Posts in Category: method
tell me something true
Remember anything.
What does it make you feel? What are the images which comprise the memory? What are the sounds? Is there a flavor? A scent? What is the dominant color? Is the light artificial? Is the scene in motion? Does the memory proceed by your narration to yourself? Is there any ambient sound? Does any part threaten to pull you away to some other memory? Any that you want to forget? Are there recognizable textures? Can you reach out, into your memory, to touch and feel anything?
Does any part of your body flashback with you? Do you resist it? Does it work?
Is there any noticeable weather? Is it relevant?
Do you remember the date? The time?
Were you hungry? Thirsty? Longing? Inebriated? In love? In pain?
What were you doing with your hands?
Was your pulse quick? Was your breath short?
Were you alone?
Who were you?
echolog
About a quarter past one, for a moment there are only two of us left.
Behind her, someone in the next booth is laughing, yelling, laughing again. To my left, her right, every barstool is occupied, along with most of the space between them. Beyond the bar on stage two, one girl leaves down the narrow steps, another climbs them past her. A name is said, another song begins – Future’s Incredible. Behind me, someone screams, stops, says “oh”, and laughs loudly.
I light a cigarette. She notices and extends a hand over the knee-high table. I place it between her fingers and light another. She crosses her legs and sits back. The bartender looks over. She nods. A minute later, two more drinks arrive and I pay with cash.
She takes short drags, absently watching the performance on stage two.
Takes a drink.
Looks at me.
Breathes smoke.
Audibly bored yet barely audible, I read her lips:
“We’re friends, right?”
notes:
- Relayed last night, Wednesday.
- There was a smudge on the bottom left of the mirror, which I only noticed after a couple of hours. I’d passed out in front of it again Tuesday night and woke about an hour later to find that that I’d migrated across the floor towards it while I was out, again. When I opened my eyes, they were looking back at me. Maybe that distracted me from the remnant of the kiss I planted on the glass, though I don’t know how I didn’t see it for an entire day, and two fucking hours of looking.
- I have spent a fair bit of time considering how a person might deliberately elicit a specific emotion from someone who has no conception of it whatsoever. For example, if there were an uncontacted tribe – in which all members were wired exactly like the rest of the species, and so were capable of exactly the same emotions – but within their world, perhaps due to their particular culture or beliefs, no one ever experiences happiness, nor do they have a word or symbol for it. The children never see the adults happy, and so by the time they reach adolescence, they no longer smile, even involuntarily. Maybe they just think of smiling as one of the odd things children do, and they don’t have a word for that either. If I were to somehow meet one of those people, a fully grown adult, and able to communicate with them perfectly, is there anything I could possibly say or do which would cause them to experience happiness? If I smiled at her, would she smile back? If she did, would it signify happiness? Would she simply be mirroring me? Would her smile just be a reaction to the absurdity of seeing me make that strange face that some kids make? Would she laugh without smiling? Could she laugh, feeling no happiness whatsoever? Could I make her understand what happiness is at all? It’s not a very good analog and the answer, of course, doesn’t matter; the question was enough to get me alone with her.
little miss messiah’s first miracle
The waiting room was practically empty, not that you would have noticed anyone you didn’t trip over. You told me that you walked in slowly and made your way to the reception desk.
“Very slowly. It was hard to focus on where I was going and what I was doing. I did not want to look like I was fucking crazy in the ER.”
“Wow-” I began.
“Shut the fuck up,” you cut back in.
“Oh, you finished my sentence.”
You gave me that look. fuck
“I told the receptionist everything, she was cool about it.”
She tried to give you a clipboard and pen, to which you held up your late left hand. She apologized and gestured to the masses of empty chairs, desperate for company without typhus. A half-dead drunk was their only hope.
“Have a seat, they will call for you.”
You carefully found a chair against the wall, beneath a very large painting.
“I thought maybe I had come there to be crushed by that painting,” you told me. Fucking lunatic.
“It moves” had been the best you could come up with in the moment for what your left eye was apparently watching. “Static” was your attempt at describing what you only became aware of once you were alone with it. You told me that you initially thought the sound was a television “or something” to your left, but you looked and there was nothing. Covering your right ear, you realized that your left was hearing something else.
“Like they were on different frequencies. I do not know for sure when it started, but I did not notice it at all until then.”
You listened for a moment.
“It was not static. It was water. Or some kind of liquid, but it sounded like the ocean to me.”
You told me you turned your head to check whether the sound changed when you moved. Instead, you noticed another new twist.
“The smoke was still moving, but for a few seconds it looked like I was moving through it. Then it stopped. Or I stopped, it kept moving.”
You stood, trying to go in the direction you appeared to have been going before, but it didn’t work. The “smoke” kept twirling around, but not past you. You sat back down.
“How did you feel?”
“Curious, fascinated. But when I moved through it like that..”
You finished your sentence with your eyes accenting the loss at which you’d arrived.
You told me that it felt like you must have sat there for a long time, waiting. At some point you remembered your arm. You looked at your lifeless hand, turning it by the wrist when, to your left, came the sound of a wave.
“An ocean wave,” you specified, insisted.
“I got it,” I assured.
