grace notes

Throughout the last months I have been writing diaristic accounts. Sometimes fictional, sometimes autobiographical, I hoped that through writing I could learn more about the process and to sufficiently honour it by blurring the lines between the working and the work. So far it’s felt like a success–documenting the starts and stops; the doubt and the elation; watching the fervour of my motivation wax and wane has brought me closer to the book I have in mind, one that is identical to the narrator’s: equally a book of poems as it is about writing a book of poems. However, while progress has been made, one key question remains: how will these prosaic fragments fit with the poems? How will they interact? Currently, I see three possible arrangements:

1. The collection of poems are included in a separate section. After a first section of meditative prose, lyrical fragments, and a loose, not entirely linear plot, the poems are presented in full, as part of the narrative. This could be the narrator sending his collection out to publishers, reviewing one last time everything he’s written; or it could be looking over the shoulder of a friend who he’d asked to read them–it could be anything. The point is, the poems would be the work of the narrator, not the author. And I’m not sure how I feel about this–turning the poems into fiction and my poetry book into a novel.

2. The poems and the prose fragments appear one after the other; although, of course, there will be more fragments than poems. In this iteration, the poems and the fragments are both the author’s, and are treated rather equally. A few things about this version bother me. First, they aren’t equal, at least not in their design. The poems are very much finished products, completed over the course of months and in some cases years, while the fragments are meant to be what the author does when he isn’t “writing.” Secondly, I’d like it if the poems and fragments were somewhat in conversation; like, maybe the prose is a kind of time keeping of the poems? This version just seems a little haphazard to me, lacking intent. But also maybe that’s okay?

3. A series of prose fragments follow each poems (one fragment per page) but are attached to the poem by the use of superscripts. The relationship between fragment and poem would mimic that of footnotes, though the purpose and the page layout would differ greatly. This and the first option are the ones I’m leaning most toward. I just fear the superscript will rob some of the aesthetics from the poem! I don’t want that, but I do want coherence between the two forms. A conundrum.

Below is a poem for the book, so that you can have a slightly fuller sense of the tone of the work. I was going to include the superscripts with corresponding prose fragments from the inquiry posts, but the little numbers hovering above the letter were too distracting! (P.S. The poem is in couplets. I just couldn’t figure out how to leave space between each line on the blog…)

Once, It Happened A Boy

It was in the liquid shade of a yucca tree

each quivering line of the boy’s body broke 

to silver, then leaf—

sharp contours assailing angled light 

like a flotilla cutting waves, a vascular wing

macheteying 

towards this clumsy shimmering 

pool of soil 

cradling my reflection like its own. 

Once, it happened a boy.

It happened under over-ripened suns

at the pace of a fouling room—

his broke away from mine, left me 

in this frame of mud and stone a canvas teetering 

at the sharp edge of a new leaf, witness 

to my own unfurling.

When I reached for him I dug out fists full

of wet hair, long stringy clumps flecked with ash,

gnats, tiny globular pellets like furry teeth 

spat up from a pentimento world.

Crystal coronets of violet, indigo, cochineal

painted rings around my lips as I stayed up drinking

back the flowers of the yucca shade, 

cupping my hands, our hands, to the blurring canvas 

remembering the way an oil slick recalls the earth

the tilt of an August sky that held its blue

forever—once, 

it happened a boy was made

the promise to be held the same: forever

in a breath of summer carried over coning lupine; 

in a wonton splay of light 

netting argosies 

of dust, each fleck buoying a life

intent on surfacing,

no matter how or when or what 

conditions of the surface

it happens—just that it happens, 

the beauty you possess now on earth is seen, bright.

So unlike anything else.

First published in Funicular Magazine, issue 10, 2022.

A version of another poem published in the same issue is available here.

Already late, I parked on the road’s shoulder since every spot in the parking lot was taken. The day’s weather was analytical; sharp, the sunlight made precise incisions into everything it touched—the dense foliage of sequoia and red cedars; the impenetrable reflective hoods of every parked truck; stones along the narrow desire path which I followed, partially blinded, until the trees grew denser above me. I was heading toward the sound of voices obscured against a choppy current. A—’s phone was going straight to voicemail when I tried calling him, which meant he probably wasn’t getting service at the beach, which meant he was at the beach, waiting for me with whoever else was there, whoever arrived in all those trucks. I felt like I was showing up late to a surprise party, not knowing who we were celebrating. It could be me, I guess! A— and I hadn’t seen each other in years—maybe this was the kind of veneration we would finally give our friendship, having lost it and now found it again. It was a resurrection, of sorts. I started the steep descent from forested canopy toward scintillating sand, and when the people came in view some of the crowd did turn to look at me, but only briefly. No one clapped. They were still waiting for someone. 

