger red on her face. Beneath the anger--something about the fatigue of her eyes and the circles beneath them--I could see that the anger was a veneer; it covered the fear that kept her up except for the painkillers running in through her IV.
Upton stormed out, pushing me against the wall in the process. I let him get ahead of me and then followed him to the main door. I stopped at the front desk and asked to see Caldwell. The rosey cheeked, rotund nurse explained that I couldn't. When prodded, she said plainly, "Mr. Caldwell is in psychiatric care. No visitors. Doctor's orders," a line she didn't mind handing to me. I asked for his doctor, that I was the last one to seem him before he was admitted, that I was a friend. After prodding her, she eyed a doctor as he passed in a hurry with a clipboard in hand. I took the cue--intentional or otherwise--and chased after him. It was Caldwell's doctor, from whom all I got was, "He's nonresponsive since they brought him in."
I walked with him, prying with any question I could muster. I tried to explain what had happened, the memory still jumbled madly. He stoppped at a counter, spoke in an aggravated tone to a nurse, jotted down a note on a pad, but then left it there. I watched him walk away as a wave of med students with an instructor cut off my route. The nurse at the counter watched me, glanced down at the pad, and resumed her work on the day's crossword puzzle. I lifted the pad; in tight medical scrawl read, "Breakdown institutionalized prognosis inconclusive." I tore at the pad, but the nurse grabbed my wrist and neatly extricated the sheet. Her eyes on me, she spat a wad of gum into the paper, crumpled up the paper, and threw it in the trash.
I told Bel about the visit. She tried to get in to see him, trying to explain--first--that he was her instructor and--after that--that he was her boyfriend. She got a skeptical look, but they let her peer through window, the kind crisscrossed with reinforcing wire. She said she had expected a padded room, but it wasn't. He sat at the edge of a white iron bed, a lumpy mattress and single cover over top, a pillow neatly set at the head. Blue and white tiles lined the floor. And there was Caldwell: sitting at the edge of the bed, hands gripping his knees, pale and stockstill.
---
Mister Carew,
Though you have here a fine display of your flamboyant style and diction, the language comes off as trite and assumed. Your twist does not make up for an inconsistent voice. This shows some improvement over, at least in potential, from your first paper. I will remind you that this is a nonfiction course and, for your sake, I hope you realize THAT for the final paper. I will not pass you if you try to hand in another piece of fantasy like this.
C+
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
Monday, February 6, 2012
Paper Thin Walls Pt 2
It was a week before I made it back to the carrel. Everything that week had a peculiar keenness. For once I wasn't disheveled as I taught my classes, I stayed after chatting with students, encouraging them on their various projects and passions. I noticed a young woman in the class had taking a liking to me, a short curly-headed brunette who wore her hair short with obvious spunk. Upon reflection, I could recall how she was often eager to participate in class, to stir me from my lecture and develop a conversational, seminar vibe. The second class of the week I let the classroom shift: students spoke up from different corners, popcorn popping in a delightful, chaotic medley of experiences, interpretations, and insights. Students provided novel, perspicacious observations on the readings, on subjects and ideas I had learned four, five, six years before. It was new to them, often radically new, and seemed to stir me from my slumber even more.
After the second class a handful of students gathered at a coffeeshop near campus. It became clear that in my absence, they had built up a support web for one another, a study group that gave them the environment they wanted in the classroom in which they bounced around in open criticism and playful condenscencion of one another. At first, I was eager to join in, to offer my own ideas and wizened critique and udnerstanding; but in no great length of time I sat back and sipped my coffee, heavy with cream, soaking in their vigor and camaraderie. I inserted small comments, used one of their computers to dig up articles they might find interesting. The brunette--her name I recalled was Jezebel but all her colleagues refered to her as Bel--schemed her way into leading class discussion the next week, staring at me with uncanny confidence. Her fellow students liked the idea and they, with syllabus in hand, began revamping the next month of classes, setting up their own alternative.
Spring had begun eeking its way forward, drawing out the days with pleasant, sunny intensity. Night had set before I left, carrying with it the last breaths of a hesitant winter. I had only my jacket and scarf which I tightened around me. My stomach quaked with sloshing coffee, my fingers jittery with caffeine. Jezebel--I refused to take the more familiar appellation which seemed, somehow, unchaste--caught up to me and offered me a ride. She pointed to a second- or third-hand sedan, the chassis rusted around the wheels and a stubborn passenger window that I assumed refused to wind entirely. I said no, that I was going to work at the library--a short stroll--and put the caffeine to good use. I rarely drank coffee, but something about the evening had suspended that abstainence and suggested its import. She smiled and I responded in kind, perhaps too much so, and walked away, her warm brown eyes on me--I imagined, at least--until I reached the corner.
I quickly regretted the decision. The cold snapped at my ears, at my ankles along my too-short thrift store trousers, and crawled under into my jacket sleeves insidiously. I quickened my clip toward the library, feeling a brazen malignity in the night. Shadows danced as cars passed, taking on brief, perturbing forms just before fading. They took on an unwelcome sharpness, just as everything had since my last late night in the library, and I felt the urge to break into a run. The steady lights of the library façade--a brick firmament testifying to the heavenly status of education--apparently banishing the phantoms. I tugged at the door with undue force and let the suction drag me in. It was quiet, the public terminals near the lobby almost empty, and one lonely student at the front desk with a notebook half-hidden behind the desk. It was Friday just after midterms and the only sound was the faint fluttering of pages and the hushed high whine of the archaic ventilation system. The student at the front desk noticed me and shoved his notebook entirely under the desk in a feeble attempt to conceal this small breach in regulation.
I avoided the wide main staircase for an access stairwell, brilliantly lit by humming fluorescent lights. My quick steps and hard shoes echoed in a mumbling chorus on the linoleum and unforgiving walls. Upstairs, I stepped into the bathroom, the same soft humming my company as I washed my face and forced my breath to slow. I felt feverish, my forehead washed of its beads of sweat, and my eyes widely staring back at me through the silvered pane. Straightening, my hands roughed dry on crinkly towels and tugged at my shirt and jacket--damp creeped along the cuffs of my jacket--hoping to feign some composure to myself. Laughter lay somewhere inside me, bottled up with anxiety and a strained, unnatural tension. I chuckled with numb ambiguity, unnable to make light of myself. Several deep breaths later I stepped out into the hallways toward my carrel.
I expected his light on but only a series of blackened windows met me. I forced my hand steady as I inserted the key and turned the handle. Everything was as I left it, all in its rightful place, and I breathed deeply again. I pulled out a frayed spiralbound notebook, a stack of books from the shelves, and one of my awaiting black pens. Cracking the topmost book--some critical reading of Tocqueville, if I recall correctly--and let the words rise up to meet me. They were dense and warm and provided a hard, certain texture to the unnerving ethereal quality that had chased me thence. After the first several pages, the words took on a peculiar foreign attitude, as if somehow infected or modulated the way the ocean floor shifts underneath a passing wave. I could see the words, but as they sang in my mind they took on unnatural yellow tonalities; they became slippery and lolled around with sickly, oceanic weight.
