disillusionment

the ecstasy den called LOVE, strange gods, and time

Happy Holidays, Friends!

Watch out for intellect,
because it knows so much it knows nothing
and leaves you hanging upside down,
mouthing knowledge as your heart
falls out of your mouth.

- from Anne Sexton’s Admonitions to a Special Person

I hope it is truly happy, wherever you are.

I have been reading some things that explode form in fun ways. Claire-Louise Bennett’s Checkout 19 being one. An excerpt, about a protagonist, Tarquin, of a novel within the novel, who discovers a library of thousands of books, all of whose pages are blank apart from one, bearing a single sentence that cannot be read but only seen to contain everything “beyond our intellectual powers of understanding”, “a key to complete and infinite lightness”:

The reader of this blog will find an echo of Claire-Louise Bennett’s intertextuality reverberating in my revision excerpt this time around.

A bit of synoptic context: this extract again takes up where the last one has left off. Elliot and Rae have arrived at the door of LOVE, still reeling from the events transpiring after he claims to have been hit by a car while texting her. Marta and Eileen are Rae’s suite mates, Dina an old friend who is also a friend of Marta and Eileen.

See you on the other side!

🫁⚡️🫀🪽👁️💦⏳🗡️🦌🩹

The guardian at the door did not have fifty heads or snake heads growing out of his back or even a snake tail because he guarded LOVE, not Hades. His only human head rose undivided from his neck, all one stump. He wore a vest. It was leather, weather-beaten as if lashed by wind on a desert highway someplace no manmade buildings let alone doors or windows—nothing to close, give wide open any meaning—could be found for miles. He looked too big for the small doorframe. His heft spoke volumes just being where it was; without a word, all who approached began fumbling for their wallets, to show him who they were: people with names, addresses, eye colors and, especially, dates of birth. One by one, they’d hold out their IDs for him to scrutinize, verify, waiting while he came to a pronouncement on approximately how much time had elapsed since each of them had been pushed through the cervix and down the birth canal. But now only Elliot stood before him waiting to be admitted, not fumbling but extracting his credentials so smoothly it appeared he was signaling to Rae her imminent moment, to present herself for the first time as a person of legal drinking age, because not more than twenty-one years and a handful of hours ago, she did exit the womb and come into the world screaming. And if you didn’t believe her, you didn’t have to take her word for it; all you had to do was check the details printed on her ID. And maybe Elliot had not forgotten it. Maybe he had not forgotten her birthday.

Inside LOVE was dark, navigable only by way of blind faith. Elliot's bandage glowed. Sound propagated, dense, tangled. Lashed, thumped, looped and, before you could even open your mouth, silenced the aspirant words in your head. Divested you of any temptation to make your own meaningful sounds through speech, find the right words only to hear them fail spectacularly in the wild. A foghorn bellow, machines blowing smoke. Mist filtered through chartreuse light, settling atop the bar like algae on a stagnant pond. It smelled like feet, smells thinly veiling smells, disinfectant crashing into limits. Elliot had to lean in close to whisper-shout in her ear, “François K,” the name of the DJ they'd go hear on Sunday nights at a club whose name meant sky, François K coming hard in Cielo with its soft c and never-ending o. Acute, obtuse as his mysterious second initial. A shadowy figure on high, spinning records over a turning disco ball. Now François K was here to give everyone in LOVE a good time.

They wandered from room to room, toward the musical source. Into rooms you could barely see the inside of, even once inside them. In one, a furry neon structure like a jungle gym for grown-ups. People curled up in its corners and disappearing into its tubes, touching each other like they were going home together, back to the original safe and warm place. Influenced by a potion encapsulated in powder and detonating the heart, sure-fire as Cupid’s arrow.

Rae wanted a drink. As a matter of fact, she wanted as many drinks as it would take to dull the ache of the blows from the night prior. Loosen her own fist around her anger like it were something precious Elliot had given her. She was eager to flash her brand spanking new big girl ID at the bartender, but the bartender didn’t ask to see it. As if Rae's own face was valid identification in itself, her expression proof of her time spent on Earth, her adult thoughts. She ordered kahlua and vodka. The bartender served her, then turned to Elliot who wanted for nothing. Of the many balms Red Monk used to supplement his meditation, alcohol was not one. Rae wondered if he had any drugs on him. If he were on any. Some OxyContin he’d been given at the hospital after he’d been hit by a car, though, come to think of it, she could not recall him mentioning he’d even been to the hospital. Or illegal pills to smooth himself out, still his body and mind. His trembling had stopped, but his calm had a tension to it, like it would in that pregnant moment between inhale and exhale, his lungs expanding, before he dropped his jaw and released a great cloud of smoke altering every mind it came into contact with. Every mind merely sharing the same space with him. That moment before the astonishing capacity of his lungs became the atmosphere you breathed. Your spine tingling with his multitudes seemingly anatomically predestined. He pulled her in close and she took in his scent. Nag Champa-infused Skunk. Pure-castile hemp soap, for all of its 18-in-1 uses, not compensating for the paucity of his showers due to the St. Mark's semi-public communal bathroom. Resonant pheromonal frequencies. He let go, and she looked in his eyes for remorse as he looked in hers, maybe for forgiveness to attach his remorse to. From one to the other as if her eyes were a pair of hands concealing a prize. But something else she could not put her finger on was missing from his face. She knew his likeness inside out, from the void spaces underneath, to the surface layer. Could render him in gestural strokes and hatch marks. Yet she was at a loss for what was missing. Not his hair. Could it have been her own lens, pared down, sharper? She thought of a chord subtly shifted at its center, modified by a mere half step, hardly differently notated, conspicuously altered in tone.

