And the numbers now.
Will this what then not let itself be counted,
what when it was not permitted any stop?
I walked on limbs while sorting them:
this, and then this, and so on, what
passes for mind an organizing principle.
Unless this flesh is made of minutes
would you save it? I meant to answer.
Current, fly through me.
You must be time.
Is this the hour, then?
Am I?
With Space and the babies.
She was Space herself, the first room to which we could attach any signs. All other places were rearrangements of this first order. And Time, as we knew him where she held us, never marched. As our teachers tried to tell us he was doing.
“Where would he go?” she said, “It’s all here.”
“Yes, but where is Time?” we would insist, suspecting that he had walked off with one of our toys in his pocket again.
“Well,” Space would sigh, “where did you see him last? Go there. You know how he repeats himself.”
“But I was just there!”
“Child. He’s been doing it forever. Now go back there and wait.”
“But we have!”
“Yes, and?”
“Well, what time is it now?”
She would wait a perfect beat and then look up like she was squinting at the weather. “Looks like eternity to me.”
“You always say that!”
We wanted Real Time. “You know,” we tried to tell her, “Departure! Progression, Arrival!” The Time of History.
“Whelp. I don’t know about that.” She had a way of raising an eyebrow whenever she caught us saying something lamentably predictable. “But I do know there’s a surprise happening.”
“When?!”
“What do you mean, when? It’s here now. I set it down when you were pestering me about progress. Now, help me look!”
And its disappearance.
It is fashionable to have a single mind. It matches the single head. The presence of multiple heads tends to suggest the storybook monster. One possessed of multiple minds has to learn to keep them contained if they are going to get by. As I do, as does anyone I know with this condition. The only problem is the turbulence. The incessant wave keeps knocking the minds against each other. Without this constant friction, I think one of mine might manage to grow some edge I could point to, and with. Then I could announce to the world, Look at me and my cutting edge! But no such announcement seems forthcoming in this lifetime. The constant wave and its tides turn my minds over one another until whatever they are is nothing that anyone would mistake for sharp.
Text as body of bliss.
To hear the text as living, breathing being, not to be measured against the normative strictures of the machine, and know its will to bliss. To find a text on which you can never comment, because you may only speak inside it. As, whispering, you might say into it: mysterious stranger, remove me from my common notions; remember me back into elsweheres that I may be lost in the constant introduction to what may never be written.
***
Notes while reading Roland Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text (trans. Richard Miller).
Except for the weight of this form.
When you found me, I had been waiting, writing, for some time. Writing, I had been waiting behind that wall where the things that pulse at my neck are not what I tell because they are not the sort of thing that, as the saying goes, are up for discussion. One learns, as so many have, not to draw attention to what pulses, beats, flushes in speech or laughter, passion, or tears. My face gives me away. My troubling body gives me away, pouring me through the crack in this voice. I meant to be a formed thing, smoothed and polished for an admiring public, as instructed. The purpose of my upbringing, as far as I could tell, was for this, but in this I have utterly failed. I am instead a porous constellation of trembling orifices, dripping with overflow, and all of it is always too much, and as long as I have been, I cannot remember being otherwise. Perhaps there was a time when it was not too much, when I was a child not yet girl, not yet future woman, not yet in training. But it seems that the knowledge of girl came hand in hand with the knowledge of self and I cannot retrieve my prehistory so long as I am one, even if I would like to lay down the heavy weight of being anyone in particular. The atmospheric particle, absorbing, can collect moisture while continuing to float in the company of other atmospheric particles, until it is time to be rain.
Notes from the grandmothers.
Hold in the mind the feathered whisper of something almost touched, but not. Resist the urge to offer up a salve to stop the itch. And let her volume erupt, and stay while she splits her seams, threatening to tear each hemisphere from the other. Don’t bind. Don’t apply ice to stop the swelling. What do you expect can be born otherwise? These are wonders. It’s when these terrible discomforts leave, and the mind rests sated and full of itself that the subject is really in trouble.
The warmup.
Not sure what when I am waking
I am doing, waking thinking, what
am I doing here? with the what that
I am needing not enough still and yet
going on: up anyway, out again. I have to
gather my what for an hour with my coffee
just being here in this bed with this book, these
books that I may be a semblance of passing for ready
when I leave.
Beyond words, in dreamland.
In one dream, I am warmly welcomed by a sizable group of friendly people. Various sounds and gestures indicate that I am being invited to introduce myself to the assembled. An expectant hush. My turn. It does not occur to me to use any language I know, since none of these are like what I have been hearing. So instead of words, I stand there waving, opening my face wide, making certain gestures of love and gratitude before I bow slightly to indicate that I have finished my introduction. I am received with warm murmurs and a few confused nods. Only later do I think, I wish I had said something.
Torrent.
Living in several places at once
between time and the rain, our names
would escape us and the rain none can know
to find the embers of a memory doused in the rain
glowing in the winds and our faces where we let it come.
And tidal shifts.
But how, though. We wanted to know. Do we get there?
The old woman laughed. What you get in this current is changed, she said, by surrender of known wants to unknown tides, your time no longer free but bound with shining threads of taut infinities.
