You will be disappointed.

By Alisha on July 28, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

This is how it all began. Some of you will get something in the mail, but don’t be fooled: it deteriorates from here.

Hello.

Her face could heal a man.
The only principle.
It’s a trick. I recognized my gift for the first time listening to the radio.
In the beginning, everything was ugly, but you’re right, the truth is getting prettier.
How does it go? The only certain part?
Now hold its knees, and hum.
That’s advanced.

I am glad it wasn’t beautiful, and then it was.

What you lost, and what you had.

And say, Mama, don’t you know I love you?
When God closes a door, you should start to talk about sailing.
Do you remember?

Practice ranking a set of given possibilities. Tuesday, Friday, Sunday, Thursday. Forget about oars and sails, you can add them later. It could have been at any time. There are so many songs now, and they’re getting gentler. You can only name the parts after, if you have to. For someone who is less than fully aware, but more than blindly ignorant, it makes it easier to accept the probability of unfolding events.

What do you tell people always?

Do what your birds have predicted would be possible.
Stand back. Farther. Say, What you lost, and what you had.
Compare everything to desert air.
That would be stupid.
Not by chance.
She was dragging her oars.
I’ve memorized it perfectly.

By Alisha at 11:29 PM | Comments (0)

Naysay you will.

By Alisha on July 2, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (4)

Something I would love to say one day is, “It’s my birthday and you promised.”

And, “Hamburgers and blue-jeans are over, brother.

Also, “Pinkberry is so passé.”

I spend lots of time trying to catalogue possibilities. I think about division and multiplication, both sides of the coin.

Everything is Enumerated.

Proper nouns and common nouns. Words that whittle and words that group. We meet a sudden difference between mountains and MOUNTAINS, birds and BIRDS. MOUNTAINS and BIRDS can only be spotted by experts who’ve made careful eliminations.

A dogged little question: Do you understand ‘singular’? How about now? Are we like that thin coin of love? Heads: our hearts in our mouths; Tails: OUR HEARTS in OUR MOUTHS.

The woman who told us that the art of losing isn’t hard to master, also wrote this:

The tumult in the heart keeps asking questions. And then it stops and undertakes to answer in the same tone of voice. No one could tell the difference.

Uninnocent, these conversations start,
and then engage the senses,
only half-meaning to.
And then there is no choice,
and then there is no sense;

until a name
and all its connotation are the same.

And now—because things start, and then, and then—I’m just (nay)saying what I want.

23.

there isn’t much left to explore
i laughed at the face on a hydrant

i am not a buddhist
i don’t like the tones buddhists take with people

i am the ball at the end of a slack pendulum
this is my compassion

you can’t have your contempt unless you brought enough for everyone
some people think filth is charming

there’s a stone figure with a large hat across the street
he looks like he’s drowning in a bell

when i moved my dad bought me a clean refrigerator
i saw a dress with one button at each peak of collarbone

i want all my things to be double breasted
no one is that anchored that whole

a space always filling with air
balloons foreheads

bells
lift-off

I can’t say anything more about it here, but if you want to be a Naysayer, send me your address. I’m not joking, I wouldn’t embarrass you like that. Send your address to alisha@existentialmedia.org, and wait. Impatiently. I’m just gonna send something back to you, it’s not a big deal. NBD.

So email me. I have INTENTIONS.

By Alisha at 10:04 AM | Comments (4)

Choreography, they say, does not replace articulation; therefore bees cannot be said to have a syntax.

By Alisha on June 9, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (8)

I’ve been reading a little about animal cognition and communication (Shhhhh, its research!). The mystery of “what goes on inside” an elephant’s head is not really what interests me; it’s what animals reveal about the relationship of perception, language and knowledge. If language is what we use to segment and inform the continuum of our perceptions, then language is knowledge (and knowledge is language) and the knowledge of animals must be very, very foreign. Learning about non-human life forms continually confirms my suspicions: (1) We aren’t shaped by language, we are language (whatever language that may be), and (2) Many of us have aliens living in our own homes.

Wittgenstein gave us this famous verdict on animal language and consciousness: “If a lion could talk, we would not understand him.” Some people think he was saying that animals can’t have language as advanced as our own. I think he was saying that lions have different perceptual apparatus, and a different symbology, so even if a lion could communicate in English, or sign language, the words and metaphors it would draw upon would follow a completely different logic. This is exactly why I have always been freaked out by the idea of pets. We’re so casual about having animals live with us, and strangely confident that all our one-sided conversations are penetrating them just as they would a baby, or a mute uncle. Yet animals, so long as we don’t speak their language, should silence us like contemplation of the galaxies.

