Hello!
Here’s a post about mystery.
Times of conflict would help to remind us of any discomfort we have around mystery, to confront the truth that we are never upset for the reason we think.
I have been focused on undoing rather than doing lately. On cultivating the trust that everything will take exactly the time that it needs to.
I listened to Samaneri Jayasāra recite, in a powerful Nisargadatta teaching, Destruction of the False, something along the lines of, Things happen and you are but an instrument in their happening.
This line, as well as one from Flannery O’Connor, “The artist penetrates the concrete world in order to find at its depths the image of its source, the image of ultimate reality,” have influenced the content of my writing excerpt.
I have been trying to be mindful less of the “what” and more of the “how”. Refining myself as an instrument for whatever comes through creatively is more important than being productive for productivity’s sake. Even the subtlest fear of not being able to finish something “on time,” by some arbitrary deadline, is not on task, if I am serious about propagating only love through what I put out into the world. No matter the surface content, what has to be given primacy is the consciousness that flows into the work, its energetic signature.
Voice is something I have been thinking about. A strong one can’t be rushed or forced; one would assume it comes from a place of authenticity, and this is true, but it also is entirely composed, sometimes through awkward sentence constructions and misspellings more interesting than beautifully polished prose. It seems to me the quirkier the voice, the greater the opportunity for the reader to get inside of a character’s head and access universality through particularity that way. Voice can’t be extricated from style, and the two are informed by a mountain of small decisions based on how the words play, bounce off of one another on the page. In making these decisions there’s an exercising of intuition around rhythm, pulse, and measure in the sense of how much strangeness to pepper in so that a scene is just over the top enough. I can only go by what I enjoy reading or listening to, and that almost always involves the writer taking risks while maintaining a sense of humor about it. A good example is this retelling by Jonathan Goldstein of the story of Adam and Eve (a 14-min listen, Act Three of the podcast).
Saint Flannery said, “If we admit, as we must, that appearance is not the same thing as reality, then we must give the artist the liberty to make certain rearrangements of nature, if these will lead to greater depths of vision.” Exaggeration seems to be about getting an angle on the strangeness that’s already here but not otherwise given its due, about stretching a fictive reality to something so off-kilter that it reflects the distortions of ordinary sense perception. This is why work that employs exaggeration, that would seem on its surface absurd, grotesque or experimental can feel more “real” than that working neatly within conventions. Mostly, I want my stuff to be fun to read, so I’m trying to be freer in my approach. Also, because your investment in my characters / story will be limited here, not reading my novel from start to finish, I have to think of these excerpts as standalone flash fiction pieces, each entertaining in its own right.
Speaking of the grotesque, I’ve put some images of an illustrative painting I made below. And a recording for paid subscribers at the end.
Plot-wise, we’ve moved along. After that interlude with the stoners in Dallas, Rae moves to Paris, by which time Elliot’s moved from there to NYC, an audio engineer at Jimi Hendrix’s storied Electric Lady Studios. Rae moves to NYC, reasoning that NYU will grant her a Music BA in two years. Elliot gets in touch, and she goes to meet him at Astor Place.
Rae came up out of the ground and into the light. Bright but with no apparent source so that everything it fell on flattened. People lost dimensionality, casting no shadows. The sky was a sheet thrown over the ghost head of the sun. Blank as a lost memory, the lost memory of Rae sliding down the birth canal into a Niagara Falls whiteout. People flowed from the mouth of the Subway, as if the real complications didn’t arise after one was good and out in the world. She turned, tamponing the flow, her first instinct to worm back into the hole underground; it was comfortable there in the dark. Like cuddling a puke-stained security blanky, or Satan. Red faces huffed up the stairs, eyes glowering at her—#!@*&%—of two minds in a one-way system. Superfluous standing still. But moving out of one person’s way only got her in the way of another.
From the outside, the station was an odd structure, mushrooming at the top, with a visor thing in the front and little art nouveau flourishes like spiderwebs in the corners. It had a paint job that fell flat in mimicry of verdigris. Aqua joints fixed together dirty panes of glass that ran up along the sides and over the top where it didn’t mushroom but lay down flat. Next to Rae a woman looking like she meant business examined her reflection in one of the windowpanes, not so dirty it didn’t still act like a mirror. She made one of those casual faces you do at a mirror and tugged on her suit blazer. Rae felt a dull ache like her own heart squirming, all of a sudden noticing the cage of her ribs clamping down over it.
The first dead leaves hadn’t yet fallen and there hung in the air an anticipatory mood. Tap, tap, a hand danced on Rae’s shoulder, on her face planted no suspicion that she couldn’t already be glad to see whoever it was she hadn’t yet laid eyes on. She spun around. It wasn’t who she expected. It was a woman whose face bore an uncanny resemblance to the moon’s, all ashen and cratered, apparently not at home in the daytime. Not used to human eye contact. The face looked ancient, to of been marred by molten lava cooling to gray crud four billion years ago before the lunar volcanos went to sleep. In the absence of civilian casualties there could be no natural “catastrophe”! But boils wept, and pleas shot from that cracked façade, without words or so much as a mouth opening. Rae thought, This woman could only want one thing and that’s money. But not for any dermatological remedy, no; it was clear that the nature of her affliction went beyond skin-deep. What she had no cream could cure, and went hand in hand with shame. Rae shook her head, Sorry, that put-on face of hers melting faster than a pad of butter in the microwave. And the woman said, “God bless you,” but Rae had already turned away, in search of Elliot again.
