HOLE, TUBE, LINE ... STAR?
life rx jun 24 24
the emperor, and a passage from David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous: “Our first writing, clearly, was our own tracks, our footprints, our handprints in mud or ash pressed upon the rock. Later, perhaps, we found that by copying the distinctive prints and scratches made by other animals we could gain a new power; here was a method of identifying with the other animal, taking on its expressive magic in order to learn of its whereabouts, to draw it near, to make it appear. Tracing the impression left by a deer's body in the snow, or transferring that outline onto the wall of the cave: these are ways of placing oneself in distant contact with the Other, whether to invoke its influence or to exert one's own. Perhaps by multiplying its images on the cavern wall we sought to ensure that the deer itself would multiply, be bountiful in the coming season....”
the aleatory
I see a letter. I see ill yellow light. I see the L made by the white hallway beyond the door that doesn’t hang properly in its frame. I see garrets, I see miserable women writing novels, miserable women who could never imagine that one day, youths will prop the miserable ill-yellow-light novels of the miserable women on the sticky ledge of a coffee shop table, the better to hide their (the youths’) flashing eyes.
It is shocking to me that anyone has ever written a novel. The only thing more shocking to me is the fact that anyone has ever read one. As a child, I realized that I thought of the days and evenings as spaces inside the squares of the calendar (days) and spaces in the blankness around days—evenings at home, the loneliness of waking up from a nap hearing cooking sounds. Is there any lonelier sound? (I don’t know why—the idea that someone is cooking for you while you sleep is inherently un-lonely. But it is sad to have such clear evidence of the world going about its business without you in it.)
Once, my friends were super stoned at my house in Austin, in what had been the basement of an ordinary house, still obvious because the floors were smooth concrete with the occasional oil stain. Somebody pointed out that your mouth made the shape of a TUBE when you said TUBE, and the shape of a HOLE when you said HOLE, and the shape of a LINE when you said LINE. Goddamn. HOLE, TUBE, LINE, we said.
SQUARE? STAR?
The magic was unreliable.
MOON?
Yes, but only because MOON and HOLE are sort of the same.
We were all in poetry grad school.
This is why I never knew what to say, when family friends congratulated me for finishing my degree.
If anything, I should have been given condolences.
the assignment
The shape of the thing is what it’s trying to say to you.
writing prompt
Find letters in the shape of your daily things: an A where the guitar meets its shadow on the wall, a fancy T in the palm tree.
a chune
“The O Song,” Sesame Street
and a runner-up, “I Saw the Light” by Todd Rundgren
I have a form of psychosis where I was completely convinced they used this song for one of those Sesame Street videos where the letter is a little character with blinking eyes, and the rest of the Sesame Street monsters are singing to it. (“Where I saw only U!” and then the U blinks bashfully) I have a very clear memory of a green letter U being serenaded with this Todd Rundgren song, but I cannot prove a thing.
credits: small spells tarot deck by Rachel Howe
The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram
Something/Anything? by Todd Rundgren
Dear diary, I think you should really get to the bottom of why all your snake plants die. They’re not supposed to die, ever! And yet they do worse in your care than calatheas. Too wet, and they get droopy, so you keep them dry, dry, dry, then one day, they turn into brown sludge and collapse. It is way past shameful. For goodness’ sake. X S