aftermath

fugue and disassociation

Hi folks,

Thanks for being here.

As you might judge from the headline of this post the excerpt included in it follows immediately from that in my previous post (entitled "rupture"), so reading them in order might be helpful, although not entirely necessary I hope, to enjoy the one below. In it the second meaning of the novel's working title fugue—the one carrying psychiatric not musical implications—is at work but broadly, the word fugue translates from the Latin "flight".

I saw something with thematic parallels at the Royal Opera House last week: the fourth segment of a program billed as contemporary ballet, although the work to my eyes did not resemble ballet except for in its dancers' technical virtuosity. The Statement, choreographed by Crystal Pite. An extract. Dramatizing a white-collar clean up operation, The Statement choreographed various tendencies people are given to in a fallout situation: denial, euphemism, panic, etc.

The piece opened on a group of suited actors at an oversized lacquered black table. They slunk and jolted and lurched and ran their fingertips over the table’s glossy surface, and from a spoken soundtrack layered on their movements one could ascertain the actors were hashing out some tactical plan to clean up a mess they’d made—a mess only obliquely referenced (and so transposable to any real-world scenario), serious enough it would have people "killing each other".

I could say so much about The Statement. The piece pulls from a language of boardroom movements and gestures, of embodied means for professional appeasement, deflection, mirroring, cornering, smoothing over, etc. One thing that astounds me about Pite’s choreography is how it subverts through its exaggeration of this coded expression, elucidating obfuscation. Hands thrown up to dispel doubt, for example, direct awareness to that which will have been sewn by the same hands. How aptly they communicate the word manipulation which etymology, a friend pointed out, is simply "handful".

Over the course of the performance, the artfully constructed seemed more and more constricted, frenetic, jagged, tragicomic, with the choreography intensified by a crescendo in high-contrast sound and lighting. The spotlit dancers crouched, beetlelike, under the table or stood on its outermost limit. The degeneration seemed to have its own momentum correlating with that external the actors had set in motion.

Revision excerpt after this collage I call Blueprint:

By the time they got outside the night had long consumed the day and the City stolen the luster of the heavens, the vendors of St. Mark's Place rolled the stars into their twinkling wares. The moon hid behind a dark cloth of pale sky like it had in search of some clarity taken a photo of the Earth and itself become overexposed as the picture developed. What clarity was this illumined the glitz and grime in equal high definition. God in the faint wash of purple sky like an angry toddler gone and spilled his grape juice and called it the firmament. It was cold and artificially bright. The whole scene had to it the sheen of a flashgun just gone off, of aftermath. The whole scene had to it a kind of subterranean effulgence, that of a teeming ocean floor, of untold phosphorescent creatures setting aglow their natural habitat of dark.

Rae made a sweeping motion with her head, looking furtively up and down the street outside of Elliot’s apartment building. As if to tempt the very thing she wanted no part of, the witnesses she called on to defend the lie of her absence. She did not want to be seen where she was, did not want to be caught in the act of her own life. To her left a man came out of the St. Mark's Hotel charging hourly rates. Adjusting his tie. He had on a suit and that meant something. That meant the overtures he made to decorum were not merely empty gestures but substantiated by a code of professional dress. She felt an affinity with him. A mutual yearning for a reality not predicated on the events of recent history, such as, the expression of Elliot’s ill feeling hitting so hard as to test the structural integrity of his apartment walls. A fairground-size raccoon dog glared at them from across the street. It was the first thing you saw looking from that vantage outside of Elliot’s apartment building. It had a hard-on and red lightbulbs for eyes. At first you didn't notice it had a hard-on, even if you were looking straight at it. Then you were just looking straight at it, rapt by its cute lechery going at full tilt. Like a mascot for St. Mark's Place. A symbol of things first encountered at soaring altitudes of intoxication, better only dimly recollected the morning after. Or not recollected at all, banished by amnesia, that paradoxically self-preserving eraser of what you’d be better off without. A function of amnesia was mercy, understood Rae, assailed by details of the night prior her memory preserved with a sharp lucidity. The line drawn by Elliot’s fingernail on her arm, leaving not a physical trace and yet marking her all the same. His choice word locating her at the intersection of smut and slit. From the horny raccoon dog it only got stranger on St. Mark’s Place. Only more shameless things presented as if in a bid to be struck off, forgotten. Rae thought of A Personal Matter, her book about Bird and his disfigured baby boy, Bird and his mistress Himiko who posited a pluralistic universe in which some things, some matters of life or death would trigger a metaphysical break, the transmigration of a soul to another life in a universe apart from that in which the split apparently occurred. Of course this theory would support infinite possibilities for souls proliferating in lives playing out simultaneously and, in a book where it was offered by one of the characters, Rae wondered if she as a reader might be liberated by it, free to conceive of an ending of her own choosing. By now Rae had finished the book but not known what to do with the ending as it stood officially, the ending in which Bird did not take flight to Africa where he'd dreamed of going but instead turned himself around, to be a father to his son. Or rather, she had not known what to do with her own response to the ending—not quite disappointment. Or was it? She wanted to believe she'd have been disappointed either way. If Bird had flown, that would have been shocking but also a relief—the kind of relief that must come from the cessation of catastrophic thought when the worst has already happened and then everything just falls apart. Whatever the case, it was not quite satisfying, Bird doing the right thing. Like something were missing.

