Tag: story

give me a web

to reject another tired hero’s story

Yes, I see those stories, too, all around me. The location and abundance of which some will exclaim, “are everywhere!” 

No matter where I go, the one that interests me most is not a story, for it is made of what would not be recognized as such. It tends to feature a non-hero whose non-feats go unnoticed by being what they are–– more constant labors, and no less common than the fact of the web appearing between the branches of the fig tree overnight. 

Many of those who  proclaim most loudly that stories are everywhere! are in fact looking for the same story––as anyone armed with hammers for hands, might learn to see only nails. This much-sought-after tale is another version of the hero with his labors, slaying or banging on whatever he can’t pick up. 

Lately I have grown very tired of its droning echo, and I do not think I am alone. This one, I think, has gone far enough. Give me more spider, more web, more patience, less noise. 

Lately, I think, give me no more of these old stories, only quiet tending: of the careful meal, the clean floor, fresh sheets, attentive care. 

It is possible I live at the beginning of the end of the age of an old story. As someone still alive inside it, I lack the perspective I would need to confirm or refute this suspicion with any presumption of accuracy.  

Finding the ability to make those quiet and non-storied, daily events happen is the only narrative I can find valuable right now. This is partially because I could use some help with these things and also because I have grown very tired of that other clamor. 

I am also weary of those who make, as a habit, a racket to entertain. These are different from those who make an entertaining noise for reasons they have not intended. I am weary of those who throw plastic affirmations when it is clear that all their expression can do is reproduce the old pain. 

The makers of these pseudo-joys, in an effort to to capitalize on the coin of the realm, regularly add to daily misery by their steadfast commitment to cellophane-wrapped optimisms. 

Meanwhile, so many dead. And also, so many able but unwilling bodies, who have made their non-decisions with brilliant sheens of glamour, who feel justified in their non-decisions to leave unwashed those dirty sheets, who unprepare the careful meal whether or not they will eat it, or to remember what hour of what day it is, now.

origin songs

& whose word

strange unseen dark of this body
heartbeating unto her first word

and it was good
and it was listen

all this before the hour of tower lights
and high walls blaring admonitions

ripe for falling from and that followed
and with it the word forbidden and us

tumbling after
& now is a good time to remember

how in the beginning
before the word

was her hearing
like come

true confessions

at the killing hour

  1.  Hello. I am this being before you, embodied.
  2. I am made of flesh. I am being enfleshed.
  3. Which by extension makes me not quite up to muster &  by definition a slow being. 
  4. A fact that forces an admission: how flesh is a slow, as far as substances go. Yesterday, driving home in traffic, I listened to a story (in real time) about the development of data transfer methods via photon. It was old news by the time I heard it. And yet.
  5. My flesh, such as it is, will never travel at the speed of light. And yet, being human, I am one part body and the rest of me is story.
  6. In one of these, I dream of a constant beginning at first light.
  7. In another, I fly.
  8. In another, I am the dead, returned. Sometimes winged. With a choral entourage.
  9. I suspect you are, too. 
  10. So listen. To this question, please.  If I sing to you from the dark place where we hide, waiting, will you please shine me home?
  1.  [and beyond]  for once you surpass ten steps you are surely beyond the beyonds

and yet

I know you are a stranger here, too, so by the light of you I become friend. 

Come, friend. We have places to go. 

They are dark now, until we arrive. 

We may not travel at the speed of light, but this love is a shining thing. 

What if now is time to bring it out? 

I have no answers, only this slow form.

Take it now and let us go.

dogear

creased cosmos

If the only given I may assume asserts this universe as a story in pieces, with each unseen place a fiction to be assembled from salvaged shards of knowns and unknowns found and undiscovered bits, then my only conclusion may be to wonder at the mosaic brilliance of the map that swallows the all that any of us witnesses, in the valley of the trace of a single fold.

after Dionne Brand

Against the Sirens

The telling

Tell me about it, we say, nodding at the most recent lament before us––in the chair, at the table, with the tired voice; in passing in the wild rush. Tell me, we repeat, like shaking a clean sheet to fold it before stacking with the others, who whisper in chorus at this gesture and its countless kin, constantly throughout each day, a plea for a home not quite remembered or fully left. Tell me about it. Tell me about that place I can always remember, ever almost. Whisper to me of this collective hush again, what I need to hear against the sirens.

Shorelines

What may loom, unweaving.

We wanted a story its magic in the key of longing notes we arced like stones from cliffs where we stood the key was carrying the eyes to where the magic was not. Years on a planet would spin us, looking for more of them to name. Here is one, an ordinary song, here is how you survive until the moment when you say back to us here is home and it cuts to remember between places so far full of dead heroes whose spirits won’t quit. We waited, unweaving the ritual to save ourselves. For tomorrow against this siege, and dawn keeps coming so soon.

Trickster Rituals

Possibilities for movement.

Something that is was just here. It has significance but will not fit any storyline. There was a grotesque beauty reveling. And then, and then. Every soul has its way of coming to terms with its containment in space, contending with death. It crowds the psyche, back against a wall. It has no end, and isn’t going anyplace. It’s always going on. And then, and still. Unlike the notion of story­­––something that, as they say, happened. The order of movements is crucial.

Conversation With Unknowns

Writers on writing, overheard.

What are you working on?

I am writing a series of stories. I think. Or something.

What are they about?

They are about what this book is. They are still coming.

What is this book?

Complicated, I guess. They keep adding new parts.

So, what do you do?

I listen and try to write as they come. I guess it would be easier if so much of what they do didn’t evade language.

Wait. That doesn’t make sense. How can any part of writing evade language?

I mean the verbal kind. The kind I know.

What do they use?

It’s more like an incandescent unknowing. Like the brilliance of the world after memory loss.

Do you speak that?

I feel like I could once but lost it. I am trying to learn. But I guess I am a slow learner. I keep defaulting to the old expectation that they speak mine, forgetting I’m the visitor.

***

Inspired when I encountered Ingrid Rojas Contreras’ use of the phrase “incandescent unknowing” in reference to her experience of memory loss, which she relates interestingly to her process of storytelling in this interview she gave to Kaveh Akbar.

Explain This

Investigating a given scene.

Why fingerprints?

Contemporary conditioning shouts, Identity! and they are pressed like badges, considered essential means of outlining, separating one body from the next. As in, mine and mine alone.

And what for?

The first purpose was holding, and the next was touch. These are the grooves that allow a body to feel in stereo. Following certain lines of perception, one can easily lose the sense of having an end.

Then what?

If these lines begat questions, perhaps they also prompted language, to answer with a beginning, once upon a time. We needed a past to explain ourselves, and some shelter from this wild so readily felt when we stretched our hands over any given scene. One story begat the next, but certain questions were never settled, such as: was the wild coming from or into these fingertips? Either answer begs a question–––

?

–––wait, I’ve strayed again. I only meant to wonder over the discovery that koala prints, being easily mistaken for those of humans, will contaminate a crime scene, which raises certain questions I can’t go into now and for which I lack the language to decipher, about what stories these creatures have had to invent to explain this everywhere, here.

***

Inspired by an overheard discussion about koala fingerprints, with details elaborated in an article I found when I got home.