Think of all the pictures of cats on the web. No matter how much we learn about their bodies and brains, no matter how much we live and interact with them, they remain icons, or symbols, or something. We gaze at them like stars and predicate their meaning and identity with our own image.

The questions that haunt us are: Do they understand me? Do they appreciate beauty? Do they have memories? Do they make meaning? Do they have anything at all like story and narrative? Do they differentiate right and wrong? As this line of questioning continues, it becomes more and more obvious that the answer is no. Well, at least not like that, right? The problem is we have no idea how to phrase the questions so they even make sense in the context of a dolphin’s experience (or an ant’s, or a rabbit’s, or a dinosaur’s, or a blue jay’s).

We know that animals can see, hear, smell, taste, touch and feel; we imagine that they think, reason, and abstract from their own histories of sensory information. We try and put ourselves inside a dog’s colorblind, scent-swamped, ear-pricked experience, marveling at how differently they see the world. But it’s not as though we could simply heighten and dampen certain senses and brain capacities and arrive at a dog’s interpretation of the world. It’s not as if the world is a fixed text, or dataset, seen from various angles, or interpreted through different lenses, which we can compare and contrast. It is dynamic, existing in relationship and process.

Remember triads? All of our information comes to us via “a cooperation of three subjects”: sign, object, and interpretant. According to Charles Pierce, as quoted in this essay, “this tri-relative influence” is not “in any way resolvable into actions between pairs.” It’s not just the world and it’s interpreters, there are these little guys called signs—the words and symbols we use to communicate our perceptions—aiding and interfering. The “tri-relative world” exists in the interface. Animal signs and sign-functions are not like our own. And with this brilliant kernel of evidence *wink*, I suggest that animals do not live on Earth, as we know it: they are aliens on planets that may as well be light years away.

Thomas Sebeok, the semiotician who applied sign study to the study of evolution of life systems, and popularized Biosemiotics, believed that “semiosis [or sign behavior] must be recognized as a pervasive fact of nature as well as of culture.” “The significance circuit,” as Sebeok calls it in his essay, “The Sign Science and The Life Science,” is “based on construction by the observer-participancy of some carbon-based life.” Animal, vegetable, mineral—each the locus of its Umvelt. Not vessels of communication, transmitting information and receiving knowledge, but communication itself, constituting what is seen, known and understood.

Mostly, I just I love the way we talk about our furrier friends, attributing cunning and emotion, and imagining inner monologues.

By Alisha at 3:37 PM | Comments (8)

Vegetables make love above the tenors.

By Alisha on May 3, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1)

All told, I haven’t read or seen very many plays. Over the last few months, I’ve started browsing shelves marked “Drama,” “Theatre,” and “Playwrights.” Generally, these shelves can be browsed in a minute, and that’s if you’re being thorough—reading each title and tugging every spine, one by one. The Santa Barbara Central Library, heavy on melodrama and morality, left a lot to be desired (not that I could tell you what was missing). Still, no matter how limited the selection, these shelves are unnavigable to me. My narrow compass is useless outside the land of High School Musical Theatre.*

This is why I’ve jury rigged a new compass to keep me from walking in circles. It has only two cardinal points: plays other people expressly recommend, and plays by people I am already familiar with. In place of magnetic precision, my compass offers safe bets. More often than not, this means playwrights who were originally, or primarily, poets. I keep meaning to read Pinter and Albee and Labute, but when I see an e.e. cummings play, hot damn! How can that not be good?! It’s led me to some interesting reads, and even more interesting questions, which keep me browsing those shelves.

Naturally, I’ve spent some time thinking about what differentiates a play from a poem, and how the mediums interact. I want to know if there is such a thing as writing-a-play-as-a-poet, and writing-a-poem-as-a-playwright, and whether the writing would be distinct as such. “Poem” and “Play” are constructs, but they’re ingrained and operable; we know which one we’re looking at, and I think it’s safe to continue talking about them.

Certain poetic disciplines are also the building blocks, in my opinion, of a strong dramatic piece. For me, poems require close attention to structure—planned or unplanned, formal or informal—and a careful reduction of images. A poem places you in an elastically bound space, hands you the essential objects, then leaves. Plays do the same, only literally. Poets are deliberate with every syllable, treating linguistic minutiae like volatile genetic material. Similarly, playwrights are responsible for each word, considering how it reveals or masks a character.

