Her Address–

Not only was the not only present, I was not my only self, but the self that only had just begun to be herself–and that’s when the not only present had itself become itself.

They will say, I hate to admit it, but I liked her writing better before she got sick.

But the honesty!

No one wants that, and the potholes, the god-feared look of “having”

one wants to wish their lives lasted long enough to drink again

and again, you asked if I looked up, hooked my leg on a fence-post, saw skies

more alarmed at having been a sky

and not one of us, or my eyelash–no, I have looked

only for things in pockets, such as your watch, or a canary-feather

left over when on New Years so many things had children, minutes

apart—lovers lost their case-by-case arguments, dropped to see

whose kiss they were laughing into– what other ladybugs might be living

in so-and-so’s teeth. I told myself to call you

but friend, undo yourself and then get back to me.

Reflection of Other–

Understand, nothing she understood was mistaken for taking
the understanding from your hands, but understandably,
so-and-so was quite upset at what she understood, mistakenly.

Her Letter–

To answer your question, no I never learned about perrineals.

Though my bay window may, if I’m lucky, hold a thousand each spring in its eye-socket,

Lord, you should have seen the underthings they’ve got–perinnials–

root-toes two metres long, I swear it! Yours, S–

The Other Questions–

Did she write most days, or, when feeling ill, did she want other things, say

cantelope in the sunshine–did Otherthings take note of her

exact choice of words–mathematics?

I heard numbers–as lovers– occupied her bay window– ants on a biscuit, jammed

with honey and other hack-eyed-creature-curated

Night.  I was laying in a field of wet grass watching the falling stars and thinking, “I should be falling, too.”  As if all the heavens were below me, and I was plastered to the ceiling of the world.  Would that I had fallen.  Would that I were falling still.

My friend, Anto, and I decided to have fun and read what I have so far on my script.

What will hopefully be a two man script at some point. What I have so far.

Older man, 60’s, glasses. In a Dressing Gown. Has been standing on a porch for hours. Late morning. Stands still, occasionally placing his hand over his eyes to improvise a visor of sorts. Squints. Shifts weight from foot to foot. Other than that, no motion at all. The porch looks out into a neatly tended garden. There are white wicker lawn chairs speckled in the green Bermuda grass. If it wasn’t for the patches of hedges and color coordinated flowers within the hedges, the grass is pristine enough to have once been a golf course. The man, in slippers, mumbles about crown molding.

Quietly, to himself:
Yes. Yes. Quite right the painters were here to paint the molding. Seems this place is crumbling. Right before my eyes. Used to be best estate in Sussex county. Best of the best. Crumbling. Crumble cake. Wait for it. God knows.

After some time, and rather forcefully, he exclaims:
Oh, rats and biscuits! The farthest I can see into the garden is just past the hedges! That does nothing for my electrons! Nothing for God and heaven-delusions! Nothing for science and the tea-totaling hopeless badgers! Tell me! Where are the mice going? Scatter, scamper, sloppy creatures! What pill to take to know the Map-of-Imaginary-Mice!

A man, in a Dressing Gown, appears to the right of him:
You said Rats

What?

And besides, If I told you, you’d never believe me

Rats?

No, mice, obviously

Yes, mice!

But you said Rats.

I said rats and biscuits. Simply an expression!

I thought nothing was ever “simply an expression.” Either way. We’re dealing with Mice.

Yes, the Map-of-Imaginary-Mice.

You wouldn’t understand. I cannot tell you.

Tell me? Who are you?

That’s an easy assumption, isn’t it? Not so much an “expression” as you said. Nor simple.

I just need to see further into the garden, so as to know where the mice are headed.

No one ever asks about my day! And I cannot tell you.

About your day, or the mice?

My day has the mice in it, running about.

But what about the map?

I cannot tell you.

Who are you?

That I can’t tell either. Not to you.

But I must see past the hedges. Nothing can be done for science otherwise, or my electrons.

Is there something wrong with your electrons?

I think so. I’m looking at it. Well adjusted.

What has just adjusted well?

My own hands. And nothing else. Most unlikely, you. Tell me about the mice! Where are they going?

Past the hedges I suppose.

Rats!

No, mice.

No, Rats and your mother! I can’t take this. Understand, I am about to climb a tree or unground myself.

Unground, or bury?

Can you read minds? Do you have tarot cards and a scarf from Toledo?

My god, I do, in fact.

Because you know my gut-stone language!

And this is a language by all stones, or just the one in your gut?

You know, I never thought about it before. What does it matter, all stones or mine?

I do have a scarf from Toledo. Hanging on my wall. Rather interesting.

I don’t have time for this. Rather, I have to know the mice’s going aboutness before the others catch me!

What others? Am I an other?

You’re an exception. Though we have never been acquainted, you’ve somehow picked up on my stone language and other such rays. Funny, Toledo is rather miserable this time of year. I had a dog once, named after the river Tagus. One can see the Tagus for miles standing on the Alcazar. There was a woman there, a mathematician. I feel madly in love with her. Toledo, Toledo. I dreamed I was El Greco, and all the gypsies cried over my grave.

This mathematician, a woman you say?

Yes. Quite. And loved by God. Must we revisit such nonsense? Blast her to heaven and all other quadratic formulas! The mice! I need the map and to see past the hedges.

Perhaps a mathematician would come in handy about now. Tell me more about Toledo.

No! Must stick to task. I have God and the electrons in my pocket and one must be careful this time of day, sun’s nearly mad this hour. Mad. Mad. Everyone here is mad.

Am I mad then, sir?

Of course not! Anyone who knows the mice’s map has a grip on something past God and into infinity.
What keeps me standing here is the hope I’ll finally fix my electrons and know how to fix Science!
Tell me! I am positively on my knees, can’t you see?
Do you read my mind? Have you all the words to my gut stone language? All the rules and organizations?
I am not mad! I am the only one concerned for God and science, am I not?
People prancing about my garden, unawares! Unawares! Aware of only their shadows!
If we were in Toledo, the people would pay more mind to garden mice!
I tell you this truthfully, not for my own gain.
Rats and biscuits! It is true!
But Toledo is rather miserable this time of year. Miserable.

What ever happened to the mathematician, this woman who you fell for?

Fell. Fell into a trap! Like hanging oranges off the banister in hopes of catching seagulls or fish! I had a dog once named after the river Tagus. He loved oranges. No, she’s gone, undoing herself in her equations. I dreamed I was El Greco. The gypsies cried over my grave. If we were in Toledo, the people would pay more mind to garden mice. Excuse me; did I give you the password for my gut stone language? I had it written on a piece of paper. Stuck it in my pocket, see, so the others wouldn’t see it.

Am I an Other?

Certainly not! Certain things fly past God and into my hands. My hands are all that are Certain at the moment. This is why I need to see past the hedges, observe the mice. Yes, the mice must know how to fix science and my electrons. Rats.

No, mice.

Yes, mice. Obviously. Did I tell you? I dreamed I was El Greco. Theotocopoulos. Bird of God. Having died, the gypsies cried over my grave. Bird of God. Only then could I see past the hedges.

And perhaps you dreamed you were a bird, so to capture mice?

No. El Greco was Domenicos Theotocopoulos. The Greek. Bird of God. Cast from the Monestary for there were demons in his hands. The electrons were set wrong. Mathematically. In his head.

And the mathematician. She was a dream-vision, or real. A woman of Toledo, or someone you loved as El Greco?

Must we revisit this? Faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see. I do not see any reason for her revival. Her quadriadic equations. I simply need to see past the hedges and get on with it! Tell me about the mice and let us part.

Perhaps I do not want to part with you.

Alas! Did I give you the password for my gut stone language? You’re getting close to sounding like myself. This worries me. Faith is asking for visions. I’m asking for the map of imaginary mice. This must be done swiftly, before the Others find out!

Mathematically, this is impossible. And your electrons know this. El Greco would have known as well.

El Greco washed his hands before entering the orange groves. His feet, as well. Look, the garden is slick-full of mice and their map is hidden past the hedges. I know. I saw it once, in a dream. Things fly past God and straight into my hands, I tell you! This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased, hear ye Him.

Christ!

Exactly! And I tell you, Toledo is miserable this time of year.

                                                                                                 (photo by TW Collins)

“embrace it for what it is, let go of the concept of what you THINK it/he/she/they/i  should/could/would be/was/will be,  and find yourself in the place where angels speak and mystics see… the place in the eye of the storm with a straight shot and clear view of heaven; where the sun never ceases to shine. the place of pure peace and understanding and acceptance. find your way within. many are waiting.” -A.llen O.wen

“We shall be changed. For this perishable nature must put on the imperishable, and this mortal nature must put on immortality.” – 1Corinthians 15:52-3

There are moments when you know that a voice or language from a distant source– be that an author or memory of a past-self–comes, shattering glasses, with the purpose to lift and nudge you to hope-free joy, for to hope is not to live, but to predict, and the voices outlast all anxiety found in hope, that unstill ground. In these moments–glimpses of Great Love.

As I stood between myself and the window, I had a feeling an Other was perceiving what I soon would unwrap.

