Worthiness and directionality

What's it worth, I wonder, Willard, trust, a life, the sort of life I thought I'd lead, the sort of life I get to lead if I so choose. Beset by a specific longing, I--or maybe beset is not the word: perhaps this longing is a gift. It is a gift, a powerful one. The more I say it the more it seems the truth. The more I say anything the more it seems the truth. For a while at least. In another light the world is turned about and I think a different thing. Then reverse. We are biologized for it, the switch the flick the reset button and then we're righted. Or was that right? We might be blighted by a distant love, not know just how distant love is and what it means. Of course you should recognize love when it comes, you'll say, Willard. I can hear you now. But how to know? How to trust the self and its weird desires? It's as if there is no point in thinking because nothing is permeable, or all things are equally permeable, so that I have no frame of reference. It is like a blizzard, Willard, the sort I enter into willingly, or if not willingly then at least with some secret knowledge that I carry with me like a gift for whoever opens the door I might find my way to.

Every way I look is white. A room of it a heart of it a home of it a frozen toad. Each minute my feet feel cooler, the way you start to lose all feeling in a toe, as if it was a stone. Is it that I feel lost, or am I just not recognizing the way the light hits, the way to read the wind, the outline of the weathervane from a week ago yesterday? I see no doors. I am a boor, indelicate, undecided. I no longer know these weather patterns: nothing is clear. The sun is rare. All is drear and bleary haze. In dreams I never feel my agency. This is not so far from that.

Of course that is too a lie, I know you'd say. I'd say it too. Is it that I know but cannot bring myself to say or act? Is it that the truth I once believed about myself will not hold? These fantasies--these ghosts I summon up--are they just that, driven by impossibility? Or are they keys to another life, a brighter side, a glimmer in the storm? They could as easily be fault, a long hold, a winding stair to nothing, repeating patterns leading to the same self I was before.

Light and heat and darkness

Dear Willard,

the lights are down, the heat is coming up from beneath the desk. This last weekend the neighbors have begun their assault on the Christmas season. It is a spectacle in the greatest sense: the million lights, the inflatable beasts, the recorded warbling songs: the curtain goes up at sundown and it runs until sometime between 10 and 11 at night when one or the other shuts the show down for the night. I don't know how much it costs. Perhaps that's not the important question. I know how much it haunts, though. I miss you here, though is that enough to say it? By saying you I conflate the you I knew and the you I think I know and the you I surely know with a thousand other yous. You stand all around me in a circle in the dark, holding glowing candy canes as the lights go out, saying nothing. It is not a dream, exactly. It is both less and more than a dream. The spectacle is real. It's saying something about America. It's saying something about our collective dreamlife, how we speak to each other, don't, or can't. It's saying something about our cant, the canticles absorbed in our brains through a dozen years of religious education. Once I said fellatio meaning education, and thought it was original. Maybe it was. It embarrasses me now, Willard, so overwrought, so meant. This note is no less meant. I write to you because you are a fiction, a screen of Is, of eyes, of the letter y, not to mention the word.

I don't know if it's safe or not. My life feels in danger. I am going to the snow country in two days and am not sure if I will return. Perhaps temptation will wreck me there and strand me, ending everything. By everything I mean everything for me. Your everything will of course go on. It's hard to know that but it's true. It's hard to live knowing that, but we both have seen it. A someone ends and then another. And yet we are still here, until we're not, obscured by scrims of snow or memory or distance, until we're gone entirely, existing only in our memories. Maybe you only exist in my memory. That's okay if so. I will keep you close and hold you there. I will speak to you for a long time, and then I will continue to do so. In memory it is so easy to hold another, to contain another. Only rarely are we pressed by others in our memory, by their drives and wants and uncontainable urges, the waters on which we are buoyed but are only able to access or divine in moments, in the past tense, if we're lucky, if we're real at all.

A long hour, a space, a breath about desire

What good is desire, Willard? It feels impossible, yet it's in the air, clear and clean and white and slowly growing. Does it define the self or efface it? You know it well, I'm sure, its heat, its rhythm, the way it grows into the cracks between moments. We both keep it close and covered, like a lifelong soup pot, like a locket. We are both closed in our own ways. Not impenetrable, I know, these interiorities, but it's a long effort against a shell.