Playwriting, in my very limited experience, is like stepping inside a poem and making its internal argument apparent. Any implicit tensions or questions are animated. The transition from poem to play is like taking a puzzling piece of machinery, separating all its parts, and laying them out so their relations to one another become obvious, if not explicable.

It’s pretty stupid to talk about poems because they are what they are. Lyricism, nonsense, playfulness, stillness, description, intimacy, ambiguity—in a poem, anything can be an end. You know how when you read a poem, you kind of hear it in a voice that’s coming from the place where your ribs join? Or how this knotted awareness forms in your stomach? I want to know how this can happen in a play without sacrificing narrative or always succumbing to surrealism. In other words, I want to write something accessible, relatable, easy to follow, and convincing, yet retain that feeling that it’s all being spoken by a very beautiful voice inside you.

Maybe that’s not the point of a play, though. Maybe the point is to make you face up to others and give equal attention to several incongruous voices at once. Can a poem do this? Probably. What is a poem again? A play? Fuck, maybe it’s not safe to talk about this, after all. Form is important and inescapable (it all comes back to architecture), but as soon as you inhabit one, it yields itself.

I would be wise to give you an example before we all evaporate.

Under Milk Wood, by Dylan Thomas

This is technically “a play for voices,” and was originally performed for radio. It was later made into a film featuring Elizabeth Taylor and Peter O’Toole, which, I must admit, is difficult for me to envision. Under Milk Wood is like music. It is written in the dialect of a small, Welsh, sea-side town—a dialect that was in Thomas’ blood. It’s rhythm is pronounced, and Thomas indulges—no, luxuriates—in consonance, alliteration and rhyme. I would love to hear it performed; even in reading the language is enough to carry the play without plot or content:

FIRST VOICE

Vegetables make love above the tenors.

SECOND VOICE
and dogs bark blue in the face.

FIRST VOICE
Mrs. Ogmore-Pritchard belches in a teeny hanky and chases the sunlight with a flywhisk, but even she cannot drive out the Spring: from one of the finger-bowls, a primrose grows.

C’mon, I could listen to lines like that on repeat, no context necessary.

Under Milk Wood presents a cycle, opening and closing at dawn. The day we observe (hear?) could be any day at all, the limited cast going about their chores and repeating well-worn gossip. This gives it a mythic quality; the town may as well be the only existence, and its people eternal. The language supports this quality, reminding us of oracle and, well, poetry. Even when you’re not sure what’s happening, you can remain present with each line, and sense the earthy magic of the town and people.

FIRST VOICE (very softly)

Listen. It is night in the chill, squat chapel, hymning in bonnet and brooch and bombazine black, butterfly choker and bootlace bow, coughing like nannygoats, sucking mintoes, fortywinking hallelujah; night in the four-ale, quiet as a domino; in Ocky Milkman’s lofts like a mouse with gloves; in Dai Bread’s bakery flying like black flour. It is to-night in Donkey Street, trotting silent, with seaweed on its hooves, along the cockled cobbles, past curtained fernpot, text and trinket, harmonium, holy dresser, watercolours done by hand, chinadog and rosy tin teacaddy. It is night neddying among the snuggeries of babies.

The story is narrated by these Voices, but specific characters also speak, relieving the heavy flow of third-person description. People with names like Mrs. Ogmore Pritchard, Gossamer Beynon, Willy Nilly and Polly Garter often speak in playful, rhyming stanzas. This acts like a cue for the listener—someone is speaking now. The polished, plain verse of the characters stands in contrast to the detailed, near-stream-of-consciousness narration. The Voices immerse the listener and build like waves, then break against a person. The effect is that these persons feel crisp and real.

SECOND VOICE

The lust and lilt and lather and emerald breeze and crackle of the bird-praise and body of Spring with its breasts full of rivering May-milk, means, to that lorldly fish-head nibbler, nothing but another nearness to the tribes and navies of the Last Black Day who’ll sear and pillage down Armageddon hill to his double-locked rusty-shuttered tick-tock dust-scrabbled shack at the bottom of the town that has fallen head over bells in love.

POLLY GARTER
And I’ll never have such loving again,

SECOND VOICE
Pretty Polly hums and longs.