Call it opening up, call it madness, but sometimes, one feels waves when the ground is steady, feels love when all corners are dark.

These moments strike only when the mind is ready, when perhaps a broken-down-ness has occurred. And, the very moment we feel the whole world is stagnant, in the cracks of an alleyway, burst gardens! And why not? Sporadically, the Other dances in tune with our neurons. If not sporadically, we might not notice it when it does occur.

I said I stood between the window and myself while sitting down. At that second, I did not know that state of being-in-between, but looking back, as satellites look to stars, catching unseen tails in their lenses, I move toward a realization that I could, and did, stand between former despair and future unknowing, suspended.

What stands between is not really me, but the Other, singing in a tongue of unknowing.

Despair has the capacity to lull our bodies into the dance, too, but only occasionally, and with caution. For, after we begin to see ourselves as the Other, a clearing in a wood is put to flames, or, more physically, a neuronal pathway, used, shakes off.

One experience cancels the next, and to build, we remember ghosts, only ghosts.

Why can’t gardens grow out of every despair then? So what if our minds give up the clearing in the wood, brushed back with flames of the Other, destroyed, neurologically clipped?

Because, alongside the unknowing that comes with the dance, the moment when the voices come in, there must be undergrowth and new associations, though they are painful. Not to withstand the undergrowth and pain, but to understand, know.

Once, I succumbed to another sort of dance. Not the relief of the Other, but anchoring despair. Weighted, I thought to cry out, lift me up! But something wanted my attention. To know this undergrowth, to keep my life from being always “in the clouds,” a gift was being presented and I was to unwrap it. So I cried. Full and belly-shifting. But I want revelation, I thought, not this!

But why, asked the former-me, the voices, the Other. How is this any different from joy? Unwrap it, slowly, sing into the suffering. Be still in it.

From this stillness, something happens like what happened today near the window. The Other stands and allows me to be in-between former despair and future unknowing. And, in that moment, glimpses of Great Love.

It is the body where the weight of my crying rested. My body that understood something the mind was rejecting. So, when we are crying out, wanting relief, not accepting the gift, how can a duality happen? How can we have a feeling of beginning-to-know something we have yet to know?

A single electron can take two different paths within our circuits. It can, in essence, interfere with itself while trying to get from place to place, split between two places at once. And so, too, ions, which carry all our potential actions and thoughts across the brain—it is through ions that our neurons communicate.

So, as with Schrödinger’s wave equation that computes all the possibilities of one particle’s behavior, left alone, the particle has no specific location. Two places at once, five? In a wave or still? To observe is to un-know.

Just as I was walking down the stairs for a cup of tea, a person downstairs began playing Brahms. Though they had been playing for some time, I was only just aware. A thought scurried across just as I felt sadness. So this is the language of the moment. So this is two places at once. My listening and Brahms’ calling into the world, the darkness that once housed his despair. And, possibly, the person playing Brahms began in order to relieve their own sort of sadness and weight. Lifted, we are all together singing!

I remember a friend who called to me as I was running into the West Texas sunset. He was a sort of perceived knowing that the Other danced into me today. I had the feeling of beginning-to-know something. And sure enough, my despair back then led me to write about water, and in that water surfaced a stranger who saw his own face in it. Hannah! He cried, and so I was then named Hannah in his mind. And perhaps the particles in my brain split open to be that for him. Communion, between our sadness and joy, is possible, even with those we have never known.

And when I succumbed to the weighted, full crying, I sang into my arm and began to unwrap the gift. What makes me hold, I thought, to one branch any longer than another? And so each experience is its own unwrapping.

If electrons are subject to the counter-intuitiveness of quantum mechanics, perhaps so are our states-of-mind, our emotions. And how, in brief seconds, we may lift up, out of despair or unknowing, and glimpse Great Love.
See below Bernstein and Glenn Gould together perform Brahms. How can a joy-canary not be hidden in this? Even on the saddest days?

So awestruck were we, by  the falling stars, that we never noticed that the world was burning.  As the smoke filled our lungs, our final words — we spoke without knowing we would forever after be silent — were ‘thank you’.

And then we too were burning.  With the plants, with the oceans, with the animals,we were all of us burning.  Our lungs blossoming into flowers; the fire in our bones at last released to join the fire in the earth, in the air, on the water.

Before beginning this entry, I would like to direct your attention to my new little audio-wordling. I recently uploaded a new track-song-poem to my Mysapce music page. It’s called “Case Study: Girl Thinks She’s a Sparrow” check it out HERE

Knots have been away, resting their bodies against a sea rock, I suppose, perhaps in Maine. I don’t blame them. Wander the lights, I think, lean against the glass, eyes pressed to an ocean dress.

One of them wanted to come back to me tonight. The herd stamped that idea out of its mind immediately.

It’s not time! knot 34252 said, untangling seaweed into the shape of a helix.

But the one who wanted to come back looked for Jupiter in the sky, drew an equation in the sand for the distance between.

Between listening, the carpet has names for my breath. Another language that perhaps the knots could translate.

Something beams inside me, whispers,

don’t you know, in the listening one composes things, hangs lines of beauty in the air,

As grass keeps growing, though the roots know nothing of it.

Pressed, I think I see knots,

in Maine, or where my thoughts

and You, settle.

Listen,

when the knots come back, beauty

will reveal She’s been sitting in my corridor,

all along, handing me things like: Your intentions,

the sun caught in a toads throat, forgiveness

open cotton-field-wide under

my feet and You. I will tuck under my bed

the sandpiper who stands one-sided, drunk

from whatever it was my words bloomed in the other life.

There are little creatures in my lungs and they just don’t wanna leave. I know, I know, close to my heart, dear ones, but please leave; there are other planes out there with wider expanses than my modest alveoli.

Sickness lifts the tops off of cans and leaves me staring into the sky thinking there might be something I am missing on all of the other days, in other states-of-being. Something about the fighting within matching some spirit of fighting on the outside. My senses lean back and place their feet on the vein-ways, take breather. Swaying daisies, what else can we do but go with it, have our way with how the Universe pulls on the tops of our heads?

The chest breathes without notice most of the time, then, suddenly, an ache or tightness. Other senses take over. The brain maps take a nose-dive and rearrange their streets.

What? The chest hurts? Rewire smell, touch, hearing, because breathing maps have less property to go about.

Walking out of the hospital, the green of September deepened, as did the blue above.

Are your lungs about to collapse? I asked the pine.

Just wait, said the pine. Any moment now, your memories will scatter like soon my leaves.

A strange tingling from the nebulizer rest on my hands. Dots against dot-strangers.

Pine, I said, does your heartwood break down, your lignin gasp and take it on themselves to collapse? Why are you following me in dreams?

Nothing stays that settles on the frontal lobe, and you’re about to remember something that hasn’t laid its hands on you in a while.

Your smell does that to me, I said. Tell me more. What will I remember that stays settled in the occipital lobe? My hands, see, bugs of sort going over them.

Later, I read a magazine article about the last days of Patrick Swayze’s life. “He wanted to die at his ranch in New Mexico, but Dr’s wanted him to stay in California.”

Once, I held the stump of a great pine as a girl. So tight. Remember this land, I thought.

I wrote, frantically in a notebook, 12 years old, about the land was a heaven. A heaven. I didn’t want to leave.

Some chord in a water-trough spun out and licked at my ankle. The river running through the ranch property spoke in thousands of tongues, more tongues than rainbow trout.

See that line, my dad said, it’s got one, a big one in a fight. Pull!

I leaned the whole weight of my frame against the rock-banks, tossed blonde into the wind. Dad had a grip on my belt-loops. The thrill of almost falling into the ice-current, coming straight from the mountain’s tips, rushed spotted-blood bugs to my ears.

HA! I gasped. As a lighting leapt, and something gaped next to me, as though a birth from rapids.

Breathe, I thought! But the eye of the trout shocked open in surprise, stayed on the sky.

Can I throw him back, I asked dad.

Take him like this, he said.

His hands, thicker, demonstrated.

Walking back to the ranch-house, I squeezed where the scales dug in, watched the blood out, in, out, in, like the mouth of another being, wanting to breathe.

Years later, at twelve years: This is where I first learned to ride a bike, I wrote, frantically, next to the pine stump, and caught my first fish, I added. Leaned into the ring-stained footstool again. And now, we have to sell the ranch, I ended the entry, crying, grabbing hold of the amputated tree and root system as though I could keep a part of myself here, forever.

I try to catch my breath between a sudden remembering. The bronchitis holds me down. Against the pharmacy floor, I read the magazine article, wondering if the tree stump was still there. How many trout did he catch in the same river? A river I thought, “mine.”

…as though I could keep a part of myself here, forever.

“He wanted to die at his ranch in New Mexico.”

There’s a journal to my grandmother in my room somewhere, from when I was 12.

“Dear Fredda,

I went to the roof and watched the sun go down. You know we sold the ranch. I guess it’s about perspective, mom says. But I just ache. It feels like I was really happiest there. I’ll miss Jenny and the horses and climbing Hermit’s Peak. I’ll miss the smell of rain on the mountain and how you can see so many stars because everything is cleaner. Your father’s spirit. I learned how to fish and ride a bike and shoot a gun there. I guess it’s almost more like home. Maybe where I was most a kid, too.”