I closed the book and opened another, not even glancing at the title. The words roiled as if boiling, intoning themselves in unimaginable ways. They were the words of dreams, juxtaposed with alien meanings the way one knows Arabic or German in a dream, speaking and understanding in perfect fluent clarity only to wake and feel that knowledge evaporating away. I tried to focus, to ead each word with its own anglophone certainty, its Saxon or French root. The letters and syllables each a constituitive building block on the next. Again and again, even flipping through my spiral notebook with growing anxiety and inescapable surreal fear, the words became a heady, abyssal sound. Alien phonemes of geologic age meant nothing to me but each iteration brought on new vertiginous depths, each haunting me with ineffable meaning.
The door slammed behind me, sealing my keys, coat, and scarf within while the reverberation echoed through the floor. I ran, holding onto banisters and tracing my finger along walls on my way to the exit. Incandescent bulbs flickered, revealing the shadows beneath the light, hidden between pages, tucked like bookmarks between the covers in every cranny of the library. My feet tripped themselves in my haste, fearing that I might step on some tangible specter waiting to grab hold. The student looked up, shouted something at me, as I broke into the sharp, cold night--his words chased after me, carrying that otherworldly annunciation--and I felt liberated despite the dark. Icy air stabbed at my unaccustomed lungs as I raced through campus, heading into town, following the trail of street lamps and the raucous vigor of youth.
I stumbled past my apartment entrance, wheezing and frustrated. I checked my pocket for my wallet and strolled, bent half-over, into town. In a dimly lit bar, the dance floor rustling to life at the other end, I downed a double whiskey and grabbed my beer. Someone nearby whooted in my honor, either oblivious to my frantic state or confusing it with something celebratory. I grabbed a pen from my pocket and a stack of napkins, thinking I might record the events. My hand seized in stark fear above the napkin, fearful of what letters or strange glyphs I might inscribe. As the whiskey gripped my stomach, I was able to attend to the surrounding sounds, the rumble of words redefined by software and the conversations hollered between friends and strangers. They were clear and comprehensible. Words loaded with their own meaning but ultimately a human meaning, something my mind could grasp and comprehend. I sat alone for several minutes, ordering another beer and whiskey on the rocks that I sipped with gradually steadying hands.
After the second class a handful of students gathered at a coffeeshop near campus. It became clear that in my absence, they had built up a support web for one another, a study group that gave them the environment they wanted in the classroom in which they bounced around in open criticism and playful condenscencion of one another. At first, I was eager to join in, to offer my own ideas and wizened critique and udnerstanding; but in no great length of time I sat back and sipped my coffee, heavy with cream, soaking in their vigor and camaraderie. I inserted small comments, used one of their computers to dig up articles they might find interesting. The brunette--her name I recalled was Jezebel but all her colleagues refered to her as Bel--schemed her way into leading class discussion the next week, staring at me with uncanny confidence. Her fellow students liked the idea and they, with syllabus in hand, began revamping the next month of classes, setting up their own alternative.
Spring had begun eeking its way forward, drawing out the days with pleasant, sunny intensity. Night had set before I left, carrying with it the last breaths of a hesitant winter. I had only my jacket and scarf which I tightened around me. My stomach quaked with sloshing coffee, my fingers jittery with caffeine. Jezebel--I refused to take the more familiar appellation which seemed, somehow, unchaste--caught up to me and offered me a ride. She pointed to a second- or third-hand sedan, the chassis rusted around the wheels and a stubborn passenger window that I assumed refused to wind entirely. I said no, that I was going to work at the library--a short stroll--and put the caffeine to good use. I rarely drank coffee, but something about the evening had suspended that abstainence and suggested its import. She smiled and I responded in kind, perhaps too much so, and walked away, her warm brown eyes on me--I imagined, at least--until I reached the corner.
I quickly regretted the decision. The cold snapped at my ears, at my ankles along my too-short thrift store trousers, and crawled under into my jacket sleeves insidiously. I quickened my clip toward the library, feeling a brazen malignity in the night. Shadows danced as cars passed, taking on brief, perturbing forms just before fading. They took on an unwelcome sharpness, just as everything had since my last late night in the library, and I felt the urge to break into a run. The steady lights of the library façade--a brick firmament testifying to the heavenly status of education--apparently banishing the phantoms. I tugged at the door with undue force and let the suction drag me in. It was quiet, the public terminals near the lobby almost empty, and one lonely student at the front desk with a notebook half-hidden behind the desk. It was Friday just after midterms and the only sound was the faint fluttering of pages and the hushed high whine of the archaic ventilation system. The student at the front desk noticed me and shoved his notebook entirely under the desk in a feeble attempt to conceal this small breach in regulation.
I avoided the wide main staircase for an access stairwell, brilliantly lit by humming fluorescent lights. My quick steps and hard shoes echoed in a mumbling chorus on the linoleum and unforgiving walls. Upstairs, I stepped into the bathroom, the same soft humming my company as I washed my face and forced my breath to slow. I felt feverish, my forehead washed of its beads of sweat, and my eyes widely staring back at me through the silvered pane. Straightening, my hands roughed dry on crinkly towels and tugged at my shirt and jacket--damp creeped along the cuffs of my jacket--hoping to feign some composure to myself. Laughter lay somewhere inside me, bottled up with anxiety and a strained, unnatural tension. I chuckled with numb ambiguity, unnable to make light of myself. Several deep breaths later I stepped out into the hallways toward my carrel.
I expected his light on but only a series of blackened windows met me. I forced my hand steady as I inserted the key and turned the handle. Everything was as I left it, all in its rightful place, and I breathed deeply again. I pulled out a frayed spiralbound notebook, a stack of books from the shelves, and one of my awaiting black pens. Cracking the topmost book--some critical reading of Tocqueville, if I recall correctly--and let the words rise up to meet me. They were dense and warm and provided a hard, certain texture to the unnerving ethereal quality that had chased me thence. After the first several pages, the words took on a peculiar foreign attitude, as if somehow infected or modulated the way the ocean floor shifts underneath a passing wave. I could see the words, but as they sang in my mind they took on unnatural yellow tonalities; they became slippery and lolled around with sickly, oceanic weight.
I closed the book and opened another, not even glancing at the title. The words roiled as if boiling, intoning themselves in unimaginable ways. They were the words of dreams, juxtaposed with alien meanings the way one knows Arabic or German in a dream, speaking and understanding in perfect fluent clarity only to wake and feel that knowledge evaporating away. I tried to focus, to ead each word with its own anglophone certainty, its Saxon or French root. The letters and syllables each a constituitive building block on the next. Again and again, even flipping through my spiral notebook with growing anxiety and inescapable surreal fear, the words became a heady, abyssal sound. Alien phonemes of geologic age meant nothing to me but each iteration brought on new vertiginous depths, each haunting me with ineffable meaning.
The door slammed behind me, sealing my keys, coat, and scarf within while the reverberation echoed through the floor. I ran, holding onto banisters and tracing my finger along walls on my way to the exit. Incandescent bulbs flickered, revealing the shadows beneath the light, hidden between pages, tucked like bookmarks between the covers in every cranny of the library. My feet tripped themselves in my haste, fearing that I might step on some tangible specter waiting to grab hold. The student looked up, shouted something at me, as I broke into the sharp, cold night--his words chased after me, carrying that otherworldly annunciation--and I felt liberated despite the dark. Icy air stabbed at my unaccustomed lungs as I raced through campus, heading into town, following the trail of street lamps and the raucous vigor of youth.