POLLY GARTER (sings)
Now when farmers boys on the first fair day
Come down from the hills to drink and be gay,
Before the sun sinks I’ll lie there in their arms
For they’re good bad boys from the lonely farms…

Isn’t it beautiful? You can listen to the full thing here and here.

* If you’re unsure if what you’re looking at is a musical, ask yourself, Does the title end in an exclamation point? If yes, you’ve got a musical on your hands. Fortunately, there are many other obvious indicators that should tip you off before you even look at a title. Also, nobody reads musicals.

By Alisha at 2:18 PM | Comments (1)

Aequus nox

By Alisha on March 21, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1)

Spring is here. I feel it distinctly. Even though I live in Santa Barbara, with its perpetually mild clime, Spring still makes its annunciation. I don’t have anything to write. I just keep thinking about the equinox; this stillness.

A couple weeks ago, he took me up Figueroa Mountain in his new, white truck. There, and there. The first lupines; some little yellow ones; no poppies, yet. Green rocks and copper moss, acorn caps and pink sediments. From the top, everything was a ruffled valley. There’s Michael Jackson’s ranch, and there’s where rich kids learn to chop wood. There’s the stone house with the cold pool, built on sloping land. I used to throw my keys in so I’d have to go after them.

I keep thinking about cold keys, the taste of rust. I don’t believe in ghosts or in animal emotions. I don’t have the energy to explain myself. Even scientists know that bad things stay in the ground. Bad things, good things, whistling a tune—molecules are altered. My jeans smell like rust and my ankles are cold. It’s been so long since I’ve held someone’s hand.

Adelbert and Johann were best friends. Adelbert named the California poppy for Johann. Johann named the Sun Cup for Adelbert. The coastal hills were there so long before them, but their naming had a retroactive effect. It’s like they lived their lives in reverse and took their ancestors into their wombs, or loins, I suppose. They claimed the lineage of another species, of another Kingdom. They joined an expedition and did not apologize for their diaries. The one-upping—naming flower after insect after shrub for the other—went on until the first one died. By then they’d inherited 4.7% of the earth and took it with them, having already broken the rules.

4.7% of the earth is so much more than a single Spring seen too early from a single mountain. Right now, there are hillsides itching with poppies. I wish I could wear such an obvious sign of growth and be stinky with self-propagation. I wish that writing (and lots of other things) didn’t require such a long, hidden process. I want to go exploring and point to things and make up names for them and be fully convinced of my own authority, or at least pretend.

Spring is defiance. Everything I am working on right now is about defiance. Little things, absurdly serious, soon to be made available, boldly taking on meaning just because they exist, and threatening everyone else like badges that read “I did not waste my time,” even though I did, decidedly, waste my time. I threw my keys in the water so I would have to get in, even though I was alone and I got right back out.

I don’t have anything for you now. Not even soon. I find it weird and satisfying that Adelbert the Botanist is the same Adelbert who wrote gloomy poetry and loved the tale of the man who sold his shadow to the devil. The Bikini Atoll was previously named after Johann. Grave-robbers got it. I like these men. What were they like as friends? Was it anything like the confessional of the little truck, winding its way up the mountain?

I can’t form a coherent thought from all the stuff in my head right now. Sorry.

By Alisha at 5:13 PM | Comments (1)

I am Builder, or a myth come true.

By Alisha on March 10, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (2)

Dang. So, Thursday night I went to the grand reopening of Santa Barbara’s Granada Theatre. I know that Santa Barbara reeks of wealth, but it’s the kind of wealth that likes to pretend its just beach-bummin’-boho-too-laid-back-to-notice. Never have I seen the display of glitz and glamour that strolled over the red carpet and hovered around the champagne that night. I got free tickets through work and later learned that people paid $1,000.00 a seat.

You know you’ve reached extravagance when all around you are furs and feathers, sculpted hats with lace veils, and inch-thick diamond bracelets. I was clearly unshowered and had my sweater buttoned to the throat to hide the gross yellow stains on my t-shirt. Had I known, I would have gone all out. It was hard to take pictures because we were crammed in there so tight, but I really wanted to show you the old woman in the fluted red and turquoise gown, and the rows of tiny tiny cupcakes, and the flapper costumes, and the rhinestone cowboy.

The whole event made me reflect on what I had said earlier about a longing for an over-the-top mythology with all subtlety thrown to the wind. Not that I was talking about something that would actually take place, but it did feel like I walked right into the parade I had described. It was bizarre and repulsive and fun and ultimately very moving. And it helped me draw a connection between architecture and myth, or the ways spaces give rise to meaning.

