n: vb: the spice of imagination
“Love makes the world go ’round, or so I’ve been told and I think I believe it. And when we decide to enlighten the wise, the world will be happy again.”
My endless gratitude to those who also attended the Memorial tonight. I’ve never experienced anything like it.
You are the beautiful, brave people who made their songs true.
Separation
By W. S. Merwin
Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.
I started wearing perfume again just over a year ago, not daily, but on occasions I want to be remembered. Because the olfactory bulb in the brain has such an intimate relationship with the emotional amygdala and the hippocampus, responsible for associative learning, scent can conjure memories like nothing else. Therefore my perfume, warmed by my body, becomes a language, waterlily sweet thickened with amber musk, sharp with vanilla, my name as a ripple through the air, ever changing, the apple bright notes fading quickly, replaced by apricot skin, delicious with chocolate and as smooth to welcome hands. It was chosen specifically to be as honest a self-representation as possible, so that I can be conjured with it, a spirit named. Triggered, linked, set, and match. My scent part of the toolkit, like my pen, like my tongue. Mercenary social graces, my hair my banner, my fight my own.
A touch in the fiery tangle on top of my head and a touch on the collar of his shirt, a drop to the hollow of my throat, a drop behind his ear, a mist that became my invisible self, recognized as deep as the lizard brain.
Knife bearer, dream walker, post-geographic mythologist. I have been claimed again, a shadow drifting through space and time, a gift I left in a small green bag. He was downstairs, I was helping upstairs, packing alone. Enough time to leave my memory in his luggage, the only way I could think of to go with him, the scent clinging to his things like we did to each other, rarely farther than arm’s reach, as brassy but as certain as when I met his eyes, picked his necklace up from the dresser, and slipped the pendant into my mouth, (I, too, am like you), defiance, acceptance, a dare and a promise both. Story-telling subconscious, unconscious together, our minds told the same narrative while asleep our first night, something I had forgotten could happen, if I even ever knew, a cold-reading shared between us, a city to explore, climbing old buildings with rusted stairs, our footsteps clanging, a ladder. When we woke, even as it defied logic, all I wanted was to say, “Thank you”, “That was beautiful”, “I love you”, and “Let’s do that again.”
He unearthed it this week. I had been wondering when he would find my hidden, invisible gift, the only way I could be there when I need to be, even if only as a conditioned response. My ghost sent, wrapped in memory, a reminder of comfort and love during troubled times. My hope had been pinned on the chance that he wouldn’t open the bag during a mundane day, but only when he traveled again, leaving home to take care of heavy events. Now it has happened, a relative dying, I find myself waiting, my breath held, for the other penny to drop.
There are things sadder
than you and I. Some people
do not even touch.
Sonia Sanchez, Haiku.
I’ve been trying to teach myself to write again, insisting on consecutive events, playing catch up from a month ago – the science conference, cansec, the whistler trip, and now Seattle; Sean Corey Adams, the emerald city comicon, friends, productivity, love, and witnessing the birth of a scarlet wall squid. Not sure how well it’s serving me yet, but here’s hoping. In the meantime, I want to mark this as one of those rare occasions when my life is actually nice. Thank you.
Middle Aged Lovers
by Erica Jong
Unable to bear
the uncertainty
of the future,
we consulted seers,
mediums, stock market gurus,
psychics who promised
happiness on this
or another planet,
astrologists of love,
seekers of the Holy Grail.
Looking for certainty
we asked for promises,
lover’s knots, pledges, rings,
certificates, deeds of ownership,
when it was always enough
to let your hand
pass over my body,
your eyes find the depths of my own,
and the wind pass over our faces
as it will pass
through our bones,
sooner than we think.
The current is love,
is poetry,
the blood beat
in the thighs,
the electrical charge
in the brain.
Our long leap
into the unknown
began nearly
a half century ago
and is almost
over.
I think of the
amphorae of stored honey
at Paestum
far out-lasting
their Grecian eaters,
or of the furniture
in a pharoah’s tomb
on which
no one sits.
Trust the wind,
my lover,
and the water.
They have the
answers
to all your questions
and mine.
WIRED has a really nice new piece (with photos and a video of some of the clock restoration!) on one of my favourite inspiring secret-art collectives, UX, the dreamy Parisian group that specializes in fantastical heritage restorations and interstitial spaces:
[…] This stealthy undertaking was not an act of robbery or espionage but rather a crucial operation in what would become an association called UX, for “Urban eXperiment.” UX is sort of like an artist’s collective, but far from being avant-garde—confronting audiences by pushing the boundaries of the new—its only audience is itself. More surprising still, its work is often radically conservative, intemperate in its devotion to the old. Through meticulous infiltration, UX members have carried out shocking acts of cultural preservation and repair, with an ethos of “restoring those invisible parts of our patrimony that the government has abandoned or doesn’t have the means to maintain.” The group claims to have conducted 15 such covert restorations, often in centuries-old spaces, all over Paris.