I stumbled past my apartment entrance, wheezing and frustrated. I checked my pocket for my wallet and strolled, bent half-over, into town. In a dimly lit bar, the dance floor rustling to life at the other end, I downed a double whiskey and grabbed my beer. Someone nearby whooted in my honor, either oblivious to my frantic state or confusing it with something celebratory. I grabbed a pen from my pocket and a stack of napkins, thinking I might record the events. My hand seized in stark fear above the napkin, fearful of what letters or strange glyphs I might inscribe. As the whiskey gripped my stomach, I was able to attend to the surrounding sounds, the rumble of words redefined by software and the conversations hollered between friends and strangers. They were clear and comprehensible. Words loaded with their own meaning but ultimately a human meaning, something my mind could grasp and comprehend. I sat alone for several minutes, ordering another beer and whiskey on the rocks that I sipped with gradually steadying hands.
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Paper thin wall, pt 1
The walls of the study carrel were paper thin. Not that it mattered much. It was in the library with the other and provided an alcove for study and, to a smaller extent, escape. I spent five, ten, then fifteen hours a day in there as the semester wound on, the dissertation in my head gestating and appearing suddenly on bits of paper, on the computer screen, scribbled into the margins of the books I bought. I could shut the door and close myself off from the world, only noticing the scrabble of a pen, the clatter of a forcefully used keyboard, the flipping of dry leaves of paper, the rumble of someone on the floor blowing his or her nose. I came prepared with a thermos of green tea and several sandwiches, though I'd often have more than crumbs leftover while I had visited the café multiple times for more hot water. The days I taught for my advisor would break te rhythm, but I began to arrive later, to emphasize the final paper they were all supposed to be working on, and throw my lecture notes willynilly into my messenger bag and shuffle off. I could feel the weight of their apprehension, their hundreds of pages waiting for me at the end of the semester, and the innumerable hours spent assessing them. Funny how now my writing seems so insubstantial and unimportant, how I would barter to regain those quotidian rhythms with everything but my soul. A soul: something I once set aside as a romantic daydream now feels so central, if utterly deflated.
I'd spent the Saturday in the carrel, noticing more than usual the thinness of the walls and how the neighbor to my left--present, it seemed, as often as I was despite the numerous underused options--seemed to read his research material aloud. Becoming distracted, I realized he must be a student of language, either ancient or exotic if not both, because I could discern nothing familiar in the muffled intonations. Despite the ambiguity, he spoke with a rhythmic, even musical manner that even after I returned to my work I sensed not just through the wall, but behind me as if someone were peering through the small inset window on the door. More than once I glanced behind me expecting a student of mine or some neglected friend furtively standing their, fingers poised claw-like behind the glass. After several such inconclusive distractions, I made an excursion to the restroom; the opportunity allowed me an investigatory glance at the various students, few on a Saturday but all embedded in their work, and deliberate spying on my neighbor.
His head bobbed up and down as if in mosque-style prayer as he studied. It gave reason to his rhythmic chanting and I wondered if he were a Muslim or had simply picked up the habit as a neurosis. His unkempt hair was flecked with shimmers of grey and I could see his olive complexion by his widely protruding ears. The small desk was littered deeply with open books, old heavy tomes, many with broken spines and ruddy old covers; but one corner of the desk was clear for a spiral bound notebook, its revealed page thick with a tight, incomprehensible chicken scratch. Something in his motions, his queer dedication, or the admirable mess he labored in captivated me and I stared for longer than intended. I began to discern not just his scribbling, but clearly described diagrams or hieroglyphs that I could not make out. In one of the books left open, an expansive two page illustration detailed a circle of people and in an ancient stone room, braziers with listing fire cast unnatural shadows on the walls, on the floor. The image took on a cubist style, apparently depicting more walls than a traditional vantage would, suggesting fleshy and angular bodies that inspired complaints in my empty stomach.
His head jerked up, dragging me from my focus and without thinking I twisted myself away from the window, jabbed my key into my carrel's lock, and slipped in. He was silent for a long time as I calmed my breathing and absently flipped pages. I brushed off the anxiety as the result of overeager snooping, an unusual voyeurism on a fellow student and researcher. He must be analyzing fiction of a bygone era or the language was only an addendum to some sort of religious study, an examination of medieval mysticism or something like that. I had jumped to conclusions and then been surprised when his research was not as expected. Being sly did not come naturally to me and it had titillated me in a surprising and captivated way. The sensation unnerved me and I tried to placed it behind me, but no amount of tea seemed to bring me back to my studies. I folded up my papers, slid them into their awaiting folders in the abinet, replaced my books on the shelf, and locked away my little monastic cell. My neighbor's door had been left just slightly open and against my better judgement I slipped in for just a moment and looked around. My heart leapt again to my throat, but the illustration was hidden again between covers, and the books were in various languages--one distinctly German, another two or three in Italian or Latin, but most entirely unknown to me. I noticed a small unmarked vial tucked in the bookshelf, containing several orange capsules. The absence of labeling set me off, though I am familiar enough with the contents. His bobbing made that much more sense.
Considering my predicament in a briefly cleared mind, I slipped from the carrel and made my way to the stairs. I caught the small man at the corner of my eye, but prevented myself from any egregiously suspicious observation. He was Middle Eastern, maybe Indian, or perhaps Egyptian, and seemed overly small, as if trying to avoid attention by curling up into himself. He was a snail of a man, I decided then, carrying his stacks of books, his rightful shelter being the pages of ancient books, of times that he managed to understand better than this present. The University was large enough that we may never have crossed paths until that night and if it hadn't been for those paper thin walls I might have gone on blissfully ignorant of this man and his esoteric studies. But I doubt it.
The way home was unnerving to say the least. The suspicion and anxiety other presences didn't dissipate and, upon reflection, became more intense as I made my way home. The nights were dark, that wintry dark that gobbles up the light in its amorphous starless skies. Somewhere above, the moon danced in the sky, infusing a sickly radiance in an ever-shifting formation of clouds while earthbound street lamps flickered a sickly yellow. The campus was suspended between the early tittering of youths and the boisterous return of those celebrants; they were somewhere, I told myself, enjoying the night far away from this particular route. All the time I felt shadows racing on all sides, encircling me and cutting off my escape and as I turned to face them, a lantern would flicker its sodium glow nothing unusual would be there; a flash of darkness and then the expected outlines of denuded trees and shrubs, walkways and banisters, ivy-covered buildings with shriveled leaves rattling in the night. I wanted to run, to lock the door behind me and turn on all the lights until this malignant mood passed, but I refused the fancy with all the determination I could muster wishing it away with clenched, pocketed fists.