Hardwick: your prescription are ready.

Help me to breathe, I say to the bags and bottles.

The pine outside said, you will remember the thing you don’t remember, soon. See, the sky and I wave daily, but how often do you look up?

And I asked again, does your heartwood ever collapse, your lignin turn in on its own weight? Air, air, air!

I hugged a stump of your sibling once, in New Mexico. I wanted to hold on to the land, as though anyone could own it.

Go back, said the pine.

I did, do. And I bet so does he, now. I said, while the buzz still crawled on my hands.

From time to time, alveoli find it difficult to move air. Tissue tires. One day, nothing will move. Still. There are dot next to stranger-dots on my hand. Breathe. The land inside.

Picture of Hermit’s Peak from the porch of the house. Swayze filmed Red Dawn in and around the area, which is how he fell in love with the land and, when my family had to sell the ranch, he was the one to buy it.

my father took this picture of me, at the Ranch. Eating a turkey sandwich made by my mother.

Just a favourite passage of mine from Albert Camus’ notebooks, bordering on poetry, really.  Every once in a while, I come across a passage of prose that possesses such poetic clarity (Kawabata especially comes to mind).  This is from Camus’ entry from August 1937:

And he went into the water, washing off the dark and contorted images left there by the world.  Suddenly, the rhythm of his muscles brought back to life the smell of his own skin.  Perhaps never before had he been so aware of the harmony between himself and the world, of the rhythm linking his movements with the daily course of the sun.  Now, when night was overflowing with stars, his gestures stood out against the sky’s immense and silent face.  By moving his arm, he can stretch out the space between this bright star and its flickering, intermittent neighbor, carrying with him the sheaves of stars and trails of clouds.  So that the waters of the sky foam with the movement of his arm, while the town lies around him like a cloak of glittering shells.

Deva: Moon (2009)

[Albert Camus, Philip Thody (translator), Notebooks: 1935-1951, New York: Marlowe and Company1998, pg. 46.]

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Among other things, I’m beginning to see dust in a whole new way. As though the molecular form has suddenly changed and what was once based on some form of geological pillar, is now made of what Milton referred to as “angel fluff” — heavenly bodies neither male nor female who frequently make each other gigggle mid-air, mid-sentence, kissing between the currents. And why should I complain? Instead of solitude interrupted sporadically by the blackberry or a sip of tea, my bedtime now salted with wonder-inducing illusions of dust. No, the knots are not appearing as often as they used to, wiggling beside my lamp, but enter, dust.

Maybe I should be worried. Worried I’m losing my mind. Or perhaps I should listen to the dust giggle here and there, and not worry if I may, or may not, be seeing things.

So, I haven’t slept in a while. But maybe this is exactly the time to see such things come into themselves, circling the room in free-verse.

But what do I say or do with something so elusive? Bring me visions and I’ll lay down, too anxious to sleep. Bring me a reason to write again, and I will compose letters to you but won’t send them, just tuck them behind my ear, on tiny scrolls or scraps of paper that could be hidden anywhere…even in my shoes or pocket.

Webs of words, catch-nothings peeling their ribs off one by one.

She’s trying to see the cycles, how,

though the dark belly of some field deer can be gutted,

though the ligaments tear when kneeling

and friends pass the hallways, silent,

the once childish light remains, even among

violence and red–indeed, that’s the moment

of hush-orange, solitude’s sting.

Enter a collection of sighs; enter the last time there was enough weight to press your eyelids down like the window to a grain silo.

Underneath minutes there hide skirts of things: a lost-friend’s letter, trunks of algorithms memorized and shelved in the brain under: useless.

I never thought I’d dream about math or numbers or algorithms. Wading though the necessary math classes with clenched teeth, I resisted the things that love me. But resisted knots swirl back into patterns from day to day, if there is attention to the strange attractors. The mystery remains in their corner, hidden, as I am to them, in deeper symbols.

So, crying in a car under the blankets of worry, hands gripped on a wheel, the thought of radius enters.

Enter into the mind a conversation with a friend.

And, rocking in the car, hands tight on the wheel, a rope thrown into the mind…in a different language than what it’s used to. A split mind sorting the world in new ways, ways that love to wrap their bodies in what is unknown, dancing in front of us each second, like grace.

Me: how does a computer communicate with itself?
For example, take this sentence and tell me if it can be applied to a computer
“The exchange is deemed “an explanation” when foreign symbols are converted into familiar ones. Upon this transfer, curiosity rests.”

Friend: well there are a lot of factors, like which operating system, hardware, etc
but let me try and say it in computer logic: what I am about to type is not any sort of actual language

Me: I like the “not any sort of actual language.”

Friend: it’s such an abstract concept that this wouldn’t mean anything to any computer:
VALUE “Exchange” = VAR “Explanation” IF (UNKNOWNVALUE) FUNCCONVERT KNOWN VALUE

Me:  if/then function? is that what that is?

Friend: well there is no “then” here

Me: is that your translation for the sentence I gave you

Friend: computers do not do undefined concepts
Me: wow

Friend: yeah you’d need some actual values
I mean the amount of code to define the indefinable,
only a human brain can even grasp that concept
it’s not too long ago that computers had trouble grasping the concept of zero
they really only know what you tell them

Me: zero

Friend: yeah

Me: that’s a good one

Friend: they didn’t get the idea of nothing.
now they sort of arbitrarily get it.

Me: how did “we” “make” “them” get zero?
do we even “get” zero?

Friend: if 1<2<3…etc then 0<1
We get it more so than any machine

Me: but don’t we “get” zero in the same way?

Friend: the computer only knows that zero is less than 1
we know it’s nothingness

Me: what is nothingness?

Friend: the absence of anything

Me: but we can’t know nothingness

Friend: we can conceptualize it

Me: isn’t nothing, by classification, something?

Carmon: we know it imperfectly
it’s conceivable

Me: I was reading Heidegger last night and that’s what he loves to talk about
Nothing

Friend: I think the biggest difference is that a computer, currently, cannot partially know something
either it knows a value or it does not
it can’t understand something, in any real sense
they just store data, and that data interacts.

Friend: and this goes back to what we were saying about partially knowing the mind of some sort of “god”
that we can only know it imperfectly.
Back to how computers “think.”
I have another sentence.

“Curiosity rests in this technique upon our ability to find a familiar verbal coin of the same or similar value as the word to be defined. The synonym may or may not bring us “closer to reality.” It tells us how terms are being used by placing the definiendum, the symbol to be defined, in a context of familiar words.”

you don’t have to translate the actual sentence, but its concept within, into computer terms. How it applies to computer programs, how they “think.”
it is very computer-like anyway
don’t you think?
symbols and such
value, translation, transfer of symbol into action / thought / idea

Friend: well
curiosity is not computer-like

Me: ok, take curiosity to mean
an unknown command
which it’s trying to figure out

Friend: well you would find an unknown value
there are no unknown commands.

//This section defines the variables to be called

FUNCTIONNAME: CLOSERTOREALITY
X = lim(*) //where “*” = Word to be defined
-X = lim(*)
Y = lim(*)
-Y = lim(0)

//This section declares global functions

FUNCTIONNAME: FAMILIARWORDS
(W = “?”) //where “S” is the synonym of “*” and “?” represents any present value in the dictionary of familiar words

//This section declares the values
CURIOSITY||{W = [S(FAMILIARWORDS)+(CLOSERTOREALITY)]}
oops
correction
//This section defines the variables to be called

FUNCTIONNAME: CLOSERTOREALITY
X = lim(*) //where “*” = Word to be defined
-X = lim(*)
Y = lim(*)
-Y = lim(*)

//This section declares global functions

FUNCTIONNAME: FAMILIARWORDS
(W = “?”) //where “S” is the synonym of “*” and “?” represents any present value in the dictionary of familiar words

//This section declares the values
CURIOSITY||{W = [S(FAMILIARWORDS)+(CLOSERTOREALITY)]}

End Conversation.

End into the steering wheel. What the knots know is that the love of the strange-attractors don’t change their shape when we ignore them.

And tumbling into the day, something I thought I’d never adore, moves closer to me, knowing the mystery is deep and hides as many luminous things as a universe can stand without becoming the underbelly of another universe. When two galaxies collide, a sway into the other, and thus a leaning into mathematics when the questions lie under my closing eyes, when the steering wheel is all it feels I can hold onto until a further collapse.

Repeat:

(CLOSERTOREALITY)
((CLOSERTOREALITY))
(((CLOSERTOREALITY)))

Do not understand zero, or the knots as they stand 23023 feet tall today. Gathering this as one gathers functions or bits of conversations to repeat to the self, in the mirror, in the bath, in the car while gripping the steering wheel, wondering where the loves of things hide.

Move closer to the hiddenness of what loves you, what gets stuck in your mind.