I wonder if it is like a blizzard wipe, a pull strong enough to shake apart the screws of self. It is pure, I’m sure; it’s strong, I mean. Surely knowing it’s wrong does not demolish it. It grows regardless. It banishes thought. It is not like thought at all, though it occurs within. This last year, the au pair. The La Brea tar pits, slick and thick and black and eerie, the way they swallow up the past.

As a yearn, can it be consumed? Used up? Or does it necessarily empty us? Is desire for another the end of us? Or can it be used and held in hand, a lightning bolt, a healthy body shock?

I saw a mountain of white a week ago and thought of you. Sometimes I fear the desert is a dream and I'm still in that tower, years ago, unknowing.

If it's strong enough like blinding wind thrown against a rock wall, it might obliterate it eventually, remove even the letters of the words I scrawled there a thousand years ago, destroy the memory of the name I wrote upon it.

If I vanish in it

then I vanish, and there's nothing left where my body was. I mean there's something left where my body was, but that something isn't me. Every mark is something somewhere. Every mark is left by something. If I could retrace each mark, the world would slowly reassemble in the darkness, getting lighter every lift, healed rift, every movement of a skiff backward on a lake, lightly. A forgetting is a vanishing too, assuaging the traces in the brain until they don't crease the meat at all. All I know is that they can disappear. I pray they can disappear, those selves I used to be, those footprints I made on others' hearts. If they can't disappear can they be covered over, Willard, so at least they're lost to me in time? If we can soothe electricity away, then the singed bit left by it can be taken back too. It's a positive move, to think we can erase ourselves. It enables love, a cove, a covering up of things we did when we were younger, stronger, when our hair was longer, when we believed the world would disappear for us when we closed our eyes. But then after all of that it was somehow still there. In snow, in silence, in that particular silence that snow offers us. It is a chance, Willard. It is a second chance to me, this memory, this offering, this doubleness. Knowing trace makes us trace our knowing. Makes us think back, blackly, makes us wonder if what we did is what made us, or was it what we didn't do? True, is there anything true in memory, or is it all a bit that we can flip in dreams from off to on and back again. Is everything just white on white on black? Where I was I was. I can't take it back.

a blizzard a buzzard

A burial. How to breathe when the snow comes in in force in frenzy and how to even see when there is only one tone one color one state of being. Its own darkness. Eyes close to opposite. When the world shuts down, Bentley, it is so so quiet so slow. But my mind, my mind, so--the storm entering through pupils. It will slow, though, if I walk outside, if I sit and look up, if I let myself become snowflake, become drift, vanish.

What I see in the dark

The white is full of dark colors, Bentley. The black and blue of falling on ice (what I saw in the dark): the noir of a knee taken over by shadow and bruise. The noir of a colleague who disappeared in the night, just as winter began—she, too, taken over by shadow and bruise. And I’ve been thinking about her letter, what I suppose only a few will ever know, and I’ve been writing it for her, over and over, changing the ending, over and over (the mind goes where it goes, you’re right, Bentley): I’ll send a postcard, It’s been fun, See you in the spectrum of color. Though the outcome never changes. The goodbye. The cruelest of editing jobs.

I can’t save anything, Bentley, as hard as I try.

In this way I’m stuck in your accordion of memories, and I’ve been missing the dead. Both human and animal, both dead in body and dead in presence—those I’ll never see again though they may still be breathing. Isn’t the past the same as dying? The used to know, the used to. Perhaps it’s the holidays that breeds nostalgia—waking up in panic, the card I forgot to send, the present I forgot to buy, only to realize the recipient died months ago, years ago. I find it difficult to remember them all. A slideshow on repeat.

And every time I forget, I wonder what it means. I keep being confronted by the possibility of parallel universes—an accordion of Willards living similar lives—and maybe this forgetting is a form of travel, a split-second where the dead are breathing, where the card is waiting to be sent. Where the letter I keep writing and rewriting is my own, a letter powerful enough to sling me back and forth between selves. And I wake sitting up, all the differences translated into the forgotten.