[…] UX’s most sensational caper (to be revealed so far, at least) was completed in 2006. A cadre spent months infiltrating the Pantheon, the grand structure in Paris that houses the remains of France’s most cherished citizens. Eight restorers built their own secret workshop in a storeroom, which they wired for electricity and Internet access and outfitted with armchairs, tools, a fridge, and a hot plate. During the course of a year, they painstakingly restored the Pantheon’s 19th- century clock, which had not chimed since the 1960s. Those in the neighborhood must have been shocked to hear the clock sound for the first time in decades: the hour, the half hour, the quarter hour.
[…] One summer, the group mounted a film festival devoted to the theme of “urban deserts”—the forgotten and underutilized spaces in a city. They naturally decided the ideal venue for such a festival would be in just such an abandoned site. They chose a room beneath the Palais de Chaillot they’d long known of and enjoyed unlimited access to. The building was then home to Paris’ famous Cinèmathèque Franèaise, making it doubly appropriate. They set up a bar, a dining room, a series of salons, and a small screening room that accommodated 20 viewers, and they held festivals there every summer for years. “Every neighborhood cinema should look like that,” Kunstmann says.
I still smell a bit like the witches, their blood and smoke and sharp perfume, like the sweat of the actor who held me more confidently than many of my serious past relationships, like murder and love and despair and the body swinging from the noose.
At one point I jumped an entire flight of stairs to keep up with The Detective, (Malcolm? Lord Duncan’s son?), only realizing in mid-air, knees automatically tucked, that perhaps what I was doing was foolish, what with the dislocated bones in my ankle, the sprained ligament in my spine. No matter that he just did it, he’s trained, looks like ballet. What am I doing? Too late, too bad, I landed perfectly, slammed into the wall and rebounded, leaping half the next flight, again, impeccably done, the better to run, the better to keep track of the plot, the story, the dark and haunting dream meticulously building inside the McKittrick Hotel. Sometimes you just have to sprint. And when, after I tore up the stairs after him after he was poisoned in the ballroom, as we sat panting on the floor of his office together, when he met my eyes, I almost smiled invisibly behind my mask, but instead I winked.
I was rewarded with a one of the rare and coveted one-on-one sessions, pulled firmly from the audience in the back of his auguromancy office, where the walls are covered in birds, into one of the locked areas, a long darkened room just off of the main street. Once the door was shut behind us, he pulled me to him as as a lover might, pushing my body with his in the darkness, close and incredibly, impossibly intimate. I had thought my time before with the green witch, who put her fingers in my mouth in the closet then tore me through the false back through a Narnia hallway full of fur coats, was familiar, but in comparison to how he held me, it was nothing.
He placed me like a ball jointed doll, manipulating my body with his body, pulling my arms back, trapping me against him so that every possible inch of us touched, and then swept aside a black velvet curtain that we’d been invisibly facing in the pitch dark. It might as well been a magic trick. In front of us was a very tiny room, just barely big enough for both of us, with a dim light shining on a small metal box sat on a very tiny table. We leaned down, still glued together, his unexpectedly powerful dancer’s body keeping me in place, and he opened the box to reveal five pale eggs nestled in straw. Shifting me to his side, as if I were conspiring with him, he then added an egg from his office to the box and ran his fingers over them, murmuring secrets and small pieces of not-quite-shakespeare. After the crowded office, the manic ballroom, it felt like we were the only people alive.
A beat, then another, until we were breathing together, before he chose one of the eggs and carefully placed it in my hand, closing my fingers around it as if it was precious, so gently I was actually shocked, then smashed it, cracking it completely into dust with the strength of his fingers around mine. My hand was suddenly full of ashes, thick and chalky. He forced them into my palm, roughly rubbing them in all the way up my wrist, reading the lines, the black streaks of carbon writing a map of my life. Suddenly a tiger, he brought me to my feet again, picking me bodily off the floor, and pushed me into the wall with his hips, ripping my mask upwards and off my face. “Who are you?”, he demanded, shoving, pulling at my hair, running a hand over my face, holding a massive magnifying glass only inches away from my eyes. I stayed silent, uncertain if I should speak, but then the moment shifted and again it was if we were lovers, and he pressed himself into me, lifting me off my feet, shifting me to another wall, and we held each other so closely, so tightly that it seemed real. I felt necessary, as if I wasn’t there, he would break. The intimacy was almost unbearable.
Then, another shock, the light flicked off, dropping us again into complete darkness. He fell a little, away from me, coughing, barely choking out his lines, clutching at me as his body wracked in agony. It was my turn to hold us up, until finally he spat up a tiny wet feather which he pressed into my hand. When the light came up again, but even softer, more dimly, he said, “The hawk was seen flying at dawn.” He fiercely pressed us into the wall again. I felt exposed by his need. We might as well have been naked. “Do you understand?” I nodded. “And blood demands blood.” His lines were the words that he’d typed on his locked down typewriter only two scenes ago. “Blood will have blood.”
Each Sound
by Dorianne Laux
Beginnings are brutal, like this accident
of stars colliding, mute explosions
of colorful gases, the mist and dust
that would become our bodies
hurling through black holes, rising,
muck ridden, from pits of tar and clay.
