Greetings, dear readers!
I’m learning again how rhetorical devices, well deployed, are also moral structures.
It’s uphill work. You try to round out a metaphysical-experiential something-or-other and find the language as you go.
I’m a hard student but I’m also a tough student. Slow-witted. Boneheaded. Big love as always ever to Randy for the expansive intellectual and sentimental and moral space — the silence — wherein I can grind all this out.
Anyhow. Here’s a little study in apophasis for y’all.
I need to tell you about something that started happening — or something that became present — that I really can’t describe at all.
I suppose you could call it a substance without accidents.
Even that’s too specific, though. At this point, I’m not even sure whether this something is an entity or an action.
I didn’t know a durn thing about it until two Sunday afternoons ago. There I was sitting on the floor, tired after a long trip, doing a little PMCS on my vacuum cleaner, and this substance was with me in my living room.
It was — or I should say it is — something like a presence that happens, or else, maybe, it’s a presence I’ve happened upon. Or it may be a particularly present happening. I’m not sure yet.
And even presence is too much of a word; a “presence” suggests angels and hodags and so on. I don’t feel like I was in the presence of another being, that sort of thing. I just mean presence as in a thing that was present. The vacuum cleaner was present, I was present, the air was present, the substance also happened to be present. Or, again, the happening was present. Something was presently happening.
This isn’t getting us anywhere.
When you write a story, you can’t just type out generalities. You need something that speaks to the senses. Which sense you address hardly matters. A beefsteak tomato spurts on your tongue. You think of honey and blood. A wasp stings your thumb just between the webbing and the first metacarpal. You start to holler but the baby’s asleep in her Jenny Jump Up, head lolled to the side like she’s a Big Bird-colored daisy, so you suppress the yell into a raw inbreath, sort of a rubbery gulp. I’m not sure how to tell you how that sounds. Rubbery, as I’ve said, air through the neck of a balloon, quickly pinched off?
The wasp buzzes away, more interested in finding out whether she can get out through the window screen. She hovers around the mesh, puzzled and frustrated.
You kiss the baby and taste her, just her: sour milk, cinnamon, tomato.
All that time, you realize, she realizes, this woman realizes, something has been coming into being, something that’s neither blood nor baby nor wasp, something that might have been arriving for ever, and how did she just now notice it?
While the woman eats a tomato and puts Benadryl ointment on her thumb and checks on the baby again, she ponders this new coming-into-being that has no story, no plot, no politic, no doctrine, no words at all, but that’s not mindlessness, either, this something with no sensual aspect whatsoever, nothing to whisper to any sense, that now seems to have been unfurling all this while in everything in the room.
And also, she realizes, in the negative space, the air.
And also, maybe, herself.
That’s what I noticed first, in fact. The negative space. It was becoming not-negative as if, perhaps, a peach was ripening from every point all at once, rounding out in every direction, but without affecting me in any sense whatsoever. I didn’t see a peach or smell one or taste one. The air didn’t turn peach-colored. I could still breathe. But what had been absence was now fullness.
What in the world can I mean? I keep giving you images but I could substitute other images; it would hardly matter.
Randy and I once discussed a friend who believed he had experienced enlightenment. The friend described it thus: Everything shone.
(We had that conversation about 48 hours before the air in my front room turned into a peach.)
But everything always shines, I said.
And it does. The world breaks my heart it’s so shining, and that gleaming heart-brokenness turns into a lance of light, and the light starts somewhere behind me and goes winging across the sky, piercing me back to front in its progress, arrowing into nowhere —
but not nowhere now, because Randy.
So now I can sit here, cupped in a palm, let’s say, and maybe think clearly for once, and realize: Everything always shines. Is that odd? And then maybe 24 or 28 hours after that realize:
— What?
T. S. Eliot established the objective correlative as “… a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events, which shall be the formula of the particular emotion.” (Admittedly even he was lamenting a lack — poor Hamlet, with no story to adequately represent his feelings. Every set of feelings should have a story, or at least an iconography, Eliot argued. Hamlet’s flaw was he had none.)
Hamlet aside, that’s not uncompelling, I mean, Simon and Garfunkel had an image for everything, cigarettes and magazines, specific and graspable.
But what’s the objective correlative for a happening, or perhaps a presence, that doesn’t have any any associations at all? A swirl of cigarette smoke might occupy the same space as this presence, but so might this peach I’ve been telling you about. So might a drop of blood. The happening might unfold in a still house where a woman lies dreaming, but it might equally take place where an infant wails half the night or an old man slides sideways down the sofa — it’s his last visit to his front room, his last ever — and into my lap because his postural muscles no longer support him.
I got nothin.
You’ll have figured out that there’s no baby girl, no wasp, no rose-ripe tomato.
Yes, I took my vacuum cleaner apart to fix the beater bar, but no peach exploded in my front room.
There are no physical correlatives for the eucatastrophe that continues in slow motion. It happens across the possible correlatives, across the music, as I’ve heard folks say in dance, as when maybe we want steady movement unfolding over a swinging, wheeling, catch-me-up-and-let-me-fall-down kind of rhythm. Don’t dance to the words or to the musicians’ tempo, dance across the music.