Sing 3333333333 times when someone notices 33.33 buying ribbons, texts you to tell you they noticed 33.33 at the cash register because the other day, 33 followed you into despair and then, opened a box of joy. Numerically, emotions have various ways of sticking to your side, if you let them develop into chain-reactions.

So, despair follows me into the bath while I read books on things going on before my eyes that I cannot see, such as faith or atomic changes:

“Consider an atom that has absorbed a photon of energy. That energy has kicked one of the atom’s electrons into what’s called a higher orbital, and the atom is said to be “excited.” But the electron wants to go back to where it came from, to its original orbital, as it can do if the atom releases a photon. When the atom does so is one of those chance phenomena, the atom has some chance of releasing a photon and going back it it’s original state, within a given period. Thus the excited atom exists as a superposition of itself and the unexcited state will fall into after it has released a photon.”

Superposition, in which branches of outcomes grope for the mind’s attention. Watch. Listen. Mystery sweeps by in silence. Higher into a state of excitement, the mind has understood something-above, which is not dread. But dread is the kicking-out of inertia.

So the steering wheel holds steady my dread, gripped against the dark and recalling the math that loves to wrap the unknown in back coordidoors of my mind, as the knots glow into an-already-knowing-laughter. So many times, my despair is dressed in a skirt much like joy’s underbelly. Look at things differently; stare into what frightens the knots into finally, finally speaking. Singing. Singing. Singing.

What can account for zero? For unknowing, un-likely and strange attractors?

An atom in a superposition, waiting to exist in excitement and joy for a bit longer, or to fall, fall into the natural state which pulls, is like how it feels to sing out exactly when there’s nothing to sing about.

Look, the mirror and the steering wheel hold my despair in strings that can be let go, breathed into, let loose in the face of un-likely loves that tap on the back, courting with them, mysteries unknowable-kindness.

Up through my stomach, with the iPod in my ears, I stare at the mirror and sing. Loud. Loud because I am alone. I imagine the brain tries to process the feeling of singing through different pleasure algorithms. The mystery hidden in singing brings with it the underskirts of despair, but the color of each number the neurons assign is a flushed joy.

Breaking out of the pattern, letting the superposition hold as I sing things, vibrate song, though tired, though worries, though dread-of-unknown permeates things around, though earlier in the day, I gripped a steering wheel and cried, sounds, notes, outpour into the tea sitting by my bed. I can almost see the knots swirl, tiny galaxies themselves, crashing into each other in a dance of grace. And algorithms enter into the room. Things that I never thought loved me, in fact, do, and watch as I break out of my natural state into my superposition.

Hold me here, I say to the knots.

I took this photo on 5th avenue this past Saturday. I have gotten into a new habit of photographing things that can’t move. Reflections of sky or these plastic things.  Their faces seem more real than someone sitting across from me on the subway sometimes.  It’s as though you can bring your own story into them, wrapped like wooden boxes or bunched up bouquets, listen to them tell your own story back to you.

These two hands almost touch, as though sneaking an intimate moment.  The scene makes the vibrations of phantom hands tingle inside my own side-hand, the side that I haven’t looked at yet today.  I spent 8 hours wandering around the business world, trying to contain my own self in the minutes of commerce and philanthropy. So, when I look at this, I feel a tug somewhere as though I, too, am waiting for their hands to touch. And in waiting my goal is to become more patient. Perhaps hardened with a sort of wait-for-things-ache.  The way an idea of the sunset over red rock hardens the inside of my skull while the hours tick away and I work for someone else.
“Why do I waste time on things I will only leave behind?”

Two 33’s today. And that’s two 6’s or 66 or 3333. I imagine there are two half knots in each. Walking, I saw another set of 3’s at 33rd street and it was then I realized just how seperated I am from the image of what I wanted to be a year ago. Knots know the way things should have been in your heart, but constantly remind you how it is in the moment. And 33 leans toward that centerfold like a cannon on opening night. The loudest shock is your first realization that things are their own paths and not your making, no matter how strong you think your grasp is on the minutes, on when you wake and when you fall asleep.

The 33 on the way to the second office made me realize, there is no telling when I will live in the desert again, when I will see the stars like a thousand numerical bodies in the bedrock of sky. But isn’t once enough? We keep moving forward because perhaps there will be a second time the ineffible will make known what isn’t ours to know.

You sent me a picture of a collection of bird houses. You are walking along the brick of some shore, thinking we’ll never have two seconds, let along a day, to open worlds of words, playthings and jingling thought-dolls, pressed into the other’s hand.

I wonder myself.

So last night, after another You confessed I hurt them, I tried to fall asleep imagining the universe was already my own again, and cosmically, I was made of dust, again.

Let me explain. Inside my room there are memories of other rooms, just as each house pulls back curtains on childhood homes.  Isn’t every thought another memory in bandaged and bundled other-memory-residue? And so I try and explain through the dream of me being the cosmos by the fact that I can take a photo of one girl, and feel the length of roads she may have seen just by her face. And when I look there pulls her kite-thoughts down into my own brain-sky.  A million of her kite-thoughts at once flying into my own brain-space. The field where the common mixes with the individual. And I say to the knots, look here. Look, have we something in common, or only dust?

Perhaps the wait for the plastic hands of two mannequins to touch is the same as waiting for the words from her mouth. From Your mouth when I’m lying in bed and waiting to feel the cosmos pass through me. See the stars, the bit of them, on her ears? And back I’m back at something static.

Roll in the knots, like kindly things until they inform you their home is lifting. Until their bodies lose track of your location and thoughts refuse to let known their coordinates. When was the last moment the world seemed possible? Untold, stories lift and take their careers with them.

As I type or sit or as the minutes pass, who I would rather be stands staring out the window, arms crossed, remember the faces of You. And it begins to rain. On the backs of things, other things. The memory of something rides in with the rain.

Office has four walls. A desk. My computer. Rain has the smell of gods and childhood memories. So in the smell and sounds and I leave the desk to stare into, and then become, who I would rather be, the one simultaneously standing there already while earlier, I worked. You said, don’t think about time as in a box, but created by you. And so, to escape the desk and the second office, the rain, which carries the ineffable on its back says, SING! So I quietly sing in my mind about the time a pine tree called me beautiful. The time I threw seven stones down the well and the horses lost themselves in the rain, singing. A time when, as a child, the world seemed possible.

And somewhere in New York, a sky reminded me of Utah. And crumbled, the tracks I took to get to Harlem, crumbled. It all flew out quickly in a second when I rest my eyes on this:

Utah breaks in and sage unfolds her olfactory tails into the air. Where I’m standing is not where I am, perhaps how You feel when I call you name and transcribe the lostness of being-in-the-world. But all is lost in the dread-of-being. Lost in the dread-of-being-able to escape now by taking time by the boots and chucking her out the door, by looking in someones image and finding the self. By realizing the self is something other-than.

This is the self as I saw her last night:

As the knots reflect the past knots into the image of knots which gather to make each moment-of-being-in-the-self.

So the rain comes through and on its back a memory of another self that time has carved through and dispersed into memory. And so disperesed the past-knots that I find in the photo of another’s eyes, or the patience with which I feel leaning into me in the plastic-wait in the store window. How to attain this stillness in the office-of-every-day.

Sometimes, I cannot stand to wait and so I try and dig for other knots in conversation. 33. On the way to the second office, another pair of 33. What was I feeling at that moment? Despair. Dust-bowls of despair, but in that knowing-there’s-a-sunset-soon, way. And knots refuse to be translated. 33.

Last night, on page 3, I read:

“Dictionaries tell us that “to explain” is “to make things clear, understandable.” The word derives from Latin roots meaning “to flatten, to make plain.” (Gwynn Nettler)

To flatten, make plain–making reality plainer–our realities as characters, stripped of their wooden hats and extremities.The field-flowers un-earthed in order to preene a lawn inside, for society.

How can the rain understand anything other than what it brings to me?  A little version of memory, to distract from the office desk and the despair from the afternoon, driving into a stillness for a second, but forgetting what the knots have always told me. Be what the moment needs of you. Explore the waiting. What are You saying to me, now?

To record. To record a thing. A thing that loses weight when you look at it, when you try and ponder its measurement, it shrinks. Something as elusive as dust on a chapel bell, as scripted as a North wind off a lighthouse that only pours light, not mystery.

To record. I try to speak a language of knots and nothing ends up happening but confusion. Nothing happens but an ache. And this ache keeps me anchored to the cause, keeps me in touch with carpet bugs, on my knees, searching for the equation between two sentences that were spoken before I was born.

I breathe forward into inches. There’s a light in the doorway. To record this light, photons or the electricity between a bulb and its current.

Today, for instance, I had a conversation with a friend of mine. How my brain needs shine! And so we set aside the computer screen’s work for each other’s thoughts. How, I asked, do we represent each other? My friend types answers and his voice, the memory and representation of his voice, gathers into neuronal circuits and fires. I read his text as though in his voice. Can we break through the walls of representation and actually know anyone?

The knots have been on my thoughts lately. I tell him so. Look at these equations, I say. He says, look at these wallabies in Australia, he says—they get high on poppies and make crop circles.