You remained still for another long moment out of time, trying to work this out. The “wave” had seemed to be approaching you, but the sound dissolved before it arrived. Trying simultaneously to listen, see, and feel, you found that you couldn’t think. You began breathing hard, you told me, and you suddenly realized that you could feel your heart beating, and things rapidly got out of hand.
“Every beat, the smoke moved, all of it at once. Almost like ink in water, in reverse. It was moving away from me, but was not, um, thinning. There was no empty space it was leaving behind.”
If you were capable of panic, this was the time. But not the place.
“I stood up and started towards the door. But after a couple steps, I felt pressure on my left hand, which I had just dropped when I got up. I took maybe five steps, and the pressure got unbearable. I stopped, and immediately I could hear another wave, louder and closer than before, like it was crashing into my eardrum. The smoke started moving too fast to make it out. And the pain in my hand put me on the floor. I guess I closed my eyes. When I opened them, I was already getting back to my feet and the pain was gone. And so was the smoke, and the sound.”
You got your legs under you again. Your left arm hummed. Your left eye was a little blurry. Your left ear was ringing very slightly – but they had all come back.
“How did you feel?”
“Pretty. Blitzed.”
hemiphiliac
“When did it begin?” I asked.
You told me you weren’t sure how many days it had gone on, but a protracted affair with Absolut finally reached its conclusion on the carpet of your living room, lying beneath your stereo. You were on your left side at the threshold of consciousness and could hear the music playing clearly. Then you heard your name. Then again, and a hand on your shoulder pulled you suddenly back to the waking world.
what do you think?
What sorts of things would you like to know about other people? If you were to begin asking friends, acquaintances, strangers, coworkers, the questions you’re truly curious about, what kinds of reactions and responses would you expect? What if someone you didn’t know began asking you that sort of question?
eden for breakfast
“A memory,” you said.
I was very young, still early in kindergarten. Still figuring out what school was. One very dark, grey morning, a small group of kids, myself included, were taken out of class and into the library, to a small enclosure in its corner where the head librarian was waiting with several boxes of munchkins from dunkin donuts, which I had never seen or heard of. Through the wall behind her rocking chair we could see the road and sidewalk outside the building’s entrance, all dimly lit through thick fog by orange streetlights. Between our host and the wall was a large castelet, built to look like a house with a large window which, when open, was the puppets’ stage. That morning, it was closed. There were four “trees” along the walls, each made with two sheets of wood bisecting one another, cut and painted to resemble trees. On every treetop, paper apples were taped to the branches, each apple with a different student’s name. We all got to color/draw on our apple before it went up.
The two half walls of this little library theater seemed very tall then. The trees were towers. There was a large rug covering most of the carpeted floor, with cushions and pillows scattered about and lining the walls. We brought our own blankets from our cubbies.
You started to speak, so I waited. You paused, looked at me for a long moment, then said that your kindergarten class never took their blankets to school.
“Every single day,” I said, then continued:
The librarian sat beside an end table. On the table stood a small lamp, one of a few around the room, all softly lighting the room in amber. I had no ghost of a notion why we were there.
This, I told you, was where the memory fragments. I could not remember what was said or done. I remembered a new feeling, and the idea of honey and nuts together, and something about “penny muffins” and nickles. I remembered the sense that we were there for something important, and that someone was hiding inside the castelet.
You put your hand on my chest, stopping me. Another long look. Then you sang to me:
“Five little muffins..”
“Oh.”
It all came back in a rush.
As we ate our donuts, the librarian sang the song, teaching us the participatory parts as she went. I felt almost overwhelmed by how nice this all was: the sweet and cute new food, the unfamiliar but appealing idea of honey and nuts on top of a muffin, of all things. At some point, this all became confusion as to why we were eating donuts, but singing about muffins. I thought they must be the same thing, with two names. Thinking about this distracted me from whatever the librarian said after the first time through the song while holding up a picture of something I don’t remember. All I caught was that she mentioned nickles.
But sitting beside me on the floor, I now remembered, was the girl from my class who I thought was the prettiest person or thing I had ever seen in over half a decade of life. I hadn’t talked to her, and I probably hadn’t realized I could talk to her until this moment.
“What did you say?” you asked softly.
At first, nothing. I turned and looked at her, and she looked at me. We both smiled. Then, I spoke:
“Are munchkins muffins?”
You put your hand to your smile, a thin veil across a phantom laugh. I didn’t need to tell you that your reaction was hers, or that we never spoke again.
We never spoke of her again. There is no such thing as an untold story.
between gray and grey
Before the beginning is the tricky part, I guess. But when you’re writing the beginning, how do you differentiate it from what came before? How do you start anything? How could anyone end anything?
With nothing. That’s the entire continuum; the words and the nothing between. That wasn’t obvious to me, of course, for years. How many thousands of notebook pages can you fill before the beginning and end are ultimately almost meaningless? I am not a musician or a mystic, so this stuff has to turn up arranged just the right way on a page, or I’ll never get it. Well I got it; like a fucking bullet:
Beltane
An uphill walk with a cigarette in each hand, both lit with sunlight from a looking glass. A miserable year of good luck, however many and whatever it takes.
Vent
There’s something I’ve been struggling with lately, which I think I just need to try to let go of. I want to get my thoughts on it out so I can try to move on.
[I guess I should note now that I’ve given pseudonyms to the man who created the hellish scavenger hunt I completed, Henry, and his wife, Grace.]