Over to the right of the crowd was a pile of driftwood where a man wearing a pseudo-professor costume—tweed blazer, oversized trousers, tidy beard—stood confidently, nodding his head to the bland rock music playing from a portable speaker beside him. I scanned the crowd, unable to identify A—, but there were other familiar faces on the beach. One person was dressed up as Michael Jackson; another had long hair and circle glasses; another in a bowler cap and suit, meant to be either Leonard Cohen or Mr. Monopoly. Someone, maybe Joe Rogan, but a little older and with a cane, came walking toward me.

“But you’re still alive.”

“I am,” he said. “But the radio man you think I resemble is not.” His breath smelled like ammonia. “The radio man is an imPOSter—ANTIFA silencing the TRUTH.”

“Oh.”

Meanwhile, the ocean shined like one large crystal.

Leonard Cohen rolled up his pants and waded into the water, ocean waves climbing his body, crumbling and reassembling like seductive, desirous flames licking him up. A temporal seal that had been containing this historical moment as the only moment was breaking, my footing on the inner linear track losing balance as the rails widened, stretching my positionality to accommodate these mostly dead celebrities resurrected at different stages in their lives, making no logical sense at all, and my real friend whose name I was having trouble remembering was nowhere. My hands and my legs felt numb. My attitude, I felt, was waning.

I couldn’t have been at the beach any longer than for an hour, but when I got back to my car the windshield had distorted over with frost. I sat in the driver’s seat and locked the door; my vantage point either shrinking in size or reversing in time to the molecular level, gazing from inside the ordered structure of ice. I took pictures on my phone, wondering where the pictures might take me—how in movies it’s always technology that’s the catalyst for mobilization across millenia. An image of young Keanu Reeves in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure comes to mind, standing in a parking lot where a copy of himself has just stepped out from a telephone booth time portal: “Strange things are afoot at the Circle K.” 

The sun had seemed so warm when I first pulled in, ripening the ants like little round berries. People said that lately the impressions made by the weather were becoming less trustworthy; that an atmosphere of fabrication and suspicion held us in its fold, warming us.

When I got home I put coffee on. The water took time to boil. As it heated I walked over to my bookshelf and gazed absent mindedly at the colourful spines, regarding them aesthetically—rows of ornately painted nails, each a little different, different hands, lifting together something massively heavy. On my desk was a small felted book of Benjamin’s essays that I’d recently gotten from the library. I began leafing through it. The first essay was on a painting by Piet Mondrian, dated 1963, which didn’t make any sense since Mondrian died decades earlier. But so did Walter Benjamin, the essay’s author. The author bio had been ripped out and in it’s place was a quote that also decorated the front cover: A copy is a meta-original — W. B. 

On Thursday evening during a heavy rainfall the castle’s ceiling began leaking above our bed. I first noticed the sound from my desk, like a damp rhythmic patting. When I walked in I saw yellowish water dripping from the light fixture into an egg sized depression in the bed sheets; the smell metallic. After putting our largest pot where the pool was forming I called the building manager, then called again, and again. I was about to call R—— when my phone buzzed: “send email to info@aqprmf.com.” 

Immediately I typed into the body of a new email: Water is pouring from our ceiling. Help needed urgently, please call me.

As I waited for a response I sent a video of the water to R——, then searched the internet to find out how bad the situation was. Pictures came up of ceiling collapses and mold dominated attics, a crew in hazmat suits removing wheelbarrows of asbestos and building debris. Why was the water yellow? We knew already there was a mold issue from the dark, gestalt-like shadowings that periodically surfaced on the wall of the bedroom window and along the adjacent one, which we tried keeping our pillows from touching after we found mold growing on them too. 

One image I found was from another renter—their ceiling bloated, the latex paint holding barrels of water back, ballooning out like a massive cyst ready to pop. How do landlords get away with this, leaving their tenants in nightmarish conditions and still charging rent? Where was the persecution for these indignities? Look up rights, I wrote on a slip of paper, remembering reluctantly a page of narrative theory: “The mind is the nexus of the brain, the body, and the environment.” The slip of paper an extension of my mind, the way we leave our keys by the front door or our packed lunch at the front of the refrigerator. But what good was this information if it couldn’t secure me a safe place to sleep? The practicality of my knowledge was that it opened windows to more thinking, which opened still more windows, until what you saw was what really all was there—“The Dream of the Unified Field.” This was the idea.

The house itself was crumbling and all I could do was look out its windows. 

On the Internet, a man feeds a pack of hot-dogs to a grey swelling wave of racoons. He’s on his back porch in a ski-jacket, wood planks powdered with frost. Over 30 million times this video has been played. 