Somehow, this ties into the philosophical conversation. And the knots sit in the back behind me at the desk, waiting for a leap into my thoughts.

But I tell the knots, look! There’s a theory inside us all and I’m trying to uncover the dots, to gather the thought-geraniums so as to understand the grasses between one another, our thoughts, our desires, and our other-worldly-being-ness.

The knots are dragging today. I woke up in a mood. Worries down my back again, and will I have enough money for the autumn season? Plastic as it sounds, the worry of living is constant. But from my desk at work, I see an ocean. And my friend types words to me. We communicate from one desk to another 10,000 miles apart. Isn’t this amazing? My mood lifts when I type. I type of wonders. And wait for the answer.

I’d rather be outside, I think. I’d rather enjoy the sunshine. I’d rather unravel mysteries by walking in Union Square, searching strangers for their knots. But in front of us, a whole wonder waiting to be discovered. And my wonder is my friend, who talks to me of mysteries while we are at work.

Wonder at conversation! And conversation on the internet! The net that casts over all our lives. A net what leaves us connected or so estranged from another that the wandering in the world wide web can leave us hunting touch.

The knots are restless today. The tower today stands 2792 knots tall. Bundles, even. And some sit in the back corner, reflected in the computer screen as I type my longings into streams 10,000 miles away. The best thing about online communication is instant replies.

Me: it hit me the other day
mathematics (which I always hated) is like creativity and philosophy, it’s working with abstractions
to try and explain things

Friend: yeah, when you get high enough in anything, it becomes abstract

Me: and when I look at it that way, I no longer hate math
I like theoretical anything
but I like to pull it back down somehow
like with a magical string
like theories are kites
and I’m trying to pull them closer to my body

Friend: and you have to ground them to dissect them

Me: yes
so they are like butterflies then, and you have to net them to put them behind glass
and when you look close enough at a butterfly, their patterns are way beyond what you expected.
one color leads into another color, but in zigzag
and how to define that line, you can’t
like chaos theory

Friend: you have to break it down into small pieces, and that won’t give you the whole picture

Me: exactly

Friend: crazy
this is awesome

Me: like those high kangaroos or whatever they were
the lines they made

Friend: I know!

Me: crazy

Friend: no one could have predicted that
but the anchor for all this is logic
it’s pretty clear crop circles aren’t created by aliens
therefore, it must be something else
but more complex than that
it’s MANY things
and that’s where chaos comes in

Me: yes

Friend: some are pranks; some might be weird wind patterns
in this case, high wallabies

Me: the weed

Friend: lol
the opium

Friend: poppies

Me: oh
opium
oh yeah
poppies
like in Wizard of Oz

Friend: hehe
yes
man, the book of that is about a billion times better than the movie
I did not expect to have this conversation today
chaos theory!

Me: I know, right?
amazing
chaos theory is insanely interesting
it is overwhelming
I feel like I’m flying just reading about it
did you see the pictures of the knots?
love those

Friend: yes
I love the III kind
that’s such a cool pattern

Me: you know, perhaps we make our very own patterns each day and we don’t even know it
like actual patterns in some sort of air
when you type
maybe
or walk each day

Friend: hmmm

Me: and it affects the things around
around
like we’re always painting something into being and we don’t know it

Friend: well I know we affect air currents when we walk past them, or they have to blow
that’s an idea I’ve long had
the things we do create… something

Me: expand on that
your idea
that you had
creating things
what did you think?

Friend: well
I went beyond just movement
the physical world and the mental world combined
let’s say I say something mean to someone
and it puts them in a bad mood
and they take it out by slamming the front door
which knocks over their vase
which they throw away

Me: interconnectivity

Friend: you create these things
I call them demons for lack of a better term

Me: what physicists (the more metaphysical ones) are calling “The Field”
the idea of locality versus entanglement
Einstein didn’t believe theory of entanglement was true
but we’ve proved it
we’ve been able to view the burning out of electrons, a proton and electron separated and the daughter protons are effected by the “mother,” no matter at what distance
BUT
it’s only after WE observe
that anything comes into being

Friend: before that it’s Schrödinger’s electron

Me: Schrödinger’s Cat.
someone said to me the other day on gchat
“sorry I was invisible”
and I thought about that time you said it
and how I wrote that note about status updates and the new lingo and how we all sound like science fiction novels and we don’t even know it
in our minds, we’re invisible, sometimes
because we “are”
and we say we “are”
even if it’s only on gchat
like your half man-half fish superhero
reflection
if we reflect “nothing”

Friend: no, the lack of reflection
yes!

Me: then where is that “nothing”
is the nothing something only when we “reflect” it?
like Schrödinger’s cat!

Friend: it is
for that moment, you did not know if I existed or not
wow
applied to everyday life

Me: and your voice when you type as it’s represented in my head when I read your font
I hear your font in your voice in my brain. how my brain recollects your voice

Friend: Electronic data and it’s philosophical implications…
I hadn’t given your opinion on AI the consideration it deserved, because instead of basing the amount of consideration on your perceived intelligence (or creativity, or capacity) like I should have done, I based it on your technical knowledge

Me: that’s understandable

Friend: I guess when you spend 7 years telling people how to work a computer, you assume no one knows anything about them.
and that’s just wrong
it’s a scale
it causes problems
drives wedges into conversation
creates demons

Me: creates breakdowns. Our representations of people need to be broken down before we can really communicate
It’s interesting that we create someone before we know them

Friend: yes
it’s a tricky thing
knowing someone
you walk a balance of open-mindedness and … something else.

End conversation. To record. End. And the knots are sparkling. Inside their bodies: the known. The unknown casts things down occasionally, but in dots. Later in the day, the conversation from the afternoon on the computer, the conversation that happened over text, will be imprinted in my mind and replayed via representation when I read Heschel’s words….

“When the ultimate awareness comes, it is like a flash, arriving all at once. To meditative minds the ineffable is cryptic, inarticulate: dots, marks of secret meaning, scattered hints, to be gathered, deciphered and formed into evidence.”

And, earlier that day, on the computer screen, my friend said:

“you have to break it down into small pieces, and that won’t give you the whole picture.”

Which I remember, as I read further into Heschel’s words:

It comes when, drifting in the wilderness, having gone astray, we suddenly behold the immutable polar star. Out of endless anxiety, out of denial and despair, the soul bursts out in speechless crying.”

To record. I read these lines, interconnected with earlier recollections of a conversation on computer screens, and while I read, in my bed, the knots nestled by the lamp, wriggling into a sway, I listen to my iPod. The iPod lands on Laura Marling. The song bleeds into the web. And exactly as I read about speechless crying into the heart of the wilderness to find that God between the breastplate and dreaming, the song sings the words:

“You sat alone under billowing sky. If I feel God….but I fell into the water and now I’m free.”

Pressed into the sides are the knots, now weighing 4920 worth, sat on my chest, which breaks, as I cry. Something about this. About alignment and chaos. To record this. And the known in the belly of knots have a brief communication with the unknown. Three words, and a black out. Joy! Joy! Joy!

How do I expect to settle into stillness when the vibrations tumble out of my drier each morning? When I stumble over the peaks of things like jetting rocks down the stairs?

When I wake, there’s a melody waiting for me in a hidden place. I haven’t called on her yet. The known is speaking to the unknown in another language in my dreams. Until I smooth the length of worries down my back, I’ll keep buzzing around, disturbing any chance that stillness will nest next to me.

The known are in knots and my body contains many of them. Like a tower, I stand 29740 knots tall, give or take a few. Sometimes, when I hike a hill, one will topple into the soil. And if I crawled against a carpet, a couple might try taking root there, bedding up with the carpet bugs.

The known hangs on inside the belly of the knots, which sometimes circle my head. When one knot passes or beds up in the carpet or hops down the street while I walk in a crowd, another one will wait by the lamp to talk to me. The unknown are like stars and stare down into the belly of the knots, trying to converse with them.

The language is strange. Catch one or two words, sometimes, yes. But this is rare.

Stay in a corner. Listen for a movement inside like a melody.

The drier tumbles the known into the unknown. A melody stills into twists, vibrates then quiets, waits for 29740 knots, give or take, to listen from within me.

I wanted to read something to comfort me before sleep. Something about circling around again and finding the self in a tree branch.

How even in a dark room there’s a memory of reaching for a hand.

Searching, it was late. My eyes hurt from reading.

The knots said, come nearer.

I always knew they were vibrating orbs in numerical bodies, but I refused to look so many nights. Come closer, they said.

Look, and I create their lives. Look away, and they pass, almost as though lightning bugs were their other shells.

Entanglement, I thought, weighs more than a spirit, much more. And so I turned out the light.

Smoke and Mirror. It smelled like my mother. I saw the remains of her face in the fragmented art-deco mirrors, now clouded with grime but that once turned daggers into her eyes. A beauty with her same caramel skin lounged at the bar, her limbs hung like they would pop right out of their sockets, slung across the counter, reaching desperately for the refreshing feel of frozen glasses overflowing with whisky and limes. Her silver sparkling dress looked cold like snow against the warm glow of her bronzed leg. She whined to the bartender, slowly and sensually twisting her leg, hopelessly; the bartender’s gaze was more often directed towards the smooth onyx cheekbones of the saxist.