I was out of breath when I locked and bolted the door behind me. The entry light hummed it's fluorescence warmly and I stood, rubbing my shoulders with my hands, trying to shake off more than the cold. A deep-rooted scientism jostled and jarred with my sentiments, shriveling slightly at this undeniable confoundment. I put water on for tea, but only after letting the lights flutter gradually into life, banishing the shadows only too slowly. The entry light remained on, breaking the childhood habit of turning every light out as I passed; a habit that frustrated my quiet mother to no end, though she always affirmed the habit with a wavering smile. I placed a spoon slathered with honey into the tea pot, the water in the kettle stirring to life, and sprinkled loose petals and leaves of jasmine into their silver chassis. Trying to reconnect with my usual absentmindedness, I opened the fridge--an old, polished Frigidaire I rescued from my grandparents' before my sister had the chance to give it to Goodwill--only to blanche at the notion of eating anything. My stomach churned restlessly, though the promise of tea and sleep calmed it once the door to the fridge closed. I flipped on the main room light--a living room and bedroom--and nibbled on dry, salty crackers from the cabinet until the water boiled, all the while watching the slow retreat of the dark.
The arm chair wrapped itself around me as I set myself into it, an immense relief sloughing off as I sipped the still too hot tea, relishing the scalding floral sweetness on the end of it. The days in the library, of endless reading and writing and solitude had gotten to me; that was all. My fellow scholar was probably in the same boat, though our brief encounter suggested foreignness, even a limited familiarity with English given his abundant linguistic knowledge elsewhere. My progress on my own writing was substantial and I may benefit from a holiday, rejuvenating myself on more than stale or soggy sandwiches. I had lost weight--a common trend during periods of academic intensity--and allowed friends' calls to go unanswered. Tomorrow, yes tomorrow I would catch up, get a drink or just enjoy some sunshine--if that skulking sun ever showed its face again--and conversation over tea and coffee. I felt my appetite return, but let it grumble as a sort of vengeance on its earlier hesitancy. I thought of rich, swirling cream; a chai latté with a shame of nutmeg, cinnamon, and brown sugar; of the forgiving flesh of the baguettes served at that particular coffee shop, the buttery crumble of a scone at the other. I'll give myself a holiday and allow this little episode fade.
Logic seemed to surface again as I considered the whole event with greater removal and objectivity. It all could have been a panic attack, the result of those upcoming papers and my poor preparation for handling them, or just some fear of actually finishing the dissertation... When was the last time I met with my advisor? He was out of the country until Wednesday, but we ought to discuss my progress shortly thereafter. It was all a conflation of forces, of the slow tides that I had refused to acknowledge. I had been taken up by a riptide, but was returning to a more comfortable ebb and flow. The waves lapped beneath me as I pulled them comforter over my shoulders, up to my chin, and dozed off.
I'd spent the Saturday in the carrel, noticing more than usual the thinness of the walls and how the neighbor to my left--present, it seemed, as often as I was despite the numerous underused options--seemed to read his research material aloud. Becoming distracted, I realized he must be a student of language, either ancient or exotic if not both, because I could discern nothing familiar in the muffled intonations. Despite the ambiguity, he spoke with a rhythmic, even musical manner that even after I returned to my work I sensed not just through the wall, but behind me as if someone were peering through the small inset window on the door. More than once I glanced behind me expecting a student of mine or some neglected friend furtively standing their, fingers poised claw-like behind the glass. After several such inconclusive distractions, I made an excursion to the restroom; the opportunity allowed me an investigatory glance at the various students, few on a Saturday but all embedded in their work, and deliberate spying on my neighbor.
His head bobbed up and down as if in mosque-style prayer as he studied. It gave reason to his rhythmic chanting and I wondered if he were a Muslim or had simply picked up the habit as a neurosis. His unkempt hair was flecked with shimmers of grey and I could see his olive complexion by his widely protruding ears. The small desk was littered deeply with open books, old heavy tomes, many with broken spines and ruddy old covers; but one corner of the desk was clear for a spiral bound notebook, its revealed page thick with a tight, incomprehensible chicken scratch. Something in his motions, his queer dedication, or the admirable mess he labored in captivated me and I stared for longer than intended. I began to discern not just his scribbling, but clearly described diagrams or hieroglyphs that I could not make out. In one of the books left open, an expansive two page illustration detailed a circle of people and in an ancient stone room, braziers with listing fire cast unnatural shadows on the walls, on the floor. The image took on a cubist style, apparently depicting more walls than a traditional vantage would, suggesting fleshy and angular bodies that inspired complaints in my empty stomach.
His head jerked up, dragging me from my focus and without thinking I twisted myself away from the window, jabbed my key into my carrel's lock, and slipped in. He was silent for a long time as I calmed my breathing and absently flipped pages. I brushed off the anxiety as the result of overeager snooping, an unusual voyeurism on a fellow student and researcher. He must be analyzing fiction of a bygone era or the language was only an addendum to some sort of religious study, an examination of medieval mysticism or something like that. I had jumped to conclusions and then been surprised when his research was not as expected. Being sly did not come naturally to me and it had titillated me in a surprising and captivated way. The sensation unnerved me and I tried to placed it behind me, but no amount of tea seemed to bring me back to my studies. I folded up my papers, slid them into their awaiting folders in the abinet, replaced my books on the shelf, and locked away my little monastic cell. My neighbor's door had been left just slightly open and against my better judgement I slipped in for just a moment and looked around. My heart leapt again to my throat, but the illustration was hidden again between covers, and the books were in various languages--one distinctly German, another two or three in Italian or Latin, but most entirely unknown to me. I noticed a small unmarked vial tucked in the bookshelf, containing several orange capsules. The absence of labeling set me off, though I am familiar enough with the contents. His bobbing made that much more sense.
Considering my predicament in a briefly cleared mind, I slipped from the carrel and made my way to the stairs. I caught the small man at the corner of my eye, but prevented myself from any egregiously suspicious observation. He was Middle Eastern, maybe Indian, or perhaps Egyptian, and seemed overly small, as if trying to avoid attention by curling up into himself. He was a snail of a man, I decided then, carrying his stacks of books, his rightful shelter being the pages of ancient books, of times that he managed to understand better than this present. The University was large enough that we may never have crossed paths until that night and if it hadn't been for those paper thin walls I might have gone on blissfully ignorant of this man and his esoteric studies. But I doubt it.
The way home was unnerving to say the least. The suspicion and anxiety other presences didn't dissipate and, upon reflection, became more intense as I made my way home. The nights were dark, that wintry dark that gobbles up the light in its amorphous starless skies. Somewhere above, the moon danced in the sky, infusing a sickly radiance in an ever-shifting formation of clouds while earthbound street lamps flickered a sickly yellow. The campus was suspended between the early tittering of youths and the boisterous return of those celebrants; they were somewhere, I told myself, enjoying the night far away from this particular route. All the time I felt shadows racing on all sides, encircling me and cutting off my escape and as I turned to face them, a lantern would flicker its sodium glow nothing unusual would be there; a flash of darkness and then the expected outlines of denuded trees and shrubs, walkways and banisters, ivy-covered buildings with shriveled leaves rattling in the night. I wanted to run, to lock the door behind me and turn on all the lights until this malignant mood passed, but I refused the fancy with all the determination I could muster wishing it away with clenched, pocketed fists.