I’m cocooned in bed in the living room, where we are temporarily storing everything from the bedroom until the leak gets fixed. Days have passed this way, drenched in blue artificial light from the neighbour’s terrarium, watching the video of the racoons over and over again on my phone, keeping my books and laptop far away—a feeling that all the reading and writing I’ve been doing is vaguely responsible for this reoccurring sinus infection. A conspiracy that literature has a hand in my squaller, in my debts, in weak immunity to reality. Scrolling through the video’s comments I notice the viewers have a remarkable ability to instruct and delight in what they write—filling in what the racoons are thinking, the dialogue and names they give them, then slipping in mini manifestos about the right way to live, adopting a voice of textbook philosophy; the doom we bring upon ourselves when we ignore simple acts of kindness; the immanent societal collapse wherever  people are no longer able to trust each other. There are over 100 thousand comments like these, comparing the hot-dog handler to Jesus and Gautama, calling him an antidote to the times, his kinship with nature, the rustic earthiness of the video’s setting. One user writes: “if i could be anything id be this man.” When I open the profile it shows a thirty-something year old who makes videos about computer language. The user seems to know a lot about the way computers talk. His videos have thousands of views, but nothing like the hot-dog handler Jesus. There’s a certain reverence in the way people respond to the racoon video. Ailing, my body weak and feeble from a virus that’s been haunting me for months, I’m among the masses of people watching him and his racoons—the way some scale down his shoulders, their bony little hands, their plump bodies poised on hind legs, sniffing up at the air—expecting convalescence. I will not overburden myself with work; I will live humbly, I will be grateful. I will not stray from the light.

Love. They said to trust your heart. Everyday in every corner a little man—almost always a man—sang Love is all you need, and the parents bought tickets and waved their cellphones with no connection in the air. Then we found out the singing man was an abuser. Yet, somehow his message lost no validity—love was still the answer, still all you needed, and it was still as simple as just choosing it. Everybody had that single tool that could fix the world. And the tool, we were made to believe, was as intuitive as a hammer. 

Happiness. They said to follow your passions; do what you love and you’ll be happy. And everybody wanted so much to just be happy! It should be the simplest thing, they figured, the most natural thing, as if we skipped out of the womb smiling. Why can’t you just be happy?

The chronic scepticism that whatever I’m doing I should be doing more passionately. 

Does anybody else feel this?

In university it was trendy to take a scientific approach to literature. We said things like “neuromoduality” and “affectual cybernetics” in our classes; we discussed the statocysts of jellyfish in seminars on Modernism. I was constantly taking notes, documenting a growing sense of illumination to my own proprioception, like the tentacles of my mind were stretching out, uncurling, unravelling. We sprawled on the campus grass during another heat dome, passing homemade horchata between a small cohort of us and challenged our otolithic instincts that craved a balanced plot. The new literature—one whose intertextuality could keep up with the intertextuality of life, the porosity of it—would be definitionally unbalanced, we decided, though Carlos was the only one writing it. Excerpts of the erotic play he was writing were published in the university’s literary magazine, The Pulp, which one of us always had a copy of on hand. The idea was to use neuroscientific research to stake a claim for literature in a numbers-obsessed future. Like Benjamin arguing the phylogenic basis for human mimetic capability in his essays on photography we talked about metaphor being the basis of human reasoning, that concepts like future and past were developmentally inferred through the embodied experience of movement and speed; happy and sad emotional concepts that still contain their embodied antecedent of high and low; or the classic, possibly oldest living metaphor of understanding as to see. By uncovering a neuro-biological dependence on processes more typical of art than of computation we expected to prove something.

 

That summer, not far from where we live now, an entire town burst into flames from the heat. Temperatures soared higher than they’ve ever been in Vegas or Miami, and this was Canada. In the house we were living in, one of the tenants’ cats was sick with heat stroke, so he took a pillow from his bed and slept with her on the cool cement floor of the basement. He said he didn’t care that there was a break in months earlier; that he knew the spiders were awful in that house, and he knew about the centipedes. In the morning we heard nothing about bugs or burglaries; what we woke to was a kind of widening, a stretching of a single vowel coming from deep within the house. In the night the cat had crawled behind some pipes into an exterior wall, her moaning reverberating through the floorboards, through the walls. A note was slipped under everybody’s doors.

CAT STUCK DON’T USE WATER 

Did he think the sound of the water running through the pipes would scare her further into the wall? Maybe he was afraid of the heat from the pipes scolding her? 

I told this to a friend I was having coffee with this morning after she finished telling me about a deadly green paint fashionable in the Victorian Era called Scheele’s green, which was created by combining copper with arsenic. The result, she said, was a hue that was cheaply produced and that accurately mimicked the vivid saturation of the vegetal greens found in nature, the colour of fiddleheads and haircap moss. Dresses, waistcoats, shoes, gloves, trousers, and jewelry all conveyed the beauty and tranquility of the forest, which, usually at the price of a rash or the occasional oozing sore, city-dwellers went mad for; but when they dressed their walls in it people began mysteriously dying. Still, even after the effects were known, people continued buying it. “What do you think is the Scheele’s green of our time?” I asked.

“Free market fundamentalism,” she said. “It’s always been.” 

_{EMBROIDERY WOMAN, GEORG FRIEDRICH KERSTING, 1817.}