the person is frigid, won’t play only sees part of an object, though vision is clear
there is occlusion in blood the arm is not felt, it never belonged in spine-reassembled body the image of what being called a ghost is the empty empty empty imagination-making visible falling cutting eyes to see out but too late, late
*
hot flashes at night can mean ovarian failure, lymphoma, endocarditis, arteritis, sympathetic, no the system nerve tissue feeling stretched in one way, from old bed to new bed forward-back/back-forward beware now in form and place and so-seen as if happened for the first time: how a memory keeps vigil
*
some confusion may appear in the issue transmitted but there is a now a problem, not a new problem but a new area & not exactly that, but a new vestige which joins with an issue already gone by way of co-conscious, by way of the ill head
as ever, its circling is over-travel, is limit, is overmuch never could mean or tell what was cold unpresent imprecise or what was meant, was between whose fault who was trying to be alone, who trying to pass through
*
a body its violent excursion goes on & older in veins the unwinding so, in a still very much like childish games or an aubade very much so an indecipherable word or the moment of it what? ask the body, its relentless details to save & turn through degrees of night with a watcher’s warning to sleep in halts as if one of the
sensors on a building is dead & might not come back
CASE STUDY #10: NEURALGIA
[numeral ghost passing through]
The Ames Room works by distorting a physical space in order to create the illusion of size-disparity. It is not level; it inclines. The walls appear perpendicular to the floor, but they slant outwards in a trapezoidal shape.
If two people stand in an Ames Room, and a third looks on, the third believes that the other two individuals occupy the same depth of field. The retinal image produced by the warped room is the same as that of a cubic room, and so an optical illusion is set in place. The figure on the right will seem far larger than the person on the left.
In 1973, a Small Ames Room was constructed as part of an experiment to determine perceived body type in schizophrenics. Twenty-five people were asked to view the scape of the Ames structure in which a life-size human cardboard figure was fastened on the left-side of the rear wall. The subject’s own body was also represented in a cut-out so that it could be moved back-and-forth in the right-to-left dimension of the room. By means of a dial, subjects could shift the version of their own body until it aligned with the standard figure.
In comparison with non-schizophrenics, the subjects suffering from the condition underestimated their overall body size. A showdown with one’s total body is more intense than encountering an isolate part of it. Do we feel more secure when measuring a limb, or a facial feature? It’s said that the total body has an immediate “I” connection with basic identity evaluation. Where do I fit best and how do I? When did “I” most.
Imagine that action. Sliding an effigy of the self along the walls of an Ames room. A space that has no business being a space to measure anything.
Trying to locate a body in place-form is unworkable.
If two people are performers, then there is often a moment. Moment where the basic capacity to understand disappears. For example, recalling the outer walls of the most cold cold of houses. Like nothing else felt. A square of light so vastly peopled. Powder in the sink, the girl who gets loads of press, the photo one with gloves and shadow, sand-shadow, a beautiful neck on a bridge. Or the one with mauve nails. The best friend from somewhere, the weekend actor, the pool-table crazy. Or the one who brought vegetables. Non-weather kind of waiting for each. Bodies shaking as an aerial relative to east/ west the sss the slurred start the bed weighted down
hair fist entangled to such a height then stay, meet the others I’m shaved cut waxed add a third a fourth a fifth, a filler
in the wide upper storied room in the maze of a room white and wood.
Water in a glass, a desired plant, more powder in the sink. Typical folia. All betraying the non-time, the non-place, the habitat-sanctuary. The house was cold, it was not a real house. Speech deployed in such places should make us consider that nothing is to be remembered. To converse in a false construct means what? Can all those psychopathological studies be applied to “being made aware of?” A being lied-to-but-not. You just didn’t know but you did. It was a worked-out case with eyes closed. You are tired and you have moved something around your body for years.
CASE STUDY #17: FIBROMYALGIA
[the only way to become calculable]
Be in destroy mode. Know your bones are not a dancer’s bones.
Archive as much as you like (something will always be left out).
In what you have sentenced, make the second or first or general vertebrae lock.
The oldest reptilian part of the body folds. It has no software
whenever the skull is hit or that inner room you have sentenced over and over.
The head, it feels like warming on one side. Not your average nausea. The first stage of unclassic speech pain
In what you have sentenced, make the throat a hollow-out space where a faucet
should be.
In what you have sentenced, the range-map of uterus and all its options.
It takes the right kind of mystery away.
In what you have sentenced, the hand has an eluded edge. It locks but you can’t see how
In what you have sentenced, the jaw has a new basis. It can’t say I
The voice a shy bolt, though incomplete. Senseless wordsindream.