I was out of breath when I locked and bolted the door behind me. The entry light hummed it's fluorescence warmly and I stood, rubbing my shoulders with my hands, trying to shake off more than the cold. A deep-rooted scientism jostled and jarred with my sentiments, shriveling slightly at this undeniable confoundment. I put water on for tea, but only after letting the lights flutter gradually into life, banishing the shadows only too slowly. The entry light remained on, breaking the childhood habit of turning every light out as I passed; a habit that frustrated my quiet mother to no end, though she always affirmed the habit with a wavering smile. I placed a spoon slathered with honey into the tea pot, the water in the kettle stirring to life, and sprinkled loose petals and leaves of jasmine into their silver chassis. Trying to reconnect with my usual absentmindedness, I opened the fridge--an old, polished Frigidaire I rescued from my grandparents' before my sister had the chance to give it to Goodwill--only to blanche at the notion of eating anything. My stomach churned restlessly, though the promise of tea and sleep calmed it once the door to the fridge closed. I flipped on the main room light--a living room and bedroom--and nibbled on dry, salty crackers from the cabinet until the water boiled, all the while watching the slow retreat of the dark.
The arm chair wrapped itself around me as I set myself into it, an immense relief sloughing off as I sipped the still too hot tea, relishing the scalding floral sweetness on the end of it. The days in the library, of endless reading and writing and solitude had gotten to me; that was all. My fellow scholar was probably in the same boat, though our brief encounter suggested foreignness, even a limited familiarity with English given his abundant linguistic knowledge elsewhere. My progress on my own writing was substantial and I may benefit from a holiday, rejuvenating myself on more than stale or soggy sandwiches. I had lost weight--a common trend during periods of academic intensity--and allowed friends' calls to go unanswered. Tomorrow, yes tomorrow I would catch up, get a drink or just enjoy some sunshine--if that skulking sun ever showed its face again--and conversation over tea and coffee. I felt my appetite return, but let it grumble as a sort of vengeance on its earlier hesitancy. I thought of rich, swirling cream; a chai latté with a shame of nutmeg, cinnamon, and brown sugar; of the forgiving flesh of the baguettes served at that particular coffee shop, the buttery crumble of a scone at the other. I'll give myself a holiday and allow this little episode fade.
Logic seemed to surface again as I considered the whole event with greater removal and objectivity. It all could have been a panic attack, the result of those upcoming papers and my poor preparation for handling them, or just some fear of actually finishing the dissertation... When was the last time I met with my advisor? He was out of the country until Wednesday, but we ought to discuss my progress shortly thereafter. It was all a conflation of forces, of the slow tides that I had refused to acknowledge. I had been taken up by a riptide, but was returning to a more comfortable ebb and flow. The waves lapped beneath me as I pulled them comforter over my shoulders, up to my chin, and dozed off.
Saturday, January 28, 2012
More Thesis - Community, Meaning, and Geography
In Being Singular Plural, Jean-Luc Nancy describes how human communities, communities of knowing (abstract, practical, social, cultural, and so on) are where meaning exists. Meaning is not separate from human forms, rather human forms and meaning are the same thing (at least under certain circumstances) such that if we do not exist in human communities, we exist without meaning. (Also see Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue.) Steiner Kvale describes qualitative research interviews as a an "inter view," a sort of Gestalt image of two faces staring into one another that is also--though oddly not perceived simultaneously--a vase or candle stick. As we explore the territory of another's storied (his/herstory) experience, we undergo a flip of our own perception into the perception of another's. We cross between my view and your view of the world into an inter-view, where we have the potential to see, if briefly and fleetingly, the world as it manifests for another. What I am interested in doing with my thesis is exploring these perceptions of the world, concerning Flagstaff's current situation and future potential, its hindrances and opportunities, in order to lay out a sort of geography (I think of Borges's map in "On Exactitude in Science") of meaning in Flagstaff around staying and shelter. Ultimately, by acting as a traveler through this geography (both Kvale's and Borges's imagery) I can gather enough meaning from the different places to stitch together in exciting, novel, and structurally supportive new ways. Harry Boyte explains the IAF's relational meeting strategy and organizing imagery as a sort of "multiverse" of different world views. Though the multiverse notion has some advantages--the world IS perceived in radically different, even contradictory ways by different people--I find it deeply unsettling. If the butcher, baker, and candlestick maker (to return somewhat to the Gestalt image) all dwell in different universes perceptually--not to mention the mayor, governor, constable, farmer, miner, and so on--then how can we expect them to build a relationship? Their meaningfulness--the ways they constitute a community of meaning a la Nancy--is undermined by the radical separation of the multiverse. What Nancy suggests, then, is that regardless of the framing of pluralism (which is the goal of IAF's multiverse), the ability to corporate, to literally grow the body of meaning that a community requires to exist coherently, we have to stitch and suture and mend the broken fleshy pieces of ourselves to one another. MacIntyre begins After Virtue with a story of the loss of a meaningful method of science, of a dystopia where only pieces of scientific knowledge from various eras remain, but how they are meaningful--that is, the cultures and communities that produced them--has been lost. He argues that we reconstitute a society, culture, and tradition of philosophy--especially ethics--that will allow for a re-signification (the infusion of meaning) of ethics. I believe this is also Nancy's goal, and mine. We have remnants, pieces of a culture that don't meaningfully come together. There is a radical way in which any future culture that is coherent will be coherent in a cyborgian (Donna Haraway) or Frankensteinian way: It will be a deeply hybridized pluralistic meaning because we have been so deeply wounded and mended and reconstituted by the divorce we have experienced from the land, our families, our histories, our communities, and ourselves. That said, what I hope to uncover is some of the basic expectations, desire, and roles that will being the healing of ourselves to ourselves; that is, the reconstitution of meaning in an epistemologically, culturally, and environmentally ravaged world.
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Thesis Musings
"Like Martin Luther King, Saul Alinsky spoke in what can best be called a 'prophetic mode.' The prophet is not an outsider: he or she stands ardently in a tradition, claiming its insights, charging that present-day activities, leaders, or the society as a whole are tarnishing or destroying its own best ideals. Prophets challenge certain traditions and values at the the same time that they invoke others. And the act of recalling the past for present-day action also transforms the traditions invoked, adding nuance and new dimensions. Alinsky had located his efforts in a dynamic democratic tradition that he argued represented the best values and spirit of the country. He had also sketched new strategies for effective poor people's organizing for power in a world where experts made the poor into dependent clients."
-Harry Boyte, Commonwealth
This striking passage suggests something profound about the prophets temporal vision: the prophet does not see the future as a radical break (i.e. revolution) between the present and the yet-to-be; rather, the future becomes an amalgamation of the best features of the past fused to, or reinvigorated by, and creatively multiplied in the immediate or near immediate present. The vision of the prophet is a perception of the present as an interpolated textured moment in which time apparently collapses in a sensual experience. This "prophecy" is not radically different from the present because it is the future, it is radically different from the present because it cuts to the root (which etymologically relates to radical) in a historical and communitarian sense (Ed Chambers, Roots for Radicals). Through this interpretation, sight, vision, prophecy is as much about the past as it is about the future in that the present is perceived as "close" to a real past critical excellence--easily romanticized or nostalgically narrated but by no means necessarily so--that shares a temporal proximity or collapsed moment with a preferred future potentiality--non-utopian but rich, valuable, and progressive (Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern). I read this as relating to a "beloved community" that bases action on the collective spiritual experience of a group. That experience is infused with a radical (i.e. rooted) relation around or into that community (a perceived movement of self into spirit, self into collectivity); a relation of each individual to the experience of the spiritual text, song, enactment, understanding, or practice (Charles Marsh, "The Beloved Community"). The religious event--however it forms and however many forms it takes--returns the experience of the participant to the root of the community, to the source of their collectivity in order to reconceptualize the group as one body, as a religious host, acting in one name (God's name, the spirit of community, the illumination or fire that is shared in all participants). Such identification liberates the community from its oppression in the present world--material, political, economic, even potentially cultural (in constructive or deconstructive ways)--and precipitates action by the group to act in one liberating struggle. Boyte goes on to mention that young social critics of the 1960s placed themselves outside of the culture. This gesture--likely overblown and definitely ill-conceived--would divorce these critics from the sustaining root needed to build community and culture capable of turning a tide of economic injustice and political oppression. In lacking a "root" to community and to history would prevent identification with liberatory collectivities and a critical prophetic vision--not simply a utopian one--that would bridge a vision of the past, present, and future in generative ways.