Past perfect

What You See in the Dark is the title of a book I just received, Willard. The cover is lit like noir, all chill and shadow, the title light-infused. The effect is one of luminosity. I haven't read it. I've been failing at books this year, my attention shattered. Maybe not shattered. Meandered. Scattered. Scattered is what I mean mostly. Splintered. Broken and swept into bins. This has been happening with time too. Not circular, but recursive. I find myself thinking about a moment and it accordions into others, some from years ago. Like memories of lovers coming unbidden in dreams or in spare moments, those spent in the interminable line at the post office, the snowbird old queued up to send reminders to their relatives of their existence. We're still here, they say, I imagine. Do you remember us? We remember you mostly, though those memories get crossed and switched like on the old telephone switchboards that gave rise to the metaphor.

So I check out of these moments when I'm waiting. I don't feel good about it, though the mind goes where it goes. They're wondering what's taking so long. I'm wondering what they're thinking, what the contents of their letters are. They're so thin, barely there at all. And then I'm somewhere else. There's a scale on a tile floor. The walls are white, as are the tiles. A hospital? Maybe. One from years ago, nestled somehow in memory. Then there's a flash. I'm back. It's nearly my turn. I don't know how much time passed, or if time passed at all. A lot of things seem to be passing.

Do you think you'll always live in the white? I live in the white. Not actually afflicted. Not nested in cold. Instead we have darkness, years of it. Snow on the mountains. All trees there I think. It's treat, a distant threat. A reminder that we live in an insulated world.

Each layer, and then

My body is revolting, Bentley. The metaphorical blizzard has confused it, and it wants nothing more than to be pared down, stripped, eviscerated, the pressure too much, an undressing in the most violent of senses. This chill the same as snow. A heartache in my gut, a more appropriate of places for such an ache.

I started writing this last year, when the snow had started, or was, or not at all--no, I remember now, no snow, just death.

And where am I now, nearing a year later. These days, a year feels like a circle. No moving forward, just back around, like winter. Hello again. Round and round, back to the beginning. Some advice, Bentley, to find a straight line from the path of a circle? Is the only way off to jump? But I apologize--questions in general are so vulgar.

Instead, I'll wait, legs crossed, looking out the gap of my curtains, feeling the temperature drop, day by day. The leaves disappearing with each gust. And maybe then, when the silence comes, I'll walk out into the snow, follow the straightest of tracks, a new kind of undressing.

Timework

A full rotation is no small magic. Of late I find years begin to blur, the space between breaths attenuated. When I hear a snippet of a song trailing out of one of the radios from a passing automobile, or sometimes from one of the wiring mechanisms that accidentally picks up a signal and starts to sing (itself more than worthy of note, I think), it cues memory. That is, if I know it, and I rarely do, then I try to place that song in narrative. When was it the soundtrack to my life?

You speak of the hush of white and silence so loud that it becomes a whine, rising, aspiring to thunder and lightshow in the snowburst. I know it too. I have never been good at apprenticing myself to silence. It does not seem to be in me.

Are we us, Willard? Are we still who we were? Do we contain those selves? If those old skins heard song X and were induced to electrical state Y and we felt, what, aroused? weightless? explosive? somehow more alive, harboring such potential energy, do those selves still exist? Or are they retired, decomposed in the compost heap or in the cemetery or in the backlist of our brains?

Have I ever told you about the phenomenon of paradoxical undressing? That a body gets confused in blizzard conditions or when chilled sufficiently, that it starts to feel hot, that it strips layers off and discards them in the snow, that bodies are found on some mornings, especially those following the big snow storms, naked and frozen and buried, maybe a foot still sticking out, the ice crust on a face like a rite? That police are often fooled into thinking murder, molestation, at least at first?

The brain is so easily misdirected that it's hard to believe in I, in anything, in who we were or who we are. But then you step out in one of those moments that you describe and all those thoughts erase. It's so obvious, then, who you are, who you couldn't help but be.

Perhaps you already know it well.