When we build, it is always with a (particular) future in mind. The basis of all our designs is an ideal, and we build as though we are carving around the ineffable, revealing it in negative space. At the same time, we base our ideals on the architecture itself. Our homes, churches, schools, theaters, etc. become stopgaps in that we believe the immaterial past and future can be contained in them. I think myth and architecture feed each other. Yes, we bring meaning to structures, but there’s a lot to meaning-making that we don’t control and can’t predict. Every time you make a shape you include and exclude. Certain belief systems are better suited to say, a steeple than a hogan, and vice versa. This is one way that beliefs perpetuate themselves, finding residence in something more lasting than brain tissue.

This is all sounding more impossible the more I talk about it. But really, I would be a very different person had I grown-up in a geodesic dome or a castle or on a farm. How was I, as a kid in church, to ‘consider the birds’ when I was distracted by white beams and the smell of carpet. I considered them via another architectural feat, imagination, and meanwhile learned to associate morality with shelter and a neo-Puritan aesthetic. It is yet another testament to the relational nature of meaning. Context is part of meaning, and everything we know depends on the way things stand in relation to one another, literally and figuratively. This is the humanity of logic. People can dream and do extravagant things in the Granada because it is an extravagant place.

So bringing it back to Thursday night: Everyone there behaved as though they believed and agreed that the theatre held great, desirable, intangible things, apparently unavailable elsewhere. Phrases like “the pinnacles of human achievement,” “magic,” “cultural investment,” “preservation” and “artistic excellence” thickened the air. Would these things really be lost or endangered were the Granada to fall into ruin? I’m beginning to think so. I mean, would we even be able to take such grandeur seriously (I did; there were near tears) were it not for the height of the ceiling, the weight of the Moroccan chandelier and the depth of the orchestra pit? Okay, probably, but the point is that buildings are powerful.

True story: Charles M. Urton built the Granada using a mail-order how-to book on steel high-rise construction. The project ran out of money, so he sold his family home in order to see it to completion and pay-off every last worker. In 1925, a year after it opened, an earthquake leveled most of Santa Barbara, but the Granada was undamaged. Mr. Urton climbed the eight stories and hung a home-made banner that read: “Built by Charles M. Urton, Builder.” Despite the voice inside me saying, “Why do we treat buildings like a legacy more perfect than children?!”, I got chills. I want to be a builder! I want to hang my name on something after I’ve bought it with my whole self. David Conant, the architect overseeing current renovations, boasts of the theater’s “good bones.”

I suppose I am easily amazed, but I reel a little bit when I think that the structures I inhabit affect not just my everyday perception of the world, but my hopes, beliefs and expectations; that they are extensions of myself and points of contact with a collective identity. In the same way words are! Just like language! Architecture is literally our mode of existence! I was thinking about these things while watching the Santa Barbara Symphony Orchestra and the Santa Barbara Chamber Choir perform the most popular movement of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, O Fortuna. Seriously, they went all out.

BTW, I saw my very first play at the Granada when I was 6 or 7 years-old.

By Alisha at 11:39 AM | Comments (2)

Isolate the Unicorn

By Alisha on March 2, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (6)

I am taking a playwriting class and I realized I haven’t said anything about it yet.

I am learning some very valuable things about writing in general.

For example: the practice, when you write, of placing yourself somewhere and writing from that place. I think this is what I always try to do when I write a poem. In order to find the sound I want, I have to know what direction the sound is coming from and where I stand in relation. When writing a scene, first picture a place and then put a person there. Or picture a person and then put them in a place. When you see this clearly, bring in another person. This simple advice yields galaxies of dramatic action.

The last class I took (which was a stage and screen writing combo class) had us start with the point we were going to make. What are you trying to say? What is the boiled-down, three word, Lajos Egri phrase that describes the entire arch of your story? This is very important. I agree that I have to find this. But, like I just said, I have to find this. When I approached my scripts this way, I ended up hating my characters and settings. I didn’t believe in them. They were props. (Ironically, Lajos Egri believed in the primacy of character, but we focused on his thoughts about premise)

What I’ve discovered in this class is that a story follows from character and environment. Narratives are situated. And the way to let this happen is to take that idea literally. Go to the origin, see what happens. Added benefits: more excitement and less stress. It’s an obvious approach, I guess, but it’s also counterintuitive for many writers. I like to know what I’m trying to say, and to just start writing without knowing this feels a bit like trying to join repelling magnets. That resistance is what makes the writing so much better, though. The words have tension.