If indeed she did favor an ending of flight, of cataclysm, what could that mean? It were possible, she supposed, that she herself had perpetrated things to wipe the slate clean. How could she know? She supposed it were not impossible, that she had committed deeds so odious that memory had snuffed them out, the bonds of her reality had broken and she had been thrust into a new spatiotemporal configuration, with nothing but a vague preference for calamity in the plot of a mimetic artform to suggest the origins of her current incarnation. Rae watched the procession of mohawked heads like centurion helmets appearing at 3rd Avenue only to vanish by 2nd. The people like holograms, seemingly generated by the street itself. What could she have done, what could she have taken by force to prise open the hands of fate and land herself in this purgatory of vagrants and tourists, this eternally transient place only ever encountered from the outside in, until you found yourself an inhabitant of it, knowing it from the inside out, intimately familiar with its strangeness? This place where pervaded a sense of uncanny, of not being able to place things, put things in their right places. It was not uncommon some vaguely recognizable face would appear in your path, you couldn’t be sure where you had first encountered it and for a moment even considered it was not the face but the spirit coming through from behind it that you recognized—from another life?—until maybe as the form got closer you picked up on a scent calibrating as only a scent could the recognition, and you realized that no, no, in all probability it was the shared bathroom on the ground floor of Elliot's building, that space on the margins of the margins where your sort-of acquaintance had been made. Where Paul or Elliot at his most chivalrous would go clear of syringes and the like in advance of Rae's use. See, if you were living in Elliot's building you were living there for no other reason than all of the attractions on your doorstep, that is to say, the attractions in close proximity to but definitely outside of where you were living and so, you were all the time coming and going and leaving the building amenities wide open for use by non-occupants, denizens of the street which the building was right smack dab in the middle of. And you got to know people in a certain way; at the semi-public shared bathroom you got to be on a facial-recognition basis with people you'd never be on any basis with otherwise.