Yesterday I looked around me, at the snow, and smiled

Almost an entire rotation since I wrote last. We are entering a new decade, Bentley. Did you know that? Of course you did, aware of time in the same way that I am. Aware of snow, too, even there, in a different kind of desert. Back when snow was a novelty, I used to wait all year for the possibility--a probability, I don't know when it didn't snow at least once per winter, but rare enough to wonder--and when the snowflakes finally arrived, a look up, eyes wide, I'd listen to all the noise of the world being blanketed, and it was the sound I loved most. Not silent, but quiet. Have you heard it, Bentley? And even when I wasn't alone, when there were friends speaking to me, I heard that quietness as the snowflakes landed. But then I discovered loss and I forgot about that sound or could no longer hear it, and it was bad, Bentley. No rest for the weary, as they say. The constant buzzing, the year-round noise, not even muffled in winter. Until yesterday. I ventured out into the snow, drove on the dangerous roads, did what needed to be done, and by the time I returned, stepped out of my car, and looked up, looked around me, I saw that snow once again and smiled, and it wasn't what I saw but what I heard. It was a moment, Bentley.

But I don't know why I even bring this up because it isn't the happy ending I was hoping for.

Near a year

since my last entry here. What has transpired in the since, Willard: it is hard to say. Time passes. We play with our mechanical creations. We have loved, lost some, lost weight. Got thin. We are barely there, and to be clear, we are not there at all: we are here. I am here. This space is not a place, but it is a meeting point. It feels like my brain is still as it was then, that it contains the then. Maybe it has been frozen out. The weather on my windows feels weird. I was in a car that crashed. I thought about children. I ran a distance. Climbed a mountain. Made new enemies before I knew it. Then they became anemonies, stinging my skin gently as I moved through them.

There is them and me. There is world and self. There is self and self, and I am not so sure they are the same moment to moment. Electrically I am different now. Electrically I am different now. Electrically, chemically, I am different now. I am in a different state. I am in a state that is not North, that has not, or little, snow, unless you go looking for it. I am not exactly lonely. I am lonely, but not exactly. Think of me here and this: a tesseract is a four-dimensional version of the cube, also sometimes called a hypercube. Which is to say it connects with, maps to what we think of as ourselves. But it--us--is also larger than us, outside of our own understanding. I think about this only when alone.

Things to Do:

Use less Es in your sentences from this moment forth. Aim for Is and Os, mouth a vertical cut in snow, a hollow thing. It has you halting as you strut and think about tomorrow, or a tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. It has a word for it. Not Tim (a tag) or Timbuktu (a location) but an anything than it. A rock with tiny scars apparitions in your window. Magic? Vanishing? Night. Oulipo if you want it badly, badly. Talk slowly. I had always thought I told you. I am losing hair. It falls out in chunks in morning. It is disturbing. I dial a doctor. A doctor picks up. I ask this doctor what is up. Doc purrs, unmoors my thought. In front of both of us it apparitions: 0 and a 1. Dot. Again. Again. Again. What should occur? I cannot say. Again. Again. Again.

Don't Suffer More,

Suffer better. Beat a surfer if you see one. Seat a burping baby, and she will stop. These are things I've learned since being away from snow. The thing is it's no less cold, my heart no less tiny and starlike in the center of my body. It is disturbing. My doctor thought it would expand when the average temperature went above 45 degrees Fahrenheit. But no. It just beats slow, Willard. The doctor held the mechanism up to it and we both could see it on the screen. You know I hate doctors, hate their manners and adopted mannerisms designed to make you comfortable, make you less likely to resist the many ways they penetrate your sanctum. But we could see it on the screen. The heart. A blip. Another blip. Then another. And soon my inside was out onscreen like a baby. I don't know what it was called. The mechanism, the baby, the surfer.

I looked it up. I checked some sources. I was suffering then. But not suffering well. Suffering better, beater? Neither. We are apart. It is a suffering. It is a lovely suffering. If we were together we could weather anything but nothing would be produced. When two magnets nestle back to back there is no energy between them. When they are pulled apart you can see the squiggly little lines like in physics textbooks that can make electricity move. We need those lines. Sometimes I feel that's all that keeps this microscopic heart alive.

In an attempt to be more like Jesus

I may try snowshoeing. This morning I contemplated buying a pair, priced them, figured my size (they said it was okay to lie about my weight for my driver's license but not to find the right size of snowshoes--the snow, apparently, keeps us all honest). Sitting in my apartment, putting lotion on chapped hands, knowing a chill was crossing the country, made me think of miracles. Could I walk across snow and dream it’s water. I'd like to walk on water. I suppose I have in the winter. Freezing temperatures, Bentley, makes us all messiahs, miracle makers. I'm in need of miracle, the word. Some days I want to leave this place, follow your path through the snow. You left me here, brotherless, nose bleeding from the cold. But I’m dealing. My new year's resolution was to suffer more. I’m determined to succeed at something.