Lips of shoulder. Fleeting, malleable, the lower body organs are hung all adrift.
In what you have sentenced, switch yourself on the subway. Bleed. Release.
Then spread your legs. People let you do it.
CASE STUDY #1: INVOLUNTARY SPASM
[understanding the practicalities of the performance of evocation]
something drawn like iron filings, I am attracted to
where amassing is
of motive & what a motive
to sift through and reflect on the “forgot”
the general emptying
now in form and place
[airport, room, car, porch, hallway, country]
so-seen as if happened
how dirty is the feel of reenactment
CASE STUDY #15: PERCEIVED VERTIGO
[not of sky but of skin]
In book 4 of Rabalais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1564), the voyager Pantagruel finds disembodied voices that are frozen in time; the acoustic traces of a sea-battle occurring the winter before he and his fellow travelers arrive at the site of conflict. Though encased in ice, the words begin to thaw when touched, and so become audible.
I saw some very sharp words among them; bloody words which . . . sometimes return to the place from which they come—but with their throats cut; some terrifying words, and others rather unpleasant to look at. When they had all melted together, we heard: Hin, hin, hin, hin, his, tick, tock, crack, brededin, brededac, frr, frrr, frrrr, bou, bou, ... trrrrrr, on, on, on, on, on, ououououon, Gog, Magog, and goodness knows what other barbarous sounds.
However, the words are only fragments and compounds, barely identifiable. The battle can only be imagined, not re-lived or truly understood. Rabalais is pointing to the instability of communication, that the voice is durable but untrustworthy, that the ephemeral can take shape, but in a different form. That nothing is truly lost. That error may occur in the dissolving and the recombining. That someone else might return to the site through which you passed, and hear a little of you. That you might return and deploy your own preference for selecting. For destroying entirely.
I wrote a lot about cold, around the same time as an important phone call I received in winter. There was a poem called Réseau that worked over the numbers on a digital weather station, the co-ordinates of constellations, and a pen & ink sketch of an acrobat. Fine lines and networks everywhere except for a final image of footprints denting the snow covered ground, their destination unclear. It began in the lateness of a day, one that was dangerous, far too late.
The poem didn’t sound the way I wanted it to. It was a residue of an experience, not the essence. It was as if I was writing it after some kind of dissolution (repressed even, a forgetting with intent) and then grabbing particles to collate an idea, and then creating a poem from the forced multifaceted idea. One aspect of ‘réseau’ I didn’t think of was the Réseau plate, a clear glass disc on which is etched small black crosshairs, placed at the front of a camera in order to correct images, to make them more precise.
What could be done better? The tree line, a no-tree line, slit-sound of ice, some degree of warp, and how something fell. From the eaves of a house that had char in the basement and a voice sounding -- is the mail there, am I cold yet? Yes, froze solid, and hunger, perhaps. The sky seemed to have turned its veins out, the birdseed was gone, a snowdial half-thought-of and never built, the path unpaved.
I made notes on clouds, even though they barely figured in the poem. Fine striations of midsky between road (where the object landed, it didn’t speak) and upper blankness. Cirrocumulus, but not white. Silver as I said. As I remember. I remember how those clouds predicted the very worst.
Afterwards, my lids kept blinking for a month. More months and then years, and soon it was asked, what would I know someone by? Would I know someone by the path unpaved, that day far too late, each year repeating its days? The object that fell from a high wire to remain on the ground, calcified. Its jaw set in a might-as-well-die-trying line, limbs un-jointed.
In slow backturning fade of memory, can I hear a sound? Such as goodbye, thank you. And I to you. Thank you. Or would it be an inflexible set of syllables? In a different order: lo…half…life…eav…vs….it…dot…go…ebb…shh. I am older now. I eventually forget.
I had confidence in my method of exit. Marks in the snow like coal-eyes or birdseed spelling spilling a clue a code, dot dot of how I left. Even in your easy tearless way you had no idea. You’ve no idea how I got away.