She almost had my mother’s eyes though. Despite all the smoke and late nights my mother’s eyes were bright and brown and clear, flickering instantly from stimulus to stimulus, following my brother and I from game to game, always knowing what we were playing and all the rules we made up and broke. I felt sure her eyes were just as quick when she would nightly frequent the lounge in which I now stood. They would follow the music notes, knowing the rules but loving when they were broken, pursuing the tune from floor to ceiling to the bartender’s ear and up the dress of the soulful singer. She carried a tiny mirror in her fringed handbag (the one that once was covered in sequins that gradually fell away until only a single one still sparkled; we found them scattered around our apartment for years). The mirror was tarnished and distorted, but she would pull it out to pluck a stray eyebrow or line her cloudless eyes with black crayon, as if to underscore the consequence of her chocolate stare.

This caramel woman in the silver dress, though – her eyes were blue, an anomalous mark of white blood on burnt skin. They were blurred and bloodshot, the pupils like round, bloated whales, impaled and bleeding in the sallow froth along the shore. But beneath the film that protected her vision from reality, there was some painful knowledge, a faint twinkle composed of the same noble despair my mother embodied.

She was trying to hide it with her frail limbs sprawled towards the copper whisky and her red nails curled around the pennies she thought could pay for it. She was trying to look pathetic, and part of me ached to rip the sparkle from her and melt her skin to thick syrup, to mold a new body that would congeal into a stronger shape, slick and hard, and would clink when you tapped it until the warmth of your palm burned tiny holes in her shell. (And then she would let me lick the sticky soul that seeped out, her hand on my head, a caramel statue no longer letting us taste her for free). But she was trying to look pathetic, and she would look that way until she took all the syrup from you, leaving her bloated and repleted, full of all her men.

My mother had many men, but she would not fill herself up with them. She was hollow, and content in her emptiness. The men she took home sometimes thought she had filled them and brought her chocolates and wine and roses in attempt to return the favour. But the gifts moved right through her and after her hungry lovers left she would light a cigarette and laugh. We would laugh along. At the time we didn’t understand the joke, but now I know it’s because her lovers would never be sated; they would suck and suck but she was only hollow and dry, giving them nothing but a stomach full of air and maybe some of her blueberry pancakes. She would cook them naked, unashamed of her exposure because there was nothing to see or understand. Each man would think it was a special treasure, a privilege; that they were touching the outermost atmosphere of her heart. She would just laugh, wiping the sticky maple syrup from her fingers, for her heart beat only to get blood between her legs.

My name is Simon, but people call me Smoke because I smell of my mother. Andrew is my younger brother. People call him Mirror because he is like my reverse twin. He smelled like me and fished with me, and had my mother’s eyes, nose and lips like me. But his skin and hair were light as rain and he pattered while I thundered.

I learned the caramel woman’s real name was Mary, but once you entered the lounge you were baptized with a new name and a new meaning. Everyone called her Mel. It used to be Caramel but eventually she wasn’t worth more than one syllable, so she says. She was scared her name might soon be reduced to only a sound, like the short staccato swell on the saxophone. Mm.

This story isn’t about my mother. This story isn’t really even about me or my brother. This story – if you ask the general population – isn’t about the caramel woman, but her heart pumped to get blood to the brain and between the legs of this story. She was and was not my mother; she was and was not all our mothers. Her body lit our fire, and her eyes – the eyes of our mothers – cooled our hot faces. If her dislocated arms never reached and her soft body never devoured, I may never have met the true hero of this tale; none of us might have. And he, without her, might never have been able to fill her or us or anyone, and would not have left a mark of his existence.

Judy.                My skin looks cold, but it is white hot. No one can touch me without being scarred with the remembrance. Mel eats you whole so that you sit like a mouse in a snake’s stomach, so huge she digests you for days. But I consume like fire. I bear no mark of my last meal except a temporary blue flame, only hot enough to last until my next repast. There is no evidence except the excrement of ashes, the disfiguring scar left on your lips. I am neither empty nor full; I am barely a substance. I am not the fire in your hearth, or the one you sing around, no; I do not provide warmth – only violent, scalding heat.

Perhaps Mel is not a snake, but rather a salamander. When my blaze met with her hunger, she did not curl into white cinder like a serpent. She swallowed me, so that she burned from the inside out, and the tiny holes some man had rubbed into her skin glowed orange and blue. I would have been frightened if she had not been frightened too; she was worried the burns on her organs would heal to make her so tough that men could no longer melt and mold her. I told her fire could forge her too, into any shape she pleased.

But no matter what form I shaped her into, when Jesse X was around she was absolute butter. I can’t remember if she introduced me to him or he introduced her to me, but my first known memory of both of them is the same. Mel wore a slinky, low-necked, silver dress, just barely covering the top of her thighs. She was twisting to the erratic sounds of the saxophone, weaving her arms in the air as though they were swimming through an invisible maze. Her blue eyes were wide and scared, though her body moved smoothly, as if it were part of the music-filled air. She was barefoot and slipped a little along the floor as she wiggled towards Jesse, waving her arms out and squeezing her fingers, a motion to join her that he didn’t seem to understand.

He was talking to two men I didn’t recognize; one was darker and the other lighter, but they had the same face and smell. They had the posture of newcomers to the Babylon lounge, and Jesse was pointing towards John, the saxist who was currently absorbed in a particularly frantic song. I figured Jesse was telling them to get fresh names from John, who was in charge of determining your fate in the Babylon if you planned to stay. Your new moniker became your identity; you could be a fisherman by day (and by the boys’ smell that’s what they were – and also heavy smokers) but if he called you a blacksmith that was your true essence. You would need to learn to manipulate my fire to hammer Jesse’s iron eyes, and the resulting hot poker would burn more holes in Mel’s skin. Mel was always at the end of our long line of communal labour; every product worked to build or destroy her, so that she was never quite complete and never quite ruined.

Jesse signaled to the bartender, Bart, for drinks for the two boys and returned his mind to the music and to Mel’s writhing figure, still beckoning to join her on the empty dance floor. She pulled and pulled at him, draping her liquid limbs all over his pale body in a way that made me feel sick. I nearly went to halt her humiliation and dance with her, but Jesse seemed to sense my intentions before I made a move. He dragged her hand onto the floor, as if it were he demanding the dance. I was angry – maybe because they both embarrassed me, maybe because I wanted them both, and maybe because the desire itself embarrassed me – but I was smoothed by the harmonious discord of their dance. His white limbs shone vibrantly against her muted glow of polished amber. His intensity and her softness seemed to be born from John’s saxophone as they twisted together and apart, never just one but never wholly two.

Of course, I knew them well before then but I couldn’t pinpoint our first meeting, just as we can’t remember the first time we met our mothers, or the first time we knew they were our mothers.

After the song ended, Bart cooled John off with a gin and tonic. The two new boys went to speak with John. I could hear them praising his saxophone skills, and after that I lost interest. Jesse and Mel were still meandering across the floor in a way that seemed aimless but was certainly paired with some music they both heard and understood. Jealousy panged me, and Bart, seeing the tinge of green on my cheeks, poured me more red wine.

“On the house, Judy,” he smiled.

“You’re too good to me.” I lit a cigarette. Bart grinned weakly, looking at my glass of wine as if it were a regret.

The new boys approached me, walking with the same awkwardness with which we all entered the Babylon. They told me John had called them Smoke and Mirror, but that their real names were –

“It doesn’t matter what you were,” I said. “Your parents were blind. You were a bouncing baby, a bundle of fleshy joy with a soft skull that softened your parents’ minds. They didn’t know who you were or who you would become. They only knew themselves, and you cannot live by that label.”

Of course, this was John’s creed, not mine, though I thoroughly believed it. If I didn’t believe it I’d tell you what my parents named me.

“But, John isn’t us either,” the one called Smoke said. I stared at him with dull incredulity.

“Not everyone gets a name, you know,” I examined my nails as if I wasn’t interested, but I was angry. “John isn’t you, and he isn’t me – but he’s part of the stuff that surrounds us. He can communicate with parts of you that you can’t even conceive of. Now you have your name, and now you are part of us.”

Smoke and Mirror didn’t seem to understand.

“You cannot turn back now,” I said, trying to dumb down John’s words. “So you must learn to understand John – or understand at least that you cannot understand him but he can understand you.”

“What about Jesse X?” Smoke asked again. Mirror was so quiet and his eyes were so empty I thought maybe he was blind.

“If you are patient, there might be parts of Jesse he’ll let you understand. But no matter what, you’ll always think you know him; that you’re kindred spirits,” I laughed softly with perhaps too obvious a tang of bitterness. “He doesn’t belong to this world.”

They nodded soberly, pretending to make a mental note of it. But I knew soon they’d want to swap best friend charms with Jesse, whose perfect face would make them feel the friendship was real.

“What do you want from me anyway?” I asked sourly. “A grand tour?”