The other thing: surprise yourself. As one of our teachers puts it, make your writing strange. When things get comfortable and you begin to know too much, throw in a phrase you just overheard, force yourself to take an uncomfortable turn, make two unrelated characters talk to each other. At some point you’ve gotta know what’s going on, and that is exciting and good, but surprises are fertile. You’ve gotta work for it and fire some new synapses. We all become romantics in a foreign land, no? In other words, strangers gotta exercise a little imagination.

An exercise from our other teacher: Write a scene between two people, one person is verbally punishing the other. As you write incorporate the phrases your teacher is shouting at you. For example: “Shut the door!” “Harness your people!” Then, half-way through, turn your punishment scene into a seduction. Super fun!

An exercise we did at home: Write a scene bridging chapters 2 and 3 of our book using only words found in those chapters. A found text scene! I had diabolical circus masters shouting, “Isolate the unicorn!”

I LOVE using found text. I think it is a fantastically rich way to write. It teaches me to think in new ways, opens new perspectives, and turns writing into an interactive process. I submit that using found text often requires more creativity than using one’s ‘own’ words. This is also why I am currently fascinated by gnoetry, but more on that later.

I was really intimidated by playwriting (though drawn to it) because of the restrictions: you’ve gotta tell your story through your characters’ mouths and you always have to consider staging. But so far it has only been rewarding. I’m learning about what motivates us. I have a deeper understanding of how language defines and alienates us. I think my poetry has improved.

The real purpose of this post is to encourage people to write plays. If you are interested, I would really like to talk to you or swap scripts or host a reading. Also, if you think you might want to take this class, let me know.

Okay, then.

By Alisha at 7:55 PM | Comments (6)

Fruit(cake)s of my labor.

By Alisha on February 21, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (4)

Today was the longest of long days. I experienced stress, crankiness, anger, sauciness, comfort, distraction, peace, self-acceptance, and then a lot more crankiness.

I have been at work, thinking about other work I need to get done outside of work. On my break I walked out on the pier and looked at the ocean just as it was starting to rain. I tried to concentrate on how heavy the ocean looked and how tiny it’s sounds were, like bodies rolling over in a bathtub. I really wanted to feel something other than taut and wordless, and I did a little bit. I felt a great affection for the gray. I decided that I would put off responsibilities long enough to write something pretty and pointless.

I like this. I really did see a pink cake of vomit one day. I like these characters a lot, too. I want to see them do more, but I also like them just like this. I like how the story (or poem?) starts with him and moves to her like a gently shifting scale. I like how there’s a balance between the relationships, but how they are also disconnected from each other. I wonder if it could read like it’s all one person, in a wholly internalized world.

Well, enjoy today’s little fruit of defiance.

The Promise of Life Without End

The vomit was bright pink and evenly round. It appeared dense, yet spongy, like a cake.
It was Christmas on a Sunday and, in his spirit of thrift and cheer, he combined the rituals of Sunday brunch and Christmas dinner. He felt mischievous and ate without remorse, like someone might eat a twenty dollar bill found on the sidewalk.
As he was driving to church, Emmanuel announced his coming like one solid butterfly in the stomach. Up came the brilliant baby, born onto the pavement just after he parked the car. He studied it: had it come out intact, or did it neatly congeal after hitting the ground?
He considered shutting his door and driving straight home, and then he did.

It seemed fitting that our humble Lord would choose this spot, outside the sanctuary, beside oil stains.
What had happened was so clean, so sudden. He felt lighter. It was an act his body had conceived alone; no one saw.
He didn’t compare himself to Mary, or any of history’s immaculate conceptions, but when he was driving away he thought about Miriam releasing her baby brother among the reeds.
Who knew what this Bundt cake—to which he was strangely and intimately related—might do?
He felt the peaceful grip of trust and put the question out of his mind.
The image of the vomit stayed, leaving his thoughts for a warm space in his chest.

He was not very old, not very young. Handsome, but with a helmet of black hair and a forehead that was perpetually wet. He shone like a seal.
He lived in an inherited home and occasionally rented out spare rooms, but only if he felt sure the inquiring tenant would demand little fridge space. A well-spaced fridge made him feel that life was not moving faster than he was. The sight of leftovers crowding an unopened pouch of broccoli made him gasp. It was like waking from a too-long nap.
He spent his whole life gasping. He gasped at every wilting leaf, falling hem and setting sun he ever saw.
Had his vomit been something other than self-contained—more liquid or oblong—he would have felt betrayed.