...
Now to write the rest of it and figure out where this fits.
-Harry Boyte, Commonwealth
This striking passage suggests something profound about the prophets temporal vision: the prophet does not see the future as a radical break (i.e. revolution) between the present and the yet-to-be; rather, the future becomes an amalgamation of the best features of the past fused to, or reinvigorated by, and creatively multiplied in the immediate or near immediate present. The vision of the prophet is a perception of the present as an interpolated textured moment in which time apparently collapses in a sensual experience. This "prophecy" is not radically different from the present because it is the future, it is radically different from the present because it cuts to the root (which etymologically relates to radical) in a historical and communitarian sense (Ed Chambers, Roots for Radicals). Through this interpretation, sight, vision, prophecy is as much about the past as it is about the future in that the present is perceived as "close" to a real past critical excellence--easily romanticized or nostalgically narrated but by no means necessarily so--that shares a temporal proximity or collapsed moment with a preferred future potentiality--non-utopian but rich, valuable, and progressive (Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern). I read this as relating to a "beloved community" that bases action on the collective spiritual experience of a group. That experience is infused with a radical (i.e. rooted) relation around or into that community (a perceived movement of self into spirit, self into collectivity); a relation of each individual to the experience of the spiritual text, song, enactment, understanding, or practice (Charles Marsh, "The Beloved Community"). The religious event--however it forms and however many forms it takes--returns the experience of the participant to the root of the community, to the source of their collectivity in order to reconceptualize the group as one body, as a religious host, acting in one name (God's name, the spirit of community, the illumination or fire that is shared in all participants). Such identification liberates the community from its oppression in the present world--material, political, economic, even potentially cultural (in constructive or deconstructive ways)--and precipitates action by the group to act in one liberating struggle. Boyte goes on to mention that young social critics of the 1960s placed themselves outside of the culture. This gesture--likely overblown and definitely ill-conceived--would divorce these critics from the sustaining root needed to build community and culture capable of turning a tide of economic injustice and political oppression. In lacking a "root" to community and to history would prevent identification with liberatory collectivities and a critical prophetic vision--not simply a utopian one--that would bridge a vision of the past, present, and future in generative ways.
...
Now to write the rest of it and figure out where this fits.
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
Haiku & Tarot
A pair of dead foal
stare with eyes full of dry, clear,
& keen vacancy.
...
I wrote this on Twitter yesterday and I am still lingering on it. Perhaps it lingers on me. That is the way of things sometimes: we think we get to be the center with our thoughts and our friends and our places orbiting us. Then we get to be jarred by how we are in orbit ourselves, moving like moons round the beautiful and terrible objects of the world.
Well, I am orbiting around the pair of young dead deer I saw as I walked away from the county buildings where I intern. Why this is... there are many possible reasons, but I have latched onto one (I recall Sherwood Anderson's grotesques at the beginning of Winesburg, Ohio). I consider the Tarot, it's collection of symbols and roles that, for some, can be so filled with meaning. Divination is a hit or miss sort of game, but I think the deer force me to realize how we are always encountering the symbols of the Tarot and they are full of meaning even in our ignorance and arrogance and distraction.
The Death card, so often figuring into stories, can represent change, decision, loss, and novelty. I have been exposed or brushed along death more than usual and my life has taken on certain dynamic qualities of late. My mother's heart was stopped, her brain nurtured by machines, her digestion augmented by tubes, and her sternum sundered. In other times, in other cultures, with other technological situations there would be no question that she would not be alive now with all of that behind her. Of course, that was done intentionally, knowing that it might very well extend her life for ten years or more.
On the opposite end, I am blessed to be an uncle today. Oddly, little Vivie's birth came the day my mother was released from they hospital. Like my mother's condition, Erin giving birth was mediated by medicine and treatment. As a result, Vivie was a month early and remarkably small, though she has put on weight and increasingly adorable. Birth represents another sort of death, an inverse of dying and a departure from the comfort of the womb to the harshness of the world. Like my mither's chest, birth represents a sundering of a whole--the pregnant woman--into two--mother and daughter. In the Mountains and Waters Sūtra, Dōgen writes:
"You should understand the meaning of giving birth to a child. At the moment of giving birth to a child, is the mother separate from the child? You should study not only that you become a mother when your child is born, but also that you become a child. This is the actualization of giving birth in practice-realization. You should study and investigate this thoroughly."
The tension that remains for me is how my mother's life was mediated by mechanical and pharmaceutical means. Before her surgery, we drove to the hospital and I could see the anxiety rising in her already. I was tired from a late night and the sky was still dim when we left, but she wore those minute wounds of strained nerves. She had been up late, unable to sleep and determined to compete various tasks before surgery laid her low. At the hospital, the nurses and anesthesiologist poked and prodded to prepare her with an IV and the appropriate pre-surgery meds. The doctor ran late due to an early surgery at another hospital. The outlook was frustrating to say the least.
When I came back to the room, Mom was accompanied by a woman, the two speaking freely. This was a nurse with whom Mom had spoken on the phone often over the past week. She had provided information about the surgery and had spoken with a kind frankness that bolstered Mom despite various frustrations that seemed to stack inexorably on one another. We stayed with my mom for an hour and a half or more waiting for the tardy doctor and comforting my mom. When they took her to the OR, it was an immense relief. Later, I would learn that my mother was medicated such that all of that comforting and conversing had been strictly short-term and had been wiped from her thoughts by the end of the surgery.
Of course, with surgery such as hers, a little lost memory is not the only marking. All the same, my mother was going through all the stress that she would if unmedicated and I could not shake the absurdity of that experience seemingly snatched--if appreciatively so--from her. The way I saw her body sunken, sapped, and fundamentally infiltrated remains with me. Recovery was a process of liberating her from these life-sustaining, if horribly uncomfortable, paraphernalia. She was both herself and not herself, her body undergoing the radical change of initial violation and eventual liberation.
My mother was close to death, though not in a traditional way. Rather, her life brushed near the edges of what was tolerable. I was not struck with fear for her survival--though the possibility of complications had come up and been discussed--but I continue to be alarmed by how she cannot be the same person she was before. Of course she is my mother, but how her perception of self, the sensation of her body as the center of who and what she is has been radically upended. It is easy to think of ourselves as whole, as one solid being composed of bone, sinew, muscle, and flesh; electricity, hormones, and neurotransmitters; blood, thought, and relationships. With such moments as my mother's surgery, some of those bonds become weak, even insubstantial, and a great anxiety--potentially healing and generative it may be--seeps into the world.
stare with eyes full of dry, clear,
& keen vacancy.