They looked so ridiculous, so small against the cramped vastness of the Babylon. Suddenly their clothes looked many sizes too big, like starched hand-me-downs from giants. It was as if their new names had truly shrunk them back to the disproportions of infancy, their naïveté hanging from them like bulging dirty diapers. I bit my lip as I contemplated Smoke’s insolence; perhaps John did merely reduce us back to our voiceless births, our tiny, incapable fingers unable to take hold of our identities. I mentally shook my head, displacing the thought from my brain so that the particles of it drifted like dust in my skull. If I kept moving my head, they would not settle.

“Much will be expected from you,” I said viciously, as if wishing to scare Smoke and Mirror into expanding to fill their silly, huge garments. They only seemed to shrink further. I sighed, wanting at once to help them and to hurt them.

“But don’t worry,” I tried to sound reassuring. “You’ll be given the resources and encouragement to fill out your names and your destiny here. We’re family.” I almost patted them on the back, but refrained. I shuddered at what it would feel like to touch their baby skins in the shell of their large, crispy clothes.

John had started his music again and Mel began wiggling with increasing passion. Her red lips touched Jesse’s neck. She was either too intoxicated or too possessed by the music to form a proper pucker, so she just continually pressed her mouth against Jesse, leaving a trail of pink patches. Whether it was the music or the whiskey sours, she looked helpless and I felt like vomiting again at the sight of him being touched by her, and her wanting to touch him.

Smoke eyed me as if he wanted to dance, but even if I hadn’t felt so sick he and Mirror just looked like children to me, and I couldn’t overcome my belief that they reeked of baby shit.

Fortunately, I made it to the washroom before I finally retched.

Smoke and Mirror.           The Babylon was unlike I had imagined it to be when I was a child. My mother would come home flushed and hyper, the usual solemn glint in her eye polished to an intense, joyful shine nearly reaching the luminosity of hope.

My first impression of the Babylon was that it did not sparkle like the joyous luster it seemed to give my mother. The hole in the ground the Babylonians inhabited was not dirty; there were no rats, no dust, and while the mirrors were tarnished they were evidently regularly washed. But somehow it emitted an aura of filth that, despite their clean skin and sparkling garments, coated its patrons with an invisible grime.

Or perhaps the grime came from the patrons themselves, because it seemed as though each Babylonian had their own dirt and as they danced and drank and fucked with each other it would rub off, leaving each with an intangibly physical history of their nightly interactions. A golden aura of dirt meant Caramel, while a harsh blue meant Judy. Jesse was iridescent; the hard, metallic taste of iron or blood mixed with something black and smooth, at once seductive and safe, like the smell of vanilla. Perhaps all their filth got muddled up together and rubbed into the surface of the Babylon, mixing into a dull, muddy brown.

I wondered what my mother contributed to the dirt of the Babylon, envisioning her as sparkling silver that lured you in like a lost moth. I figured I was thick, heavy grey, more a smell than a substance. And Mirror – he wouldn’t leave a trace if he ever had the chance to touch somebody.

Whether the dirt was a product of Babylon or the Babylonians, it was there and didn’t seem capable of producing the fresh life force that hung around my mother anytime she returned from its depths. I pictured the Babylon as water rather than earth, returning its inhabitant to their sea creature origins and continually refreshing them so that they could evolve into something superior, stronger.

Jesse was the first face I distinguished out of the dirty chaos, and he seemed to perceive my doubt in reaching land instead of sea.

“Have faith, Simon,” he said. He placed his hand on my shoulder; it felt both delicate and tough and that’s when I first noticed the vanilla and blood that came from his hand, and – though less powerful – the gold shimmer on his neck and the harsh blue on his ear and various other colours covering his body.

He smiled at Mirror, then known to me only as Andrew. Andrew’s eyes were a green that would have been radiant, had a different soul occupied them. Instead, they showed nothing, not even a reaction to the Babylon or the blood between the teeth of Jesse’s smile. If he had already been named by John, perhaps I would have known that Andrew didn’t understand or judge, he merely reflected the world back onto itself.

“Your mother said you would come one day,” Jesse said, still smiling though its tone seemed to have changed and I wondered if the memory of my mother was a good or a bad one, until I realised Jesse must have been around thirty, and never would have met my mother. For some reason – maybe the aroma of black vanilla – I now felt the faith he asked of me too strongly to question his ability to know her entirely. I felt not only that he knew her thoughts, but also ours, and that his empire in the Babylon was built strictly in anticipation of our arrival predicted by some ancient prophecy, that we had come to fulfill some unfathomable gap in Jesse’s ultimate plan, though at that time I was not aware there even was a plan.

“I am glad that you did,” Jesse said warmly, though the metallic tang of blood still hovered around his words. “We never felt complete without your mother’s sons. Don’t let us down.”

I felt my chest swell with a pride that resembled patriotism. It was as if I had been assigned some grand mission and I was certain the ancient prophecy was what Jesse’s soft words referred to. Andrew still looked like a mirror, and Jesse’s clear blue eyes scanned him with something I thought was suspicion. In an instant, however, the warmness returned.

“If you’re serious, after this set go see John, the saxist,” Jesse pointed to a man as dark as the vanilla Jesse radiated playing passionately on the saxophone. “He’ll give you your names and you’ll begin your new life here.”

My visions of a watery Babylon suddenly seemed so inconceivably foolish and I marveled at my innocence; dirt was certainly the only means of renewal. Water might physically cleanse, but I knew the filth of the Babylon would teach me to live with the muck of the world, somehow bring myself above it in the midst of it and teach me to use the dirt for something larger than any of the elements. I felt the surge of joyous brilliance almost touching hope and knew I would not let Jesse or the Babylon down. I only hoped Andrew wouldn’t.

Jesse was finally dragged away by the caramel women, who he briefly introduced to us as Mel. We watched them dance until the song was done, and then approached John. He held up his hand to us in a motion telling us to wait while the bartender wiped his brow and John gulped down a gin and tonic. He introduced Bart and then waved him away. I started to speak, but he held his enormous hand up again.

“Jesse has told me. Just wait.” His eyes were small and looked as if they were in a permanent squint. Later, as I began to understand the immensity of his knowledge I believed he was indeed permanently squinting to see the small particles of spiritual intelligence the average human could not. It was if he saw the smoke hovering around me as I stood there and as if he truly saw his own reflection in Mirror’s muted face. He cleared his throat.

“Smoke,” he said, touching my head firmly but gently. “Mirror.” He did the same to Andrew, now Mirror. “Take them, learn them and soon you will understand them.” He said this mechanically, as if it were something he said in every baptism, but somehow I felt that it was an intimate moment, never before enacted. We stood for a moment – I basking, Mirror merely standing – in the new filth of our names. John stared at us quizzically, as if he had never before witnessed a rebirth. He waved his hand toward Judy – though we did not know she was Judy yet – and gulped down another gin and tonic. We turned around and looked at Judy, who was casually smoking a cigarette looking a dissonant combination of bored and passionate.

“Should I rename you Dumb and Dull?” John asked viciously. “You’re not one of us yet, so go talk to Judy.” We shuffled away, embarrassed. As we approached, her expression barely changed, except that her eyes – the same hue as Jesse’s – shifted towards us and perhaps a bit more boredom entered their stare as they laid themselves upon us.

After lecturing us, teaching us an ambiguous lesson about Jesse, and performing what seemed like a strained attempt to comfort us, she resumed her observation of Jesse and Mel. I eyed her quietly, wondering why she seemed so frightened of us, and was about to ask her more about the Babylon when she ran to the washroom in a hurry.

When she returned she smelled faintly of vomit. She asked Bart to bring her something to eat, and he returned with a few slices of bread and a small plate of various cheeses. It looked elegant and fresh, something I would not have suspected from the muddy innards of the Babylon. I glanced around again, though, and the Babylon seemed not to hang with imaginary dirt any longer, or rather the dirt didn’t seem as repugnant.

Bart refilled Judy’s glass of wine as she gracefully ate a slice of bread topped with brie. She pushed the plate towards Mirror and me, and gestured us to take some. I said I had no money and she looked as if she were about to laugh.

“I suppose Jesse and John haven’t taught you anything about the Babylon?” she asked rhetorically after swallowing a mouthful of bread and cheese. I looked at Mirror, who was reaching for a piece of cheese. Judy laughed, seeming significantly cheered by our ignorance. I felt ashamed.

“Well,” she started, as if preparing to tell an epic tale. “John and Jesse will collect your fees monthly. When you come here, you are welcome to all the food and drink you can handle, and can stay the night when you can’t face the outside world. And believe me; once you enter the Babylon the outside world is never satisfying and most often unbearable. But what you will gain here will make up for what you have lost in what you once called reality.”