CASE STUDY #3: FURTHER SYMPTOMS
[I cannot speak, or only with great effort]
/Dance, says Stephan Brinkmann, is “a memory art….an experience of remembrance” \
/The tiny adjustments recalled by the bones, ligatures, tendons of a dancer in order to perfect a single gesture. How her repertoire is built from a body that echoes its own machinic folds\
/She learns the choreography of a sequence then adds vibrancy, nuance. Finally she absorbs the basic movements so essentially that her body begins to work that way, leaving her brain free to effect the personal interpretations\
/I click on a link to a live performance: un|stet/ Dating my Memory un|stet/ Choreographer Antje Pfundtner. Stet | As it were. Let it stand. Except it doesn’t\
/Bodies in lo-fi color hold their forearms up in sync. They are contoured in a sand-dune shade. Hands librate the air. A couple detaches in solitary blue light, their eyes locked on a peripheral scene. A mouth is pulled apart, a woman’s body concertinas at the waist, as if shot. Another reels in attitude of agony or vanity. Another lies asleep with a huge inflatable fish on her chest. A faun stares. A crinoline dress appears, the wearer is brutally turned around. I hear “Shut Up, You Said You Wanted To Play;” somebody sleeps in someone’s lap\
/I look closer, time and again. The dancers weave into each other’s phraseology. They’re a hive. I imagine each centimeter of the stage, mapped by one and transmitted to the collective. Propioception — they all know where their bodies are at any latitude of moment. They know the instant at which a muscle imperceptibly stretches and angles\
/It looks like the frantic art of longing to me. I see the lattice pattern of forgetting. The hinges of it. The need to work over and work over and across. No I mean this, no this, no this. Let me say it again, again, then or then. Now it’s indelible. I see the slap, the stun of one dancer. His silhouette flying off stage\
CASE STUDY #6: SYNCOPE
[Non-access means you never see the archive diminish]
December ’08, snow all over Canada
There was blood on my hands
in a dream that very week
Clichéd. I’ll never. During all
During all
I was running the notion of land, the air was red, a box-world
Carven hands and they were
calmly fluid, I remember
thinking ~ that’s a borrowed sky
Open to find
your ownership, your account isn’t what we filed, kept vigil of
I believe in the evidence
of evidence lost after 30 days
There was a book
It fell through the ceiling, due to water.
In Pilot G-205 pen in CAPS, is it better
better, I see
In parts. I mean afar.
As it were. All being said
By-the-by. So to speak
Such as it were. Come on
I read TEXT-END COMPLETE
In a margin. In a file, I read
WOKE THIS MORNING AND PUT MY HAND THROUGH GLASS
I believe it, I believe
the old self for saving
I want all back to say Are you better
Tricking a worn want to have it again
Sorry I showed up in blue ~
what’s my best feature?
What’s the present, do I even need it?
What happens if you unhallucinate a place, its details?
It rests in an absence
Un-lit, unthought-of
I suspect the old self for adding
between shadow & of shadow, the yes no yes no
in the ongoing body & what I see
in the blood, blood eventually
in the bricolage, the data, an awful time of the language
when I awake
when I awake to the path of strike
is a reel of someone opening a window to see more roofs.
CASE STUDY #24: GLIOBLASTOMA MULTIFORME
[circling is over-travel]
In what you have sentenced, there are people who burn other people in their houses. They wait, wait to sear, watch, reduce. You see a boy with a red truck, a toy, moving it left, right, just waiting for someone. There’s lightning in plain view, dust and police. Bodies drawn off in this direction or that. Countries, dials, lines, fractures.
You track them on a cursor, click, enlarge, see a cat skinned alive. Someone makes it to fifty, has a timeshare; says, no sooner do I see an egg than I have seen an egg for the last three thousand years. You recall a porcelain hand on which to keep jewelry and the phrase ring of forgive, comes to mind. What is a ring of forgive?
Salt water boils when cut by a certain radio wave. Filaments of skin don’t matter in Cotard’s disease; the wearer turns in soil and visits the world occasionally. Who do they truly haunt? Not you. One time you bled unannounced, shortly after reading of a machete used for rape. That month you had two ultrasounds. That month you created your own illness. We can’t renew forgetting, not with a digital past.
What can I lose? you ask. What about your accident never learned from because it remains in backup. Someone left her parents to die in famine. They believed in her. You’ll save that. You save info.
You save info on that 2% breast disease. It’s all to do with you. Your body won’t be held and why should it. Its ileocecal valve is shut tight. You read about it, your tongue is blue, a symptom. Someone tries to see within the moment when she sees – and not to see through the memory of having seen in an instant now past.
Meaning -- you blink your eye. It starts to cloud. You remember it doing so. There’s a bruise on you. You remember making-up the bruise. You’re rapidly mad, so it goes. You wrote it. And then
because of what you have sentenced, you should change/ keep/ keep/ change the archive [change] edit, efface the archive. You’re still calculable, though. Your thighs are a ruin in the softest part.
CASE STUDY #26: SACRAL PAIN
[the image, pure and simple, will not be referred to the past unless it was in the past I sought it]
side-mind
can’t swallow
in a haunt I think of a son
in life units, he doesn’t last long
I’m off-balance
couldn’t walk earlier
there’s apathy
cutoff
fracture even
I discredit my insides. Wrong kind of mystery.