A gust of wind swept her still-wet hair at the roots, tingling her scalp. The balmy cold had to it a quality in keeping with castor, rhyming with this Place she’d come to meet Elliot—that oil secreted by beavers, cute big-toothed rodents always building dams. Serving medicinal purposes. Foreign bodies brushed Rae from the outside. People moved around, none staying still for very long, only to check on a thing or two, look at their cell phones for direction. They appeared all of them to have places to go, even while being already here, in the place leading forever back to itself, the Big Alpha. Good self-referential and bad self-abasing smells wafted into her nostrils and fought for supremacy there. Perfumes she wished would attach to her and stenches she wouldn’t—might only of—been caught dead wearing. She let her eyes halfway close and observed the blur of motion that was her surroundings: steel stone sand sanguine oil. Neutral colors dotted with red lights and saffron-colored taxicabs, like checkered bumblebees whose wings had been clipped. Squinting, she saw people kiss then walk right through each other. Brakes screamed and horns honked. She heard the sounds of some getting cut off, others ahead. Grown men threw tantrums, traffic-jammed. She watched a big hand come down hard on the side of a cab, the way a cowboy’s might do on a mule’s hindquarters, giddyup, but with all of that horsepower, his modern chariot had nowhere to go. People huffed an air of entitlement inflating all of the heads, up in the clouds at the same time pursuing earthbound objectives. Each erecting her own story then installing herself behind it, no two stories alike, all artfully spun, around the same central plotline of Me. They rushed, spring-loaded with their secret missions. Beavers scurrying this way and that, afraid if they stopped building, their balsa twig dams might collapse or just plain disappear.
It was then that she saw it. A humungous black cube spinning on an axis. Twirling. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, like a thousand-ton ballerina on pointe, only a corner of it touching the ground. She only saw it ‘cause it moved, and it only moved ‘cause a tourist moved it. His body slanted at an angle, hands on one of the CorTen steel sides. The man looked to be around half of the sculpture’s height but nearly as solid. In a safari shirt and Timberlands, dressed for some kind of imagined jungle and not of the Upton Sinclair variety, he pushed that smooth city boulder with all of his might. He had no business here apart from leisure. He had time to stop and move the seemingly immovable.
The light gave itself away spread across the cube’s skyward surfaces, not flat but a velvety graphite, reflecting all of the gradations of the heavens above. Rae saw dips and raised parts she hadn’t noticed before. Like the world the cube turned and nobody paid attention to it. Except for what looked to be another tourist, taking a photograph of it with his girlfriend, her fingers pointed like bunny ears, so cute in front of the bewildering public art. He put the black box into that of his viewfinder, pushed a button to pull the trigger and shot her making a peace sign. Ground the cube’s movement to a still.
Outside of the frame, the cube kept on turning, the other tourist re-activating it. You might even say, raising it from the dead.
Nobody cared. Passersby passed by. People paid the spectacle no mind. Too busy for mystery! For untangling all of the gnarly spiritual lineages that the black box contained. It was more than just a basic building block, a toy for the tourist. He was not beaver enough to know. There was no use probing an enigma; an enigma could not be mined or converted to cash value. He stopped moving it. An impenetrable object of incalculable density came dislodged at the periphery of Rae’s vision. She felt it form again. She felt her baby teeth coming loose. Adult ones growing in for biting into the Big Alpha, a sour Granny Smith with a black pit not seeds at her core.
These people, Rae thought. Liable to miss what was right in front of their faces. The thought had barely formed behind her own face when pop, Elliot appeared, stark as a corn kernel cast out of an iron skillet. Dressed all in white, standing to one side of the black cube. He appeared to have risen up out of the stillness that resulted from the tourist having abandoned his toy. That while he seemed to of been standing there for all of eternity, just waiting on her to notice him, so he could say something illuminating about the black box. He beckoned to her, but really he just stood there, his face assuming all the expression of a featureless geometrical plane. It was lifeless and logical, him being thrown into relief this way. She did not have a good vantage from where she was standing.
She made her way to him. People parted, heads turning to see what held her gaze so steady. His clothes were not static. His hair flowed from the same beanie she’d seen on him two years ago, cornflower blue with burnt orange stripes on it, the kind knitted by an old lady with pincushion skin, sausage fingers. A string of wooden beads hung around his neck. From a distance he looked like a woman. Must’ve been why she hadn’t noticed him before. She hadn’t seen his nose announce itself as a man’s might, his duck feet sticking out from under his—robes?!? Whatever he wore, it made him look motivated by some creative holy purpose, practiced at a voodoo sort of altar.
As she got up closer, the tempo of things seemed to slow, and his presence struck her as a kind of Minimalist performance piece rolled out specially for her. Everything felt so preconceived, In Its Right Place. She almost tripped and fell. Over nothing that she could see. Up closer still, his skin carried a hint of jaundice. If she were to put a buttercup up to his chin, she might’ve seen a pale yellow light bloom there, then spread itself out fine all over his body. He smiled a faint smile emitting all the warmth of the fugitive sun. His eyes flickered a chilly radiance synchronizing with the tiny electric shocks running like chiggers up and down her spine. He smelled like a gateway drug. Something you figured wouldn’t lead you down the same path it had all the others. She could not place what else but it was refined. Oily and really essential.
He said, “It’s good to see you again.”
She said, “I feel like I’m getting away with something, seeing you again.”
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