Her mind is made up

Nods ∞ 


Part II 

Once again, her body became a vessel for objects, a curious condition she had not been afflicted by for years. During her adolescence, and those ambivalent hours of dawn, she would often steal away and climb on top of the hill overlooking the valley (maybe as a minor token of rebellion or an effort to domesticate a growing array of confused sensations arising and consolidating in her chest, which made her mouth water and a faint smell of dried flower buds swell up in the back of her nose). Her body motionless, hands limping alongside her torso, yet her eyes wakeful; observing as the morning fog would rise and billow in quiet translucent waves seemingly out of nowhere. It traveled in a hunched mass across the landscape until it had folded itself into every crevice leaving nothing untouched by its obfuscating presence. As always, the sun rose in conjunction, at which the fog would bulge upwards to greet it, all the while glowing from the inside in bright red phosphorescence, like a giant deep sea creature that had washed ashore and wriggled its vaporous tentacles in elation at the introduction to a new world. However, she did not habitually return to the high cusp of the hill because she found the spectacle aesthetically pleasing. She was rather lured by arcane thoughts on the vacillating being of the fog, its strangely wavering structure, which seemed to straddle two worlds, or none whatsoever. It was not of the earth, and not of the air, but marked the condensation of the two, without properly being either: a nexus of effusion, metamorphosis, obliteration, all at once. She contemplated this as a pastel sheet made its way up the hill and wrapped itself around her ankles, diffusing her feet, which made it appear as if the two had merged. This would replace her earlier ruminations with something entirely else. Filled with a brief sense of weightlessness, only to be suddenly gripped a moment later by an urge of being pulled down into the valley and swallowed by that inordinate body. Of course, this scenario never presented itself. Instead, she would nod in resignation and languish, drooping over the hovering surface, until the fog had evaporated and she finally found the courage to retreat back home. But this time, the last time she ever returned to the hill, the fog did not dissolve, but congealed, encircled her body and then entered through every pore of her being. A river of objects followed suit, amassing like a wave on the horizon and sweeping in roars across her visual field, then uncontrollably pouring into her, each thing evoking a distinct sensation upon entry. The world was attached to the fog as to an unyielding string, drawing every object, every phenomenon in its wake, even her precious woods, through which she usually found her way home, came tumbling toward her, tree for tree. Until alone, amidst omnipresent quietude, and before her, a plateau of barren and shapeless space.

Now that these spells had returned to plague her, they never presented themselves in the same manner as they did the first time, never the same enveloping placidity. Each time, it brought with it as much distress as it did satisfaction, though once contained, a richer quantity of the latter. To avoid this, and to properly delimit the boundaries of her being, she developed a method or tactic of sorts. A habit of nodding timidly toward strangers, mostly men wearing the pattern of clothing that seemed to trace a fortifying outline somewhere deep within her, an almost tangible cord. When night had fallen, she hid under its covers, and placed herself at the precise center of the town square, a point in space she had gone to considerable amount of trouble calculating the coordinates of. Moving her head with the same integrity as a factory worker maneuvers his limbs in concert to the machine invented to act as his servant. At first, she stretched her hand upwards and blithely ran her finger across a prefigured segment of the darkened sky in arbitrary undulations rather than straight lines. Erratic, though circumspect, strokes of a blinded calligrapher conjuring an orchestra of bizarre figures from sand. Pulling back at times, as if to start anew, her pace then quickened and steadily the glittering sketches grew increasingly rigorous and systemic, the elegance of which would have made a geometer weep. A flurry of stars gravitated toward her celestial engravings and mirrored the procession of her movements with scrupulous mathematical precision, until they broke loose from the faintly shimmering wall, piece by piece, and finally trickled down to the square, replicating the prior markings by rotating and bending in the exact same patterns. Hoping to produce the desired constellation, the neutralizing alignment of unattached fulfillment, but only if someone chanced to reciprocate her nods at the exact same moment. On most occasions she only succeeded in awakening the attention of loners, drunkards or misfits, and an ancient vagabond routinely gave her majestic bows before disappearing into the crowd. Once, she felt as if the universe had shifted its center to mirror precisely where she bent her body: after a graceful exchange of nods, an unusually pleasing person drifted hesitatingly toward her, and said, “I apologize for my lack of creativity, but have we met before?”
“We have not.”
“Are you sure, may I ask your name?”
“Fuck off please, I’m quite engaged in something.”
“I see.”
She resumed her nodding, as if nothing had happened, as if the entire doleful trajectory had not exhausted itself, and finally reemerged in another orbit.