He said he had to go to the bathroom. When he was gone, she ordered another drink. Then another. It was easy to get drunk. She did not have to prove who she was and the fourth drink just arrived on the bar before her without her even having to ask for it. Rae looked up at the bartender who beamed a smile at her through transparent braces stained the color of butter. A pair of sparkly wings spread across her chest, held fast on her form-fitting shirt. Close to her heart, they made her head look on backwards.

The fourth Black Russian did go a ways muting bad thoughts about Elliot, the imitation Rothkos on his wall and ceiling. Elliot who had still not returned from the bathroom. She got up to explore the space. Entered another room, in it an old ceiling mounted projector, projecting on the far wall a big watery panopticon. A bench in the center Rae sat on so she could watch herself watched by the monumental eye. Subsumed, turned the tables on, objectified, her I lowercased to a generic i designating nobody. Mist drifted in front of the projected eye; in her mind’s eye a scene of clouds streaked across a full moon—the scene setting up the vivisection of perception imagined by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí in the film Un Chien Andalou: a woman’s eye held open then sliced, spilling vitreous humor. Rae took her eyes from the projection, her peripheral vision charged with the up and down motion of a female hand. A girl, with a boy had come to sit on the other side of the bench from Rae—the bench in the shape of a horizontal s so that all together they formed the dots of an open lopsided yinyang symbol. Up and down, up and down, the girl’s fingers pricked the barbed wire of a tattoo like a crown of thorns around the faceless hairless head of the boy’s bicep. His dead skin under her nails. Her eyelashes like stubbed paintbrushes painting the air black, hair plastered in rococo curls on her forehead. Her hand moved automatically, eyes fixed on the big eye which did not attract the boy’s attention. The boy stared at the girl as if he were not all there, his gray eyes like ticks distended with her blood, burrowing beneath her skin. Or missiles detached in her bloodstream. Unilaterally focused on feeding on her very essence until they reached her brain and exploded into pieces settling in the girl’s own gray speckled eyes. The unitary gaze of Rae’s fantasies.

Rae got up and followed the music all the way to where the sound and light climaxed and people danced like their bodies were out of their control and it didn't even matter. Touched by a lightning rod-hurling hand. Born again but not before death by electrocution. At the foot of some revivalist altar, their arms flailing, hips swiveling and opening like they were making way for something big. Like the sky were falling and laying its polychrome shards at their feet and their destruction were cause for celebration. Others turned over and over their hands like they had never seen human hands before, and attached to their own bodies, operated by some control center they had only remote access to. There were no strangers on the dance floor. You could fall in love without ever falling out of love, over and over again. The dance floor was a fit of epilepsy waiting to be brought on. Rapidly blinking. Panels of dark splicing light, interrupting the continuum of time, slowing down the motion of everything, illuminating when it obscured people by the actions of their arms waving glow sticks, tracing in neon lines the ecstatic loss of form. Truth was, the K in François K was not so mysterious; Elliot told her once at Cielo what it stood for. It stood for Kevorkian as in the Doctor who believed helping people kill themselves was just helping them but, in any event, was not guilty of killing so much as breaking commandment number one, right at the very top of Moses’s slab, Thou shalt not have strange gods before me, an imposter doing God's dirty work for Him. Icarus-lofty in his ambitions. If people aren’t carried away to heaven, the composer La Monte Young said of the sound and light environment, the Dream House he created with the artist Marian Zazeela, I’m failing. François K was carrying people away someplace liberated and uncharted, if it wasn't the one God intended. They were on the other side of the color wheel from magenta now, in the realm of acid green. Rae moved like the devil had come to possess her, and sparks in her flew like those myriad from a jolt after yanking out a tattered cord from the wall. Myriad sparks irradiating her inside, merging into a feeling that could even be described as warm and fuzzy. Because subtracting the fear of electrocution, a little jolt didn't feel so bad—might even, she believed, be good for the system from time to time. Not that she'd go out of her way inviting that high-voltage feeling good for a person only in small doses. The one that surged in her when Elliot appeared. Parting the mist like a curtain, revealing with him Marta and Eileen, mouthing in unison what Rae could only deduce was HAPPY BIRTHDAY. They greeted one another, then lost themselves, dancing, transported, someplace heavenly descended upon them.