And maybe I already have. I’m still in love, surviving the summer, when I can’t seem to feel a thing—a reverse thawing. And, yes, I fall in love each morning—but it’s easier to love in the morning of winter, before the sun comes up. So many possibilities in darkness.

I didn't know, Bentley, if I'd return here, but the wind chill, the refusal to leave the apartment, and who else do I think of but you. There is so much. To tell. I need you when the snow comes.

Willard, I have long admired

your openness to love. I know we both reach out when the days of sun are short and we want for brightness. You fall in love each morning with something new. That's you. That's always been. You are a set of repeating zeroes, each one a mouth, lips, with abstraction behind. You give those kisses out like gifts to the small things in the world: the electric kettle. The numeral 5. The sound of bass coming up from just up the street and scattering against your windowpanes. One reason why I've always loved you. But you asked: what does it mean to love only under winter? It means I am closed when the sun is long. My attention is too promiscuous: a fault, I know, I've known, a noun, but something more. To fall in love with everything is to fall in love with nothing. We cannot mate with weather. We can pair up with the digital voice of the alarm clock for a minute each morning but then it's gone. To fall in love with it is easy. Its everything is so apparent, or seems to be. I can only wish I had alarms. I sleep through everything except the sound of guns.

They pop at night from a couple miles away, or more. I listen closely. They might be fireworks is what I think at first, but then that's not right. They don't have the afterbirth of fireworks. They have the emptiness of weapons. An action and then effect. I wait for them to move closer. I fear them moving closer. A posse! is what I thought when they first appeared. It could be a band of anyone splitting a door from a doorframe and doing anything to the X and Y inside. I feared for myself so I wished my doom on them. My doom was then forestalled. They did not come closer. I fell in love with them, their perishing on my behalf. This is a terrible admission. But only because they had perished was it possible—nothing could return. You are such an optimist when you have no options. But when human interaction is possible again you submarine and disappear. Or am I speaking about myself, speaking to myself. I forget. This glass and crystal: you can see through all of it. At times I catch sight of my own sign and think I have some company.

That Ken doll that I had when I was eight: that was love, too. I admired its smooth facade. I would keep it under water for days before letting it back up. Was that practice for the winter? I tortured it with burning sticks. I torture everything with burning sticks. It remitted nothing in response to my many queries. Whether it was it or it was he, for instance. What his relationship was with the other, with the water heater, with his mother. I filled that zero in and tore him limb from limb, tied him in glistening bits of string and hung the string from twigs in the yard so the birds would take him. I never saw a sign of him again.

[now there

are two opened out to the world, like ears, like bells, like halves of balloons. I am okay with piling these notes up against the door. Today was a long way from summer. I could see snowcaps on the mountains, the candy made fact. Actual experience turns my head around. You know a thing because of description or depiction or metaphor but having never seen it you don't know it in the same way. Sort of the way a bracket works: you throw one in and it opens up a space, a thinking space in which to diverge, to pace, to make peace with whatever trembling idea is working in the mind and won't let you continue until you work it out, give it room to run and extend itself. These things open. They are invitations to the world, or what is left of it. Sometimes I wonder if there is any there there at all under the snow or behind the fog, underneath the hem of dark. Individual experience is tough to transcend. I mean, Willard, like, fuck. Sometimes you just want to tear a piece of yourself off and attach it to the world, pop it in a socket or a freezer hole like a popsicle or to have your gaze fasten on something tiny. Maybe like an atom if we could see atoms. Or maybe something simple, the head of my broken leopard statue.

The head is all that's left. I shuffled the rest offstage in a combination of dustpan and trash. It was there—just a day ago—and then a body nudges it and it is on the floor in pieces. I guess I shouldn't be surprised. But I keep the head. When I see the head, when I really see it, when I open up the eye and let it just stew and look at it and when it reveals whatever it is going to reveal... when I see it, I can see the whole. It is a representation. An asterisk standing in for a star. A colon and a comma standing in for a face, emotion, our brains flooding out the rest.

But I digress. I digress a lot—