Still performing her small rituals, wagging her head, darting her eyes from side to side, Rae did not register that the real anxiety she was trying to quell was not that of keeping her anonymity but that of receding into total obscurity, because nobody from the world she'd known was going to find her here. By now Elliot was well ahead of her, westward-bound. Normally he kept apace with any native city dweller but now his gait had to it a fresh yawning extravagance. He took long brisk strides, his legs like scissors cutting through all of the noise, the City on either side of him. T-shirts pressing the faces of revolutionaries, prophets into mass-produced cotton. Fridge magnets bearing punk slogans. Comic books, gold-plated watches, pirated VHS tapes, gas masks, feather boas, blown-glass bongs taking every form of chimera, winged, scaled or tentacled. Bacchanal and end-of-times implements making no distinctions whatsoever, intermingling pain and pleasure and tickling every reptilian fancy. The vendors sat cupping their hot breaths in their gloved hands held to their wind-chapped faces. Huddled in their open souvenir stands seeming to replicate all the way down the street, the stands on their faces resembling desktop icons, glossy and flat, until one lure baited your attention and your attention was reeled in, and you were at pains to skim along the surface any longer, and the superficiality acquired a depth you hadn’t imagined, and suddenly you were deep in a cave of products selling empty promises, inhaling higher and higher concentrations of patchouli and hardly finding an end to it, and all you could do was gawk, standing corrected in your error of perception and marveling at what other unseen distortions lay in wait. But not Elliot, no. He just strode right on past it all, giving none of it a passing glance. So complete was his nonchalance it did not deign to be effected by the natural process of inurement brought to bear on it by the onslaught of lurid enticements, the visual stimuli grabbing tired eyes until they were plumb worn out, resigned and maybe even taking a perverse comfort in the chaos as it reflected an interior excess. He was the patient already immune to the poison administered in increasing doses to build up a tolerance in him until he couldn't feel it anymore. Or he just pretended none of it was ever there to begin with. If anything from the night prior weighed heavily on him, he gave no indication of it. He did not look back to check she was behind him and this was alright by her, this way he would not find her there and without even any dictate from him. This way she could imagine him tortured in the unknowing whether she had peeled off somewhere without him and forever. Although apparently he had already left her, in the dust, as he advanced toward some yet unvanquished foe. She followed him anyway. Because reason didn’t work here. Because she wanted what he was on. A fire retardant? The sun was on the other side of the Earth but she felt like a magnifying glass, scorched if tilted at just the wrong angle. She was a good follower, so much so she did not care if he was also the supplier of what she was inoculating against. She stayed ready at the level he put her on, only so he could lift her back up to where she'd been before he'd knocked her down.

She walked faster to keep up with him. He was acting like he had someplace to be though she couldn't divine where that could be. She reckoned together they were going nowhere in a hurry. Earlier that day he’d called in to work complaining of a concussion, he'd gone and gotten himself hit by a car and who could argue with that, a valid excuse if ever there were one. After he’d placed the call, they had acted like everything was normal, like it had been any other day. They had gone across the street to the 24-hour Asian grocer and bought provisions. Mochi, rice crackers, dried mango. Put sheets of desiccated seaweed in their mouths and let it dissolve on their tongues. Then to save her embarrassment he’d told her where she'd needed to pick out the dark green flecks from the crevices of her teeth. Flakes of snow had begun to fall like taunts from the blanched ceiling of ceilings that was the sky. They fell same as the plaster flakes, soft and cold from above, both into a single bucket in her mind.

This last time they had left his apartment unspeaking but to what degree they were on unspeaking terms, to what degree the silent treatment was being dispensed she could not tell. How the silence on the outside did raise up a notch, heighten the drama on the inside. How the mind did get ahead of itself in a delusion of damage control, in futile attempts to reconcile the past through its own blind narration of the future. Casting projections like nets and killing each hypothetical through conceptual delineation. The more nightmarish the imagined scenario, the more exquisitely set the graphic details, the more implausible that any facet of the inevitable fallout could come as a surprise. A man made eyes at her and then half of the city came at her menacing, one after another a potential target of Elliot's indiscriminate rage when it came around again. No encounter was too mundane for escalation, she surmised. God forbid anybody should be in need of the time, or directions. She was close enough now she could see the snowflakes melt upon impact on the synthetic material of Elliot's lightweight red jacket only somebody impervious to the elements could wear. She wondered if he could feel her breath on the newly exposed nape of his neck. She could be anybody, how could he know? Where his ponytail used to be clasped the wooden beaded necklace he sometimes wore, the one that looked to have come from a stand at a holy site. When months ago she had first come upon him at almost exactly this same location, in front of the Astor Place cube, he had worn the necklace but, in that context, from a distance, all of the elements had hung together.