Back then it was easy to have teeth,
claw our ways into the trees — it was
accepted, the monkeys loved us, sat
on their red asses clapping and laughing.
We’ve forgotten the luxury of dumbness,
how once we crouched naked on an outcrop
of rock, the moon huge and untouched
above us, speechless. Now we talk
about everything, incessantly,
our moans and grunts turned on a spit
into warm vowels and elegant consonants.
We say plethora, demitasse, ozone and love.
We think we know what each sound means.
There are times when something so joyous
or so horrible happens our only response
is an intake of breath, and then
we’re back at the truth of it,
that ball of life expanding
and exploding on impact, our heads,
our chest, filled with that first
unspeakable light.
There was a kiss that tasted like reëntry, the sky hitting the brakes with a roar, that blazing, intimate acceptance of a spacecraft into atmosphere, every unlikely angle, one head tilting to another, a scorched, soft light jet-stream wish to return home. History made and slammed back like a shotgun round. A promise on the wing, the ground salted, memories buried. The cast lines up, takes a bow, walks off stage, and leaves their shadows behind as the curtain falls, and it tasted like hello as well as goodbye. My apartment is choked with memories, my neighborhood is a cemetery, same as the highway south, much like my life.
He asked for my writing once, to permanently tattoo, something short, beautiful, meaningful. “Between our hands, we could have made fire”. To the death, he said, to the guttering of the sun. (The next one, he gave me nothing I have not been able to give back.) In the archives, our shared love, deliberate and valiant, a blazing comet made of fiercely bared skin, and the small delicate jewelry we wore in our ears, drops of garnet dipped in silver, lost but unforgotten. I send him a message just after midnight, from a number he doesn’t know: I am still wearing your name at the base of my breath.
We are all china barely mended,
clumsily glued together
just waiting
for the hot water and lemon
to seep through our seams.
– Toby Barlow
He walked from the apartment in the direction he always did, like a recording of the life we used to have, and with a pause and a wave, that achingly familiar wave, a chapter of my life slipped behind a corner and shut, as firmly and finally as anything ever is. Goodbye like a relationship on fast forward, my cheeks so hot it looked and felt like sunburn, my hand still splayed on the chilly glass of the balcony’s sliding door. I was supposed to be finished crying for him, but he is moving away, back south, family matters, a phone call from his mother, an inherited house, and his name remains holy. He hurt me terribly, but he is not a terrible person. We were in love once. Probably are still. The worst thing about losing my wallet was losing his letters. Sometimes that is all that matters.
Once upon a time we were beautiful, a miracle, stronger together than the sun, living incarnations of joy, swimming lions against the storm. I named him, the power of sharp teeth, the domesticity of myth, and he crawled into my heart to sleep, safe and warm, and so, more importantly, to wake. When he betrayed us, it was like he’d chewed his way out. Such a surprise to discover him there still, even after so much pain.
In it to win. We talked a little about it this evening, what we used to be. The french man on the bus who gave us a speech about how nice it was to see people in love, the girls at the sandwich shop who openly cried when informed that we’d broken up. He claimed his responsibility and apologized once again, forgiveness, that tricky thing, welling up like clean water through the barren places he left behind. “Of course,” I said, “it is so very good to see you.” I only wish he’d been by sooner, when I’d asked him to, after I took both of his hands and said, “Life is too short to stay afraid of me or of hurting me.” But instead he put it off, and now it is too late, another piece of home flaking away, he has to leave.
“You are beautiful,” he said, “Thank you for everything. For being you. You are amazing. For bringing me back to the light.” He will be gone by the time I return from my trip, so I will think of him when my plane takes off, maybe picture him behind the wheel of the moving truck, marveling at the beauty of the drive, solid as my faith, as our understanding of each other, as he drives toward his chosen exile, an endless, sunny suburb with his family, as both deathless and lifeless as only California can be.
I put the idea down, feeling like a fool as I walked down the path, dismissed from the large green house, and stepped under the arch of the overgrown hedge, a thick, living wall as solid as any made of stone. From the street, the house is hidden by its branches, as invisible as the steady burst of static that clouds my brain every time I approach it or even pass it, as I usually do, a solid block away. Something deep in my chest thudded as I walked under its shadow, wounded, let down by my own betrayal, that I had even approached that door. Why do I do these things? Why do I try? I was an echo of the spring, drained of everything worthwhile, too tired with myelf to even be angry. All that was left was to walk away.
Seattle was nice to visit. I rearranged all the furniture in Aleks’ apartment while he was at work and made a bed out of pillows in front of the fire. I enjoyed the concert, then the after concert concert, and two different movies, all of them good in distinct and lovely ways. I introduced friends to friends, met new friends of friends, spent some time chatting with Amanda Palmer and Neil Gaimen, who were gracious and sweet, had a cup of drinking chocolate while I wandered Pike Place Market, and Tony bought me a steak. It was like a teeny, tiny vacation. I no longer have any comforting intimacy there, nothing deep, it’s not my home, I still couldn’t sleep, but it was enough to feel okay on the surface, just to navigate a handful of days without any struggle.