...
I wrote this on Twitter yesterday and I am still lingering on it. Perhaps it lingers on me. That is the way of things sometimes: we think we get to be the center with our thoughts and our friends and our places orbiting us. Then we get to be jarred by how we are in orbit ourselves, moving like moons round the beautiful and terrible objects of the world.
Well, I am orbiting around the pair of young dead deer I saw as I walked away from the county buildings where I intern. Why this is... there are many possible reasons, but I have latched onto one (I recall Sherwood Anderson's grotesques at the beginning of Winesburg, Ohio). I consider the Tarot, it's collection of symbols and roles that, for some, can be so filled with meaning. Divination is a hit or miss sort of game, but I think the deer force me to realize how we are always encountering the symbols of the Tarot and they are full of meaning even in our ignorance and arrogance and distraction.
The Death card, so often figuring into stories, can represent change, decision, loss, and novelty. I have been exposed or brushed along death more than usual and my life has taken on certain dynamic qualities of late. My mother's heart was stopped, her brain nurtured by machines, her digestion augmented by tubes, and her sternum sundered. In other times, in other cultures, with other technological situations there would be no question that she would not be alive now with all of that behind her. Of course, that was done intentionally, knowing that it might very well extend her life for ten years or more.
On the opposite end, I am blessed to be an uncle today. Oddly, little Vivie's birth came the day my mother was released from they hospital. Like my mother's condition, Erin giving birth was mediated by medicine and treatment. As a result, Vivie was a month early and remarkably small, though she has put on weight and increasingly adorable. Birth represents another sort of death, an inverse of dying and a departure from the comfort of the womb to the harshness of the world. Like my mither's chest, birth represents a sundering of a whole--the pregnant woman--into two--mother and daughter. In the Mountains and Waters Sūtra, Dōgen writes:
"You should understand the meaning of giving birth to a child. At the moment of giving birth to a child, is the mother separate from the child? You should study not only that you become a mother when your child is born, but also that you become a child. This is the actualization of giving birth in practice-realization. You should study and investigate this thoroughly."
The tension that remains for me is how my mother's life was mediated by mechanical and pharmaceutical means. Before her surgery, we drove to the hospital and I could see the anxiety rising in her already. I was tired from a late night and the sky was still dim when we left, but she wore those minute wounds of strained nerves. She had been up late, unable to sleep and determined to compete various tasks before surgery laid her low. At the hospital, the nurses and anesthesiologist poked and prodded to prepare her with an IV and the appropriate pre-surgery meds. The doctor ran late due to an early surgery at another hospital. The outlook was frustrating to say the least.
When I came back to the room, Mom was accompanied by a woman, the two speaking freely. This was a nurse with whom Mom had spoken on the phone often over the past week. She had provided information about the surgery and had spoken with a kind frankness that bolstered Mom despite various frustrations that seemed to stack inexorably on one another. We stayed with my mom for an hour and a half or more waiting for the tardy doctor and comforting my mom. When they took her to the OR, it was an immense relief. Later, I would learn that my mother was medicated such that all of that comforting and conversing had been strictly short-term and had been wiped from her thoughts by the end of the surgery.
Of course, with surgery such as hers, a little lost memory is not the only marking. All the same, my mother was going through all the stress that she would if unmedicated and I could not shake the absurdity of that experience seemingly snatched--if appreciatively so--from her. The way I saw her body sunken, sapped, and fundamentally infiltrated remains with me. Recovery was a process of liberating her from these life-sustaining, if horribly uncomfortable, paraphernalia. She was both herself and not herself, her body undergoing the radical change of initial violation and eventual liberation.
My mother was close to death, though not in a traditional way. Rather, her life brushed near the edges of what was tolerable. I was not struck with fear for her survival--though the possibility of complications had come up and been discussed--but I continue to be alarmed by how she cannot be the same person she was before. Of course she is my mother, but how her perception of self, the sensation of her body as the center of who and what she is has been radically upended. It is easy to think of ourselves as whole, as one solid being composed of bone, sinew, muscle, and flesh; electricity, hormones, and neurotransmitters; blood, thought, and relationships. With such moments as my mother's surgery, some of those bonds become weak, even insubstantial, and a great anxiety--potentially healing and generative it may be--seeps into the world.
Saturday, January 7, 2012
Others' Dreams
I find myself anxious concerning the dreams of others. Once, a woman sleeping next to me for the night dreamed of a bookcase falling on me and I woke her from her distress. She was fretting for my safety from an ethereal bookshelf, its weight and contents trapping me to the bed next to her. And now, my mother has fallen to sleep as I watch over her, while I engage in my own researches. I fear--strangely, even intensely--that her dreams will go beyond her control, that they may dwell on some pain or suffering or entrapment. When I wake her, what then happens to me in her dream? Do I remain contorted and broken, the life seeping out of me in dribbling increments?
Such neuroses are not new. Rather, they are well exercised muscles of my imaginary. Dreams have the power to create worlds and even, or so I am told, reveal something unseen in our own. I am hesitant to purchase such claims, but appreciate the notion they introduce. Indeed, it is this possibility that has seeded such subsurface terror in me, roiling as it is with notions of others' dreams. These are places where I--or my avatar--are guests, hosted by the peculiarities of women I have loved and scorned, women I have cared for and cared for me, women who know both my strengths and my weaknesses. And it is in their dreams that their concerns and--to be civil, allow me to say--dissatisfactions can find facile claim.
I have been dreaming abundantly of late: a bungalow I share with my father becomes overrun with cockroaches the length of my hand, my family strands me at an icey and abandoned North Sea coastline, my legs become entangled by serpents (snake-like, but tentacular and ichorous) that bolt me to the chair while impotent colleagues look on. These are the moderate nightmares of one who dreams too easily, too perspicacious of the creatures and stories he encounters. After all, these are the dreams of the dreamer and when I wake I know that I am gone from them, that my consciousness has abandoned that place it has created to indulge in private torments and subconscious fears.
What, though, of those men that are myself--or somehow represented by me--in the dreams of others? I cannot say that I have left them behind because I have never felt my consciousness there to begin with. Without waking the turning woman next to me, woud I have not continued to moan in her mind as my bones and skin lay torn and broken next to her? And the greater anxiety remains: What part has remained behind in that dream? How many of me have already been dreamed into suffering and death within the minds of others? What part remains when my own parent cries out at my torment?
These, I might be told, are the tremors of an exhausted mind. And such soothing would be accurate and even appreciated. When the earth shakes, certain objects once concealed are uncovered. I believe it is the same for the human mind.
My nerves quake not at the idea of crawling insects, hypothermic chill, or repulsive vermin; these are all the creatures of one's own making and one's own imagination. My quaking comes from the unimaginable things, the amorphous and putrescent forms that stir in our depths, and make contact in our fragile dream-state. What can a serpent's venom do but sicken, paralyze, and kill? It is that which dwells in the crepuscular region between our minds and the places beyond that terrifies me. In others' dreams, where I am only the passerby on the street, what waits for me as I fall from the brilliant cognizance of a friend or lover or family member? What maddening, indefinable malignance lies waiting to envelope and tear at the flesh of my semblance, to digest in slow aeons not my muscle and tendons but the psychic residue of my dreamtime passing?