He phoned his ex-wife to say Merry Christmas.
He was fascinated by their calls, which happened once or twice a week and raised an emotion that he didn’t understand.
It was an emotion that only showed it’s back; a body in a white tunic he followed down the street.
He was attracted to it, imagining the face from the back of the head and the peeking corners of the jaw. It was sad—this person was always walking away—but it was beyond his control.
It was not like longing or desire or regret or mourning, just an evenly paced procession of one.
It was forgetting (impossible to recognize) made easier by his acceptance of the promise of life without end.

His ex-wife had not accepted this promise.
Her emotion was full-faced and constricting, not because she missed him, but because she kept track of her age and made a little tally on the calendar each time they talked.
The face of her emotion had wandering eyes and was always chewing. It was an ocean that pressed it’s weight against her when she looked down at it.
She was small but stood with a very straight spine; a lovely woman with violet eyes, for the sake of which she wore gray.
She was clean in an effortless way, and warm to the core, except towards children. She was lovable, but he soon started gasping at her face in the mornings.
She developed a stone in her stomach, an irreducible mineral: the constant expectation of the end of her everything.
In this way they were essentially the same: the momentum of aging made them ill—she, with a stone inside, and he, with a loss of air outside.

She did not pick up the phone and he remembered that she would be at her mother’s.
She took her mom to the Christmas service, relieved that they would have entertainment for an hour and a half.
She parked the car and walked around it to open the passenger door. She noticed the color first.
Since church, to her, was a cute and alien place—a land where people ate the world with delicate forks and knives, yet never digested a thing—she was not surprised by the pink tuffet beside the car. She saw her mom’s foot positioned directly over it and didn’t even think to warn her. It seemed as though it was meant for that very thing: cushioning a worn woman’s heel on it’s way to greet the savior.
Her mom moaned. The vomit had warmed and crusted in the sun and it absorbed her whole foot in its glutinous mass.
She stared at her mom’s disappeared foot and smiled briefly, before the freshly released smell reached her.
She gasped and frightened herself, then laughed loudly. Her mom kept moaning, like an embarrassed child who wants hit someone.
Her mom hit her, with intention, on her arm. She looked around, not knowing what to do, half-expecting Christmas elves to come with mop and bucket.
After several trips to the bathroom, bearing armfuls of wet paper towels, she wrapped her mom’s shoe in a plastic Subway bag and they drove home.

To fill the time that was supposed to be spent in church, they watched part of a movie with reindeer and a girl with a gap in her teeth.
The phone rang and she decided not to answer it, since speaking to him would only upset her mom.
Her mom was slowly recovering, nibbling on honeyed ham and cheddar cheese.
She thought about the stone in her stomach and whether it would fit between the girl’s front teeth, whether she could give it to her and be happy.

By Alisha at 9:04 PM | Comments (4)

A weightless effort of considerable substance.

By Alisha on February 16, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (3)

Please enjoy this History of the World written entirely with words and phrases found in my recent notebook jottings. Please note: some of you will recognize phrases, or understand where they came from, and when you do, feel free to laugh out loud.

I think it’s interesting that the history I constructed resembles a “fall from grace” model. Maybe next time I should foretell the future and see what comes out.

By Alisha at 4:48 PM | Comments (3)

How many times can I use the word ‘colonize’?

By Alisha on February 10, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (3)

What’s the point of leaving the past untouched? Even if it’s the past of other people…

I have been thinking about how we colonize the past; or maybe just the phrase, ‘colonize the past,’ and how it might be just another way of saying: ‘remember,’ ‘tell a story,’ ‘construct meaning from our (collective) lives.’ Every attempt to narrate a past event or series of events—every memory, every history, every religion—is an act of colonization.

I wonder if myth—in it’s most traditional definition—is the only exercise that does not colonize. Or, maybe it colonizes the future. What I mean is, myth (the fanciful kind, the kind dealing with extraordinary events and superhuman characters) attempts to tell a story about a time and place that never was. All forms of storytelling are, in a sense, doing this, but myth does it without denial and without resorting to ‘fact.’ It does not take peoples, languages, cultures, and places which at some time existed and spin them into a thread which can then be woven into the fabric of the present. It does something else: it draws on present human questions, ideas and needs, weds them to present icons and other loaded imagery and creates a fiction to ground us. It launches our next steps, imposing the very possibilty of narrative upon our futures.