Lone-Cheilos

days and nights 
of wayward and circuitous roaming
impetuous visitations 
through town and land
leaving dizzying trails of violence 
and unkindly manners
as vehement as they were coarse
yet, in their final act of perambulation
the roving band circled a hill, 
limbs moving wildly 
furiously slicing through the soft evening air
shrill voices – and above – birds echoed
the secrets of the firmament
to heedless ears
until finally they came to a halt
gleamed the jewel
under the lucid blue moon
which, for a few breaths, 
ceased its cosmic drifting
rested and observed 
in illuminated affirmation, 
bandits and marauders, aging buccaneers
up the hill they went, toppling, tumbling
one over the other
racing, to be the first
to glean the ancient treasure, 
the archaic Tree, Lone-Cheilos,
bearing fruits of unfathomable reward
yet, little did they know, 
for night had fallen, and dark risen
speaking in devious tongues
Lone-Cheilos was no more
and a gaping fissure in its stead
frenzy ensued 
and they were swallowed
one by one,
what became of them
one can only surmise, 
yet, their restless wanderings
came to an end,
time was ripe
and the young peasant boy
pulled the trunk into the mill
shriveled from the hungry sun
and stood wavering
with sullen eyes
sunken boughs
as the great Tree pulverized
a vast plume for a moment
pursued the draft,
fell quietly to the ground
yet, branches grew, gathered
and offshoots emerged
along the margins of which
ran the ramifications
he could finally cling to,
the leaves of Lone-Cheilos
rushed forth
once more.

Something Icarus related

Monsieur Verniz dans sa maison

A fragile December morning reminiscent of a faded minor tone spread across the floor of his Paris bedroom, and swelled, cold, crisp and immaculate towards him as he raised himself up in the bed; a promised day of asepsis. He coughed and ran his fingers across his stomach, through his already-turning-grey fur, and found the only bare and pale hairless spot, about the size of a button, and pressed his index finger against it. This pleased him greatly, a furtive little private act of transgression, an austere gentleman such as himself, he thought, could allow himself such a gesture strictly by virtue of silence. Morbid and insipid, perhaps, but only if seen (yet, this danger was precisely that which (though unthought-of (an abysmal sediment of desire)) sustained the delight of the act, its hard kernel, and conducted his fingers towards the secret centre of his body each morning). He rose, and proceeded to the mirror, where he inspected his teeth, his nostrils, gazed deeply into his dark eyes and then, not lacking in fascination, exclaimed, as he did almost every morning (especially on mornings such as the one confronting him now), “i am still dreaming” (he called this his “principle of parsimony”) and smiled at his ability to summon scientific knowledge. Now, the monsieur was perfectly aware that this condition was not what you encounter in sleep, he was not sleeping, in fact, it was just stated he had risen (fully cognizant it should be noted (he recalled in vivid detail his dream of the night (where he found himself as a caged rodent))) and he was no somnambulist: the exclamation issued directly from Reason, unadulterated by imagination or fancy. It was simply a necessary instauration, a ritual, drawing from his general condition of being-not-quite-human, yet, contemporaneously, being-human; an uncomfortable antinomy which would tease and tickle any sense that could rightfully be called common. Yet, despite these unfortunate daily confusions, and given his virtue of prudence (and a firmly established reputation concerning just that): on this cold, crisp and immaculate December morning reminiscent of a faded minor tone, he had engagements to meet– he was already late, far, far too late, for an appointment with a busy tailor and the city’s most exquisite photographer awaited in the afternoon (so, as always, this particular mystery had to remain unsolved (for the time being (would there ever be time))?

Purple teeth

The idea of schizophrenia as an excess of self-consciousness suggests the separation of normality and psychopathology is a question of degree. Ultimately, the analogy of the mind as a machine, mechanism or a computer evokes the feeling, or image, that if something goes wrong, something malfunctions or breaks down, that normal functioning is separated from that which is broken in a much more dramatic fashion than it really is. On the other hand, when things are only separated by degree, they are not separated by an unbridgeable gulf; indeed, the borders between them are blurred and indistinct. Consequently, it becomes difficult to define what belongs to normality and what belongs to the mad.