Around two in the morning, the Babylon began to empty. John, however, continued playing and a handful of individuals including Jesse, Judy and Mel did not look inclined to leave soon. Bart cleared away the abandoned empty glasses that scattered the joint and wiped down the surfaces viciously. Jesse whispered something in his ear and he nodded. A few minutes later he went in behind the bar and reappeared with a few bottles of dusty red wine and another plate of bread and cheese, this time along with cold slices of meat, a couple bowls of plump olives and a platter of smoked fish. John’s saxophone wailed its last note, and the handful of people who remained chatted in hushed voices while the band packed up. The Babylon was eerily quiet, as if all the noise and hubbub of the usually crowded music lounge served to disguise some immense secret. As John signaled to the band to go, Mirror tugged on my sleeve and tilted his head towards the door, implying we had overstayed our welcome. I turned to leave with him when Jesse clamped us both on the shoulder.

“Stay and eat and drink with us,” Jesse said. “We want to get to know our new recruits – and I’m sure you have lots of questions.”

His grin was so welcoming I again felt childish at having believed the food and wine weren’t brought out solely in honour of our arrival. Jesse took a seat in the middle of the table, and the others – except for John who remained leaning on his saxophone case – sat on either side of him. Mel, falling clumsily onto a stool, beckoned to me (or perhaps Mirror, I suppose) to sit near her. Jesse began to distribute wine and food, and soon the life of the Babylon returned to the room as everyone laughed and drank and talked together. When we had eaten our fill, Jesse poured more wine and stood as if to propose a toast.

“I would like everyone to meet our two new members, Smoke and Mirror,” he held his palms out in our direction and there was a murmur of greetings. I hoped they knew which of us was which. “They are the children of Magda.” I did not recognize the name; of course our mother did not go by her Babylonian name when at home.

“While it would not be a disadvantage to judge them on their basis of their beautiful mother, I ask that you receive them without any preconceived notions,” Jesse continued and then turned to address us. “We hope you will learn lots from us, and that we will likewise learn from you.”

Mirror and I both bowed our heads awkwardly, unsure of how to respond. Jesse then went along the bar, re-introducing Bart, Judy, Mel and John and naming the new faces.

“So what do you two do for money?” Bart asked. I looked to Mirror, attempting to give him a chance to speak and establish himself in their presence. He merely stared back.

“We’re fishermen,” I answered, unsure of whether it was an acceptable profession in their eyes. “A next door neighbour was kind enough to give us employment as boys when we were hard up for money and we haven’t found a reason to leave.”

Everyone nodded silently. I felt a combination of relief and disappointment; none of them seemed disapproving of fishermen, though none of them looked impressed either. They asked us a few other questions about our family and lovers and seemed satisfied to hear we had none. They talked of Magda a little, until Jesse told them that the past is gone, in a tone that implied he had reminded them of the same many times before. They quieted after that, and there were a few moments filled only with the soft sipping of wine until John announced he was leaving, asking Bart to come with him. Everyone filtered out shortly after, each embracing Jesse as they left. By the time we departed, Jesse and Mel were the only ones left behind, Mel tugging at Jesse’s shirt and humming an unidentifiable tune in his ear.

Gamma 3 – Red Magnetic Moon

Crystal Moon – Blue Electric Storm

I love BEing in a body…..this multi-sensory, multi-dimensional experience.
The WOMBniverse, the Heartniverse, the Pinealniverse – coordinate to co-create the PRE-SENCEverse.
The dimensionalism of YESism…..to EVERYTHING….to EVERY-FEELING….to ALL-GRATITUDE…to ALL-FOR-GIVING….the ultimate pleasure.
The Pleasure in FOR-Giving….the pleasure in GIVING….is for the ONE infinite existence of ALL-ONES moments.

This ecstaticism is a mutli-sensorism of playism.
Let’s play, let’s giggle, let’s hug, let’s heart-create, let’s eye’to’eye dance this pineal life together.
Let’s give this giving to the Multi-niverse…..and all its cosmic sensory systems for the ulitmate-gasm — HEART-Centered YESISM of UNCONDITIONALISM.

AHH….the body says……every-cell connects to the multi-sensoryness of this bath of smiles and joys all around.
This alklinity is within each of our cells beings…..this divinity is within our yesing being.

The affirmation of how we cam into being…..”YES”

I love this body.

I love this earth-body.

I love this UNI-verse.

The collective consciousness is abound and full of sounding humms of yummm…..everything is a feast…..a feast of love….a feast of being….a feast of co-creating joy and connection within all things.

It begins with, “YES, I love this body!”

1. Complete this sentence: I AM NOT….

2. Complete this sentence: MY NAME IS…

My name is mood maker

Today my name is ache filled chocolate centre

Yesterday my name was wind freedom

Tomorrow my name might be rain watching head banger

Inside I know my name really is caramel centred wafer protected  heart owner

Secretly I want my name to be lightening seeker

A name is everything and nothing. When someone calls my name they endow it with all the words that stand for me mood maker wind surfer rain hunter teared dancer. And still if my name was erased from my body I would still be me. but how would people call me? how would they talk about me? would it be like being deaf blind invisible, and, at the same time, made more visible by the lack of one single binding word. So that maybe to call me they would have to say you, girl with long black hair shimmering in the sun shade. Or maybe, you with the sun charged laughter and lightening eyes. Or maybe, you thundering cloud, you flooding rain maker, you ocean of feeling.

My parents think my name is hermit blood red rose

I sometimes think my name might have been electric blue lightning rod

My boyfriend thinks my name is sweet baby corn rain fed

My best friend thinks my name is crushed mint flavoured dream maker

My parents want my name to be star fisher

I sometimes wish my name was sky walker

 Don’t be afraid to diverge from the topic. If it takes you in a new tangent follow it. Write faster than you can edit. Edit tomorrow. For today, just write.

[this prompt is from susan wooldridge’s ‘poemcrazy’. A fabulous book of ideas and fun.]

3. Complete this sentence: I WANT TO SAY…

I want to say come by in the evening and maybe we can make something happen something magical or something silly something sad and funny at the same time. I want to say, if you leave it up to me I will run every time you get close enough to give me a butterfly kiss racing through the motorcycle traffic of Kathmandu to some place with open space and no cuddles something less scary than a face close enough to see your scars and freckles.  I want to say look up a little, there is a sky of support and laughter and rain and sunshine. I want to say run through  the mustard fields bare feet with me.

 Start with ‘I want to say…’ and keep going. Say ‘I never said…’ or ‘ I wish I said…’ or ‘why didn’t you tell me…’

 4. Pick an evocative, layered word: Butterfly Effect, Skyhook, Whiplash.

5. Open your notebook. pick a random phrase. Write from there. Repeat the phrase whenever you get stuck. Go where it takes you. travel with your writing.

Past paragraphs of love letters, house key exchanges and shoe boxes full of relationship ephemera lives the questions: will this survive? Past paragraphs of love letters, house key exchanges and shoe boxes full of relationship ephemera is an opening of self that must happen for any of these to be meaningful. None of these mean anything if inside the face that is smiling at you in that photograph is not a fire that glows at the thought of you. None of it means anything if while you were watching that movie of the ticket you have saved he was thinking of you as much as about the movie. None of this means anything if beyond that photograph there was not a smile in the eyes that a camera cannot capture. Past paragraphs of love letters, house key exchanges and shoe boxes full of relationship ephemera is an open sky under which is endless grass and air that smells of gardenias and there is space between the two of you, open empty space and it is how fully you can exist apart from each other, as individual wholes. If you can smell the gardenias and smile at the sky and spreads your arms out like wings and run free and think of home as each other inside of you, you are truly home; and this will survive. Past paragraphs of love letters, house key exchanges and shoe boxes full of relationship ephemera is a study room, like a library, wooden shelves glowing deeply in the warmth of the fire burning in the heath, a comfortable leather chair in front of an open desk, windows that look out into the green and open space outside; it is a study room that has the cramped cosiness of hajurba’s study and looks out from two windows, like that room and the memories of our study room packed with the lives of each of us in this house; shelves are lines wall to wall and they are the shelves of our lives. each shelf containing small circular photo frames with pressed flowers;  report cards; sea shells collected from each place we ever went to together, each one a different memory/story; a life-size model of your hand is in there, skin warm and soft and slightly scarred like yours are, open so I can see all the lines of your palm, each line a story; there is a globe in there too, a globe inside a globe inside a globe, one for each time we said you are my world; there are skulls in here too, skulls the remains of fights and lies; there is the red rose you left for me on the tree in front of daddy’s office in Durbar Marg, a whole shelf to itself, still red and blooming and fragrant as the day you left it there, as if frozen on that tree and on that day forever, made immortal by the depth of feeling, this shelf is its tree now; there is a yellow sign with an exclamation mark that reads ‘caution wet floor’ as though reminding us to tread carefully; on the ceiling is a gold left painting, a fresco of our lives, of the stories of our lives. This fresco will continue long after we have ended as a relationship, continuing to add to your life and mine, linked inseparably by the 5 years of our friendship, and influenced in some way forever by each other so that even when you are no longer here I will think of you and make up a lie to tell you or draw a flower on a tree for you; there are pearls from all the tears we cried when we first were apart, sending love across miles like sms, we have enough there to make a set now, chocker necklace, dangling earrings and wrist bracelet with gold piping;

 

this is the first 5. there are 95 more. they will arrive slowly, they are friendly and approachable, and they get paid to inspire. respond to them. make a new friend.