I’m talking about myths at the moment of their creation, not myths that we have recorded and study in classes on folklore or what have you. With these, from our position now, we may very well colonize the past, but myths at their conception are forward-looking; though they try to explain origins, they do so out of hope.

Is there any such thing as a ‘past of other people’?

I don’t know. I’m kind of just making this up. Like I said, I’ve been thinking about colonization of the past and wondering if there is anything we do which does not fall under this category. Taking and cataloguing pictures. Writing letters. Reality TV. Maybe it doesn’t count if it’s the immediate past, which you had an immediate part in.

So maybe fiction in general is the non-colonizer. Which means I could just say art is the non-colonizer. Which means I’m just talking about creativity. But I’m not. Art is too a colonizer! Fiction is just different and I don’t know why. I’m not making a value statement at all. What I’m ultimately getting at is that I like these acts of colonization and I think they’re why we can go on living. But I also like the idea of something that leaves the past alone, that makes no claims except those that are unfounded, that only predicts and imagines.

But I don’t know. When I write a story it’s almost always based on something that actually happened to me. But that happening is just a seed. It’s goal is to not resemble it’s original self; to deny it’s roots.

People feel it is wrong for one culture to colonize a past which ‘belongs’ to another culture. I felt this with great indignation in Sierra Leone. Freetown’s central (and only) library was filled with Agatha Christie novels and outdated textbooks. But actually, this is a great testament to Sierra Leone’s resistance to colonization. It is an oral culture. There are some amazing writers—primarily poets and playwrights—who are Sierra Leonean, but their literary history is very brief. They have far deeper traditions of dance, storytelling, and all kinds of performative events. It’s kind of wonderful that the library has just become a storage place for some books that well-meaning people carried and shipped across oceans. Like a bewildered little circus troop whose train got on the wrong track and delivered them to a place where no one can reach their tent.

But then it’s also not wonderful. Many people in Sierra Leone would like to be connected to the wider world of literature, to enter the conversation and tell their own stories. My host-sisters read Harriet the Spy and Murder in the Cathedral. They know how to read and write. Every culture was an oral culture, but people like to use every form of communication available. One or two or three is never enough. So whether it’s good or bad? No one knows. It’s just how it is. Some people did some things. Some people did some other things. I wish there was another word besides relativism. I’m not a relativist. I think things are good and bad simultaneously, not just one or the other depending on one’s cultural context and perspective. That’s like saying things are nothing; I think maybe they’re all things.

Okay, so maybe that’s relativism.

Four people I wanted to be today, in reverse order of preference:

4) The long, tall girl who lives on my block and dresses like an actress who is deeply involved with her character. Sometimes I see her walking to work (a health food store) in fishnet sleeves, a velvet hood and shiny cat-walk heels. She is so long and tall it is like looking at a graceful alien poorly disguised as a human. Sometimes I see her downtown smoking in elaborately torn jeans pretending she lives on the streets.

3) The guy who ran toward me down the sidewalk in a black t-shirt, black jeans and heavy black boots. It was a long time before we actually passed each other.

2) The little girls with sunburned knees in this poem.

1) All five of the guys in the green lowrider at once. They were listening to something very sparse and sexy with the windows down. They made me believe that cruising in a lowrider really is the ultimate in cool. They chose the best possible thing for a hot, Sunday afternoon. Creating a breeze. Driving slowly down State Street and stopping frequently at lights. Staring at pedestrians in a very detached way.

If I want to be these people, or reduce them in this way, am I a colonizer? Does it only matter if they know about it and I state my thoughts publicly as truth and persuade others to feel the way I do? What do you call a colonizer who works alone and from a distance? Where does her colony lie? Maybe she is only a diplomat. Or a reverse mercantilist, emphasizing imports. Or is she like a neoliberal? Privatizing her search for meaning while removing all barriers to her trade in histories and peoples and observations?

Maybe it’s better that we’re all colonizers and imperialists of experience than nationalists rallying around a single meaning. Is any kind of encounter better than no encounter at all? To quote from a very good book, ‘There’s nothing in life that’s less real for having been well described.’ Also, ‘An adjective matters more to me than the real weeping of human soul.’ That says it all.

By Alisha at 8:28 PM | Comments (3)

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