...

*beginning of transcript missing*

...he gently dipped his right hand into the aureate pot that stood before him. The space surrounding his body retracted and from behind, the breeze which had circulated the room formed into a single sheet which layered itself on the back of his neck – creating a prickling wave which proceeded down his back and broke finally with an almost inaudible but euphonious sound at the root of the pelvis. He felt an inert kind of cold shooting through his fingers as he grabbed hold of something entirely inexplicable to the touch. His hand then withdrew, autonomous of his will, trembling, ever-so-slowly from the liquid like substance. He had found a golden string onto which words had been attached. He placed the string carefully on the floor. Small, lustrous-blue lapis stone beads marked the change of a line, sometimes isolating single nouns – and two adjacent beads on each side of a word seemed to indicate a chapter title.

Bead-bead O bead-bead the serpent crawled determinately along the moist jungle floor bead a few rays of sunlight had managed to push their way bead through the consolidated congregation of branches, leaves and incessant myriad of green bead and now played out their glimmering last moments of life in a display of sublimity so vast it had to remain un-witnessed by any living observer bead they gathered in a droplet of rain and with a violent glisten, ran elegantly along its unconfined edges bead before moving towards the centre where the now passing, faint intermittent glow gave birth to a universe bead the drop then fell, passed through the air with a speed dictated as always by gravity’s belligerent, unwavering command bead and landed on the tip of the serpent’s tail bead the serpent, who caught in the depths of contemplations on God’s punishment and unusually close to a conclusion in the matter bead felt the crash first as a watery premonition … desire … urge … drive towards … so bead … with an illuminated clarity of an abysmal yet divine Will he tranquilly devoured his own tail … again …

His eyes grew wide as he observed in the corner a small table on which a generous stack of dust-ridden books rested. He immediately tip-toed as quietly as he possibly could towards the table and picked one up and greedily read a paragraph underlined in crimson:

The Logic of Self-Mutilation by Peter Fritzberger

You are your own Object concerning the directed action, and what happens when something is its own Object; the trajectory of mediation is a circle not leaving the boundaries of the Subject (Subject/Object mediation is essentially always a circle, but one which escapes the Subject, the threshold of liminality, resulting in the production of minimum distance). Thus the inevitable Feedback is formed; creating that which it seeks to destroy. Destroying what was intended as creation.

He seized another book from the pile, in which someone had placed a postcard possibly not to forget where he last abandoned his reading:

Anxiety can be compared to dizziness. He whose eye happens to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy ... Hence anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, which emerges when the spirit wants to posit the synthesis and freedom looks down into its possibility, laying hold of finiteness to support itself. Freedom succumbs in this dizziness. Further than this, psychology cannot and will not go. In that very moment everything changed, and freedom, when it again rises, sees that it is guilty. Between these two moments lies the leap, which no science has explained and which no science can explain.**

Next his eyes took hold of something which he felt an immediate aversion towards, an abrupt stabbing sensation of nauseating repugnance; he momentarily thought that he might have read the book although he could not be absolutely certain. He threw Bergson’s Le rire as hard as he could out the open window … as he had momentarily forgotten that in this realm mystery drew the circle within whose periphery things developed according to mystery’s abrasive commandments … and the book stopped in mid air, engulfed by the stagnant and dark infinity of vacant space; hovered for a few moments, found its way back the way it had been cast and returned to its destined place in the pile of books.

The leaves slowly ceased their anxious shivering as the breeze reluctantly came to a halt. I stood completely still, rooted; my hitherto ceaselessly fluctuating physicality reduced to only a few transient neural quivers. Vision momentarily blurred but regained its lucid gaze as it soundlessly wrapped around the bark of the tree – seeped through the crevices and embraced its interlacing fibers with capacious fervor. From there sight burst into countless globules which cast themselves in every direction along the dark networks of the tree’s anatomy.

Was I the tree which my gaze was fixed on?





**Kierkegaard, Soren. 1980. The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin. Princeton University Press, New Jersey.