Given the completeness, the seeming assurance of the reality of my own dreams, how can I deny that I am not just lounging in my ailing mother's mind? After all, it is not the visit to the store, the posting of a parcel, the telephone call of a friend, the cancelled trip to the cinema that I am here and now experiencing; those are but passing memories, stories I tell myself to explain why I am here presently. My mother's dream of me need not be that complete. I am but a young man sitting across from his mother who dreams fitfully, recovering bodily and psychically as medicines both treat and frustrate her. A pot of tea steams between us, it's bergamot aroma fills the air. Modest lamps keep out the winter's dark. Ha! She does not even require the stars to be lit for this particular scene.
It is all I can do to lift myself from this chair for I am bound by fear stronger than any demonic serpents. My heart races as I pour tea into my cup. I sip, my hand shaking and the tea cup clatters against the saucer, splattering outward. Several infinitesimal crystals of sugar dissolve at its touch and I sicken to think again of that encroaching night, that dissolution of the real--or at least the reality--into that formless entropic mass. My breath shudders and moans against the--once forgotten--asthmatic constriction in my lungs. I shake myself but the tension remains, suspended between ease and pain, nestled in this nerve racking middle ground.
I shake the nerves loose, letting my fingers waggle and relax. How absurd, all these nighttime anxieties, and only in my weakened state--stress from Mother's operation and recovery--would I allow anything like this entertain me. I sip again from my tea and it refreshes me, it slides with warm thick certainty down my throat and I think, for just a flashing moment, that it will go through me and root me to the floor of the lounge. I peek around the curtain and see the flickering stars of the night. Without thinking I am at the door and outside.
The air is sharp and I pull the door behind me to keep Mother from waking. The night is dark, its sky clearer than usual, and I feel armored against the brisk gust that encircles my nightrobes. Something accrid curdles the air, a smell like sulphur but so thick I can taste it on my lips. I peer into the darkness, step forward from the porch.
In the midst of the stride, I realize there is no step to catch me. Something does. Its hooked appendages latch onto me and for a moment I am cradled at the hungering edge of the world.
---
Just a story drawing from recent events and dreams. My mom is doing well and I have yet to be consumed by that which "gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time and space," despite fictionally descriptions to the contrary. This is also an attempt to use my new gewgaw for typing. For the most part it works delightfully well!
Such neuroses are not new. Rather, they are well exercised muscles of my imaginary. Dreams have the power to create worlds and even, or so I am told, reveal something unseen in our own. I am hesitant to purchase such claims, but appreciate the notion they introduce. Indeed, it is this possibility that has seeded such subsurface terror in me, roiling as it is with notions of others' dreams. These are places where I--or my avatar--are guests, hosted by the peculiarities of women I have loved and scorned, women I have cared for and cared for me, women who know both my strengths and my weaknesses. And it is in their dreams that their concerns and--to be civil, allow me to say--dissatisfactions can find facile claim.
I have been dreaming abundantly of late: a bungalow I share with my father becomes overrun with cockroaches the length of my hand, my family strands me at an icey and abandoned North Sea coastline, my legs become entangled by serpents (snake-like, but tentacular and ichorous) that bolt me to the chair while impotent colleagues look on. These are the moderate nightmares of one who dreams too easily, too perspicacious of the creatures and stories he encounters. After all, these are the dreams of the dreamer and when I wake I know that I am gone from them, that my consciousness has abandoned that place it has created to indulge in private torments and subconscious fears.
What, though, of those men that are myself--or somehow represented by me--in the dreams of others? I cannot say that I have left them behind because I have never felt my consciousness there to begin with. Without waking the turning woman next to me, woud I have not continued to moan in her mind as my bones and skin lay torn and broken next to her? And the greater anxiety remains: What part has remained behind in that dream? How many of me have already been dreamed into suffering and death within the minds of others? What part remains when my own parent cries out at my torment?
These, I might be told, are the tremors of an exhausted mind. And such soothing would be accurate and even appreciated. When the earth shakes, certain objects once concealed are uncovered. I believe it is the same for the human mind.
My nerves quake not at the idea of crawling insects, hypothermic chill, or repulsive vermin; these are all the creatures of one's own making and one's own imagination. My quaking comes from the unimaginable things, the amorphous and putrescent forms that stir in our depths, and make contact in our fragile dream-state. What can a serpent's venom do but sicken, paralyze, and kill? It is that which dwells in the crepuscular region between our minds and the places beyond that terrifies me. In others' dreams, where I am only the passerby on the street, what waits for me as I fall from the brilliant cognizance of a friend or lover or family member? What maddening, indefinable malignance lies waiting to envelope and tear at the flesh of my semblance, to digest in slow aeons not my muscle and tendons but the psychic residue of my dreamtime passing?
Given the completeness, the seeming assurance of the reality of my own dreams, how can I deny that I am not just lounging in my ailing mother's mind? After all, it is not the visit to the store, the posting of a parcel, the telephone call of a friend, the cancelled trip to the cinema that I am here and now experiencing; those are but passing memories, stories I tell myself to explain why I am here presently. My mother's dream of me need not be that complete. I am but a young man sitting across from his mother who dreams fitfully, recovering bodily and psychically as medicines both treat and frustrate her. A pot of tea steams between us, it's bergamot aroma fills the air. Modest lamps keep out the winter's dark. Ha! She does not even require the stars to be lit for this particular scene.
It is all I can do to lift myself from this chair for I am bound by fear stronger than any demonic serpents. My heart races as I pour tea into my cup. I sip, my hand shaking and the tea cup clatters against the saucer, splattering outward. Several infinitesimal crystals of sugar dissolve at its touch and I sicken to think again of that encroaching night, that dissolution of the real--or at least the reality--into that formless entropic mass. My breath shudders and moans against the--once forgotten--asthmatic constriction in my lungs. I shake myself but the tension remains, suspended between ease and pain, nestled in this nerve racking middle ground.
I shake the nerves loose, letting my fingers waggle and relax. How absurd, all these nighttime anxieties, and only in my weakened state--stress from Mother's operation and recovery--would I allow anything like this entertain me. I sip again from my tea and it refreshes me, it slides with warm thick certainty down my throat and I think, for just a flashing moment, that it will go through me and root me to the floor of the lounge. I peek around the curtain and see the flickering stars of the night. Without thinking I am at the door and outside.
The air is sharp and I pull the door behind me to keep Mother from waking. The night is dark, its sky clearer than usual, and I feel armored against the brisk gust that encircles my nightrobes. Something accrid curdles the air, a smell like sulphur but so thick I can taste it on my lips. I peer into the darkness, step forward from the porch.
In the midst of the stride, I realize there is no step to catch me. Something does. Its hooked appendages latch onto me and for a moment I am cradled at the hungering edge of the world.
---
Just a story drawing from recent events and dreams. My mom is doing well and I have yet to be consumed by that which "gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time and space," despite fictionally descriptions to the contrary. This is also an attempt to use my new gewgaw for typing. For the most part it works delightfully well!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