Nor is there a theme, not really. Love, of course, but that’s like telling you about the firmament when I need to describe daisies. The firmament’s there, everywhere, buoyant ground, solid sky (a crystalline sphere, not an empty one, they were never wrong, the Old Masters, Icarus falls with no less reality than the folks glancing up from their work on the shoreline; I mean, reality cradles him no less than it does them).
Yet, sub specie aeternitatis, this is still a love letter.
Because Randy, everything.
Because Randy, blessedly, nothing. The empty globe, small as a room where he practices guitar exercises and I read a book, rounds out into the expanse of his silence and becomes a studio, a womb, an infinite space where nothing happens and everything is happening —
But it’s only an infinity because of its specificity, because I can trust it enough, for a long half-hour sometimes, to forget it, knowing it’ll be there when I take fright again.
It’s a solid infinity.
Presence.
Heartbeat, metronome, regular, homely, space of eternal return, wherein, because of its emptiness, its nothingness — Randy is, after all, absorbed in his music just now, no more than an austere, distant profile — wherein, at last, I can step out of the close-drawn crosshatching of my mind’s topography
…
and
…
…
…
People don’t have to stay the same, Randy says before he delves into his practice. It’s okay to change.
I start to panic and cover it with a bit of sternness. But artistic practice, discipline? Care for family, animals, beloveds? You wouldn’t wake up one morning changed towards your mother — you wouldn’t holler at her and chuck your boots at her head?
I mean, of course, You wouldn’t wake up changed and pretend you didn’t know me? You wouldn’t chuck boots at my head?
He smiles at me. Of course not.
Back in my house, I squat to plug in the vacuum cleaner. I vacuum the manufactured-wood floor that’s surprisingly velvety underfoot. I feel the clingy weight of my maxi pad and wonder whether to go change now or whether I have time to vacuum the front room, too, before I’ll actually need to change my underwear and have a wash with a rag. I take a minute to think, as so many women have taken a minute to think, how much time is spent messing around with our periods, thinking about our periods, wondering whether we have time to do one more chore before we need a change or whether there’ll be an unexpected FLOOD and while I squat and bend and vacuum and empty the vacuum canister over the compost heap (a bird might want that loose gray hair for her nest) I think about how to describe eucatastrophe (but that’s the wrong word, too) and come up short.
Bleed, squat, vacuum, empty the canister. Type.
Look for the wasp again in case she’s willing to fly out the front door, but she’s disappeared. Flown off to die hopefully on a windowsill somewhere, I guess.
What are we doing in this life? What are words? What is joy?
Cut scene again. Back in Randy’s house. I leave him practicing and climb the stairs. It’s cool in his attic room. The air conditioner rattles gently. He’s given me his bed because it has black sheets, you see. I might leave a swampy spot, but at least I won’t make a stain.
You want me to put down a towel? I ask.
Don’t worry about it.
I wake before he does and creep downstairs to kiss him good-bye.
He’s deeply asleep. He doesn’t know I’m there.
He lifts his forehead to my kiss.
I check my alarm clock settings, my phone alarm setting, and before I turn off the lamp I start to pray. It’s habit, bedtime prayer; I start before I know what I’m about.
I love you, Lord, I find myself thinking. Then I’m repulsed. How sentimental, how disingenuous!
Instead I think: But what is this, I didn’t plan to say this, am I just generating words based on other words I’ve said or read, like an LLM filling in the blanks, predicting the next phrase —
But all that’s irrelevant, sick-syrupy words and reflex revulsion alike.
Here’s what I’m really about:
It’s dark and my eyes are closed but I can see myself and feel myself in all-round proprioception. I’m lying forward over one bent knee, forearms on the bedsheets, head in my hands, short-shorn hair falling over my hands, one leg still dropping towards the floor, toes propped. I see the form clad, not in this ratty tan tee-shirt but in gauze, she’s a nymph from a Maxfield Parrish print, maybe, or from some sculptor’s chisel, but better than that, less mannered, Grieving Dryad, you might call her, or even Evening Prayer.
Not me, see, but she.
And what I love is the mind that makes this body and the life within this body that for one minute seem, taken together, like the true Conjoint — not just the conjoint of one human’s spirit and body, but the larger, analogous conjoint, God and Man (and even Nature, Plotinus taught us, was a Goddess).
From the inside, this time, I feel the happening: every cell ripening like a peach, but I might as easily say, swelling as if a wasp was stinging every cell at once, so their membranes pressed into each other, maintaining an intolerable balance —
Who made this beauty? I think.
Only God.
Again, I’m unsatisfied with the answer.
Cheesy, I think.
Definitionally, God is again the placeholder, He-Who-Made, He-Who-Is-Happening, or, even better, Dame Natura (we’ll leave Plotinus alone and call on Chaucer; who else rounds out cells but Lady Nature?), but I don’t even mean that, I mean that if I want to tell you about the happening — have you lost the thread? have I? — the happening was inside and around me, yet I was a kind of living statue person, a strange familiar being, I was not creating myself.
The air in the room, every drop, every curlicue, every molecule of it, was also happening, but the happening, the presence, was not the air —
Wait, what?
Tonight, typing, I pause. I grapple with my recollection of that evening. I scroll back up the page.
…
…
I was not creating myself.
Now feel for the negative space around that sentence.
Let’s leave it at that.
This is incredible. I mean, I seriously held my breath all the way through. Please tell me your real name seriously seriously good. You don’t have to tell me your real name, but I think you’re amazing.