After awhile, alcohol called Marta, Eileen and Rae back to the bar. They sat, Rae on the same stool she had before, then the bartender came over and asked, Black Russian? and Rae nodded, please. Marta, like Elliot had, ordered nothing. Maybe enlivened by other chemical substances. She was very animated. Eileen ordered a Jack and Diet. She pulled out of her bag a box—black with a black satin ribbon around it. Placed it on the bar before Rae, who untied the ribbon falling sensuously as that unfastening the fairytale heroine’s head from her body. She took off the box lid and from crinkled black tissue paper produced an hourglass. Time in a capsule the shape of infinity. Curvaceous, feminine. An objet stationed at ovens or pianos to measure an hour’s worth of baking or playing. One you could not help but project the timeline of your life onto. An earthlike lump on the top funneling slowly into one on the bottom. The little sand things, her mind echoed in the gravelly voice of the actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, playing a character named Wilson, fumbling for the word granules, in a beach scene from the movie Love Liza. The little sand things, like his mind were a sieve letting granules through. Wilson’s wife has just committed suicide and he is trying to bring himself to read her suicide note. Adrift, he’s gone to the beach and is talking to a couple he’s just met there. Maybe he needed to feel the wet sand between his toes, discrete grains bonded together in one inchoate mass making contact with the sea, a body of water so vast the human eye couldn’t find an end to it. Maybe this was communing with his dead wife. The sand cementing him in some prehistory of man forming an image of himself out of clay. The little sand things, Wilson repeats like they were debris he could not clear from his throat, granules on the tip of his tongue. And Rae could only take in the scene aurally, only picture the waves lapping the shore behind Wilson because, while the movie was still playing, she had gone up to the loft space with Elliot to do things he’d have her do for him. The little sand things accumulating into dunes, Love Liza playing in the background of her interminable rising and falling action over Elliot. Poor Wilson. All he wanted was to smooth out the friction from his suicided wife and finding words might never have been easy. To douse the pain, he'd begun huffing gasoline, pilfering it from gas stations then putting a rag soaked in it to his nose. Because Wilson understood, you couldn’t stop time, not by repeating the little sand things (like laying an hourglass on its side), but you could warp your spatiotemporal reality, huff until the materiality of it reflected the substance of gasoline, took on the characteristics of a scene dripping down a window—one looked onto from inside a car going through a carwash—one droplet into another, into one big puddle. Content folded into form, the I into the eye, only via the disintegration of the lens, the complete reduction of friction. And Philip Seymour Hoffman, as if amused by the dramatic possibilities of the little sand things (what friction created by the words' repetition!) sounding, ironically, grainier than granules, kept repeating the little sand things as Rae focused on a single dilating image of Elliot's matted black pubic hair. Giving rise in her thoughts to a dark forest out of which emerged a glistening high Romantic sword swiped by the composer Johannes Brahms from a Scottish murder poem. Brahms' opus ten number one ballad Rae was preparing for her recital, set to the dialogical Edward, the musical overlay conveying the call and response of a knight Edward and his mother in the wake of a mysterious violent incident. Edward’s mother querying, Why is your sword dripping with blood? to which Edward responds, I've killed my hawk, then after she presses him, I've killed my horse. Oh Edward. You want to believe him; in the middle of the ballad the music shifts into the parallel key of D major casting Edward's sword in a softer light, but from the get-go, by measure five you’ve heard the icy medieval Phrygian II chord, a centrifugal force destabilizing, fleeing the center that is the key of d minor, as well the Poco più moto (a little more movement) tempo, Edward’s pulse quickening, and you’ve known, something ain’t right. The music harmonically progresses from D major to b minor to B major while the rhythm stays the same, leaving you hardly noticing you’ve wound up someplace other than where you started. Builds to an apotheosis of clanging three against two rhythms in the treble and bass, right hand crossing over left, mother and son shouting over each other, more and more polarized, both hands drifting to the outer registers of the keyboard, at the same time the dynamic volume rising just when you thought it couldn’t rise any more, to frame Edward's confession: his father’s blood drips from his sword. And he is tormented; that eerie Phrygian II chord returns in the bass, subverting the home key, setting the mood for the further grisly Oedipal revelation: his mother put him up to it, ordered the hit on Edward's father whose blood is on her hands as well as Edward’s sword. And the primary musical motif returns but with Poco più moto phrases conspicuously absent, a new inner voice appearing in triplets broken up by eighth rests in the bass: Edward's mother's heartbeat. Because that's the kind of thing that goes on in high Romantic forests—patricide at the behest of the matriarch—and generally people never return in one piece from those macabre woods of flesh.

"Elliot chopped off his hair," Marta said. Rae had zoned out watching the passage of time, while Marta and Eileen had been in conversation. She was very drunk but not so drunk she stumbled into the minefield that would’ve been talk about any of Elliot’s recent actions. As suggested by Dina’s absence, already there were gaping holes in his favor among her friends, and she could call attention to them or let them be, while she had not yet broken up with him. It seemed less work to keep up appearances than not, so she simply recapitulated, “Chopped it right off!” with her hand chopping the air, right into the hourglass, so over the bar ledge it went, just like that, smashing, all of its contents spread over the floor. And among the glittering black granules glowed Elliot's bandage, that thing right under her nose she’d not been able to identify as missing, fallen off of his pristine unwounded forehead.