Now moving past the megalithic box with its matte-black surfaces, emanating a dull ironclad authority as it stood still, unmoved by human hands, it seemed as though all of the elements misaligned, or had come out of place and meant to stay that way. Set as blood in a stone. The cube held everything inside it and sirens wailed and a phantom hand shot up to Rae's forehead then down to a point on her sternum, her left then her right shoulder. Tracing the faint lines of a cruciform left from childhood. Elliot was crossing Broadway, that rogue diagonal slicing perpendicular Manhattan open lengthwise. Making his way through the maze of taxicabs, he placed his palm on the hood of one. What gall. Like he had never before come into meaningful contact with one, never been imprinted in any way negative, not least had head trauma inflicted by one just days prior. An absentminded slip, itself influenced by the concussion? Or had he felt empowered in the stultifying traffic, to show that machine who was boss? He drifted in the direction of travel downtown before hooking sharply back up once across Broadway and turning left on 8th Street. Rae navigated the traffic as if she were the one who'd gotten hit. She was really beginning to wonder where the hell they were going and sped up this time with the intention of asking once she caught up to him. This was the way to Electric Lady Studios which you'd have thought he'd be avoiding, and she didn't have any business there. The well-worn path hardly deviating from 8th Street, their own private line of longitude linking his place of abode to his place of work, that line she could almost feel taut and bristly underfoot, like a tightrope gathering all of her being into a single point of focus that was her balance on it. She'd place one foot in front of the other as if one false step would deliver her to the infinity clearly articulated by the symbolic language of the Street, the loops of its number 8 like holes she could fall endlessly into, her fall never broken. And it made her forget herself and what was that if not transcendence. They proceeded for some blocks until the street sign displayed a W where an E had been before St. Mark’s Place cut in between the two sides. It was calmer over here where the sun set and footfall all but fell off, where the mannequins behind the fetish store windows brandished their dog collars and combat boots and bare chests, pulling out all the stops, beaming your own quiet desperation clear as the transparent glass panes they looked through back at you. Over here is where, always at these same psychogeographical coordinates, an image occurred to Rae. In her mind’s eye she saw Elliot, sitting on the curb in front of the music studio. Gaunt, his knees pulled into his chest, peering into exhaust pipes as cars rolled by him. Passersby looking around him for a can to clank their loose change into because panhandling is what it must’ve looked to them like he was doing, they could not have fathomed he was hunger striking, voluntary starvation was so foreign a concept to their healthy minds. And, in some office space behind the silver curtained Electric Lady window, a printer wheezing, spitting out another bullet-pointed list of Elliot's accomplishments into his own dedicated slush pile, with every pass the ink levels depleting, the typeface growing fainter in tandem with his nutrient levels, his drawn complexion, until finally the page was restored to blank. Because Elliot once told her, this is what he would’ve resorted to if he had not landed his audio engineering job going through the traditional avenues. He would have resorted to sending in his résumé every day for a month straight and, if this show of tenacity had not proven sufficient, had not gained him the necessary traction, he would have taken to physical deprivation in the plain view of the studio, in a wager of Electric Lady’s readiness to reward his unrelenting unsolicited advances. But what happened was this: some big deal in the music industry called in to vouch for Elliot's genius and that’s how he got the job, the old-fashioned way. That's how nobody but Rae ever had to know what a nutcase he was prepared to show the world he was and, so long as he let them, everybody kept attesting to his genius and the myth of Elliot as a genius starving artist persisted in her imagination. Because this way she could picture Elliot going to extremes, doing whatever it took to get what he wanted, and she could substitute herself for what he wanted and this inflated her own grandiosity. She did so love his certainty. She mistook it for clarity. By now she had closed the distance between them and speed walked alongside him. He took her arm and her body did overrule all of her mind’s objections; all the way down to her bones she felt her misgivings decalcify into a soothing warm broth. He turned them onto a street with buildings the color of charred salmon, their façades like eczematous skin. He paused before one that looked as if at any moment it might collapse into a pile of ash. She thought, this must be the place. They must have reached their destination. Then he turned to her finally, letting go of her arm. Something in his face told her he'd known all along she’d been behind him, and not because he was that sure of her following him, but because he could just sense her there without needing sight of her to inform him of her presence. He looked less sure of himself than she'd have expected. His eyes had in them the embers of a burnt out building, the subtle radiance of a house fire all but come to fruition. She watched him descend a staircase like a black tongue, shoddy and unreliable from overuse, to a door on which a sign read LOVE.