Barthes wrote: Life never does more than imitate the book, and the book itself is only a tissue of signs, an imitation that is lost, infinitely deferred.
I want to write a story for you. I want to follow your lead.
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I saw the moon once for what it was. And then I took a pen to it and pared it down and made it everything but that. Now I see it peeling back into the sky like a car in reverse, headlights eclipsing with rust. The orange of old blood. Glaring as a missed beat. Hawk-colored, duneish, hawk-heavy, but with the same counterintuitive propensity for flight. Under the tutelage of paper and youth, the moon is now a pock-marked God, and the word “tutelage” is dragged out of attics of erudition.
I was in college, watching the moon with the seat of my mind in the divot of my sternum. Anticipating, through the frying lens of my anxiety, how I could equate the moon to something greater than myself. This is the real problem, when you get down to it—I could not follow the trajectories of all of those pointer fingers flailing at a rusting wheel, a single fading spoke. I could not understand that I was not the object of all this fascination and desire. And the moon was not my pocket God, but my portrait you’ve paid me well to paint. But by the grace of God more likely a lack of devout Googling, I’m not sure I’d know a pockmark if I saw one.
~~~
How often do you disappoint yourself?
I’m disappointing myself right now.
~~~
There are too many ways to write things down. There are too many combinations; the margin for failure is too great. There are miles of neurons between my brain and my fingertips. So much is strewn alongside the highway of living—this is only roadside refuse. Too much fear and malcontent and joy and happiness end up out the window on the way to a hopeful somewhere. Mangled by mileage and my bad driving before they even hit the ground. This is not a page, but a single atrophied angora mitten in mint, a bright pink felt bootie, a strip of malting black plastic all tangled in the median strip that is the mind.
~~~
The scene is less a matter of surroundings and more one of perception. I’m too young to tire of scenes built by lists of threes, I care for you and I don’t know how to show it, I don’t want to eschew by accident the fact that you’ve come to me, crawled into my bed at night, asked me to explain. There’s a certain way that you’re supposed to go about telling a story about looking at the moon. But I know that you know as well as I do what it looks like: spun-cotton smoke, the giraffe-sprawl of lawn chairs, beer cans placed with the purpose of still life portraiture. I could write an essay on beer cans—do a photo series on cups and glasses and cans, all aborted of intoxicants. You’ve seen this scene before. It either did or did not become you. Reader, writer, book, butcher, baker, candlestick maker. It doesn’t matter what it looked like. My tone or style is best summed up as: I want to sew you up again.
~~~
There’s a page on Wikipedia that’s called “Heart Sounds”, and it’s a story that reads like this: Heart sounds are the noises generated by the beating heart and the resultant flow of blood through it. What ominous loveliness in the internet age.
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Barthes wrote: Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology, he is simply that someone who holds together…all the traces by which a single text is constituted.
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I used to want to make things that were beautiful. Then I used to make things that sounded smart. Now I want to make things that are honest. This is what this is.
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A man has fallen in love with a woman, a father has all the more admired his daughter, a stranger on a train has admired the yin-yang of chiaroscuro cast by tunnels and sun and tunnels again, and the way it makes a new face, a strange face, stranger and more familiar and more estranged again as she leans away from the window and into a book of literary theory, into a set of implications (Paris, sadness, happiness like a well of cold water) that you cannot help falling in love with.
~~~
These are shadow puppets cast on the moon, this is a net in the pond where the moon is reflected. Right now, in my room, there are coats hanging up in the closet in nocturnal colors that I’ll never wear. But never mind all this—the night never looked very good on me anyway.
~~~
Writing is too often presented as something sans rationale: you write because you must. But I am I and not you. I have no pity and will ask again: if I give you the moon, should I write it as palm colored, or dune-soft, or dalmationed with craters? What will make you weep? For me, it’s the lines on dogwood flowers like sand striations in a Zen garden. But I know you’re not here to hear about me. Just to take my moon out of the cavity in my chest and leave me cold. I can no longer tell what is a phantom limb.
~~~
If I’m being honest, I’d like to meet you half way. Give me a token of yours to work with. Tell me: What do you think of when it’s getter later than it is cold and your daughter hasn’t come home yet, is this how you rationalize your wife’s failure to get pregnant, the mind making your sadness crystallize so it can be dissolved away by acidic thoughts, the fact that if you have a daughter there will be times when it’s getting later than it is cold and your daughter hasn’t come home yet and the moon is up there sterile and brooding? In what way can I capture this in order to make you love me?
~~~
Barthes wrote: The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.
Is it seppuku to say that I agree?
~~~
I only know how I come to reading, and not how I am read. I’m not sure this is me, I swear the mirror reveals something far more fleshy ounce by ounce. Is this what 5’2, 105 pounds reads like? Is this too heavy? Can you breathe when I put this much weight on you? What way would you like the moon served to you? Is it an errant scrap of paper left on Matisse’s studio floor? Does Matisse move you? Or do you require a real-world reminder? Does it remind you of a smoke alarm? Silent and circular and completely forgotten? You were born and now you’re living. You’ve had your fill of stories and it’s my job to cut you off. It’s like your mother told you. Too much of this and you’ll fold up into the page. One last one? Okay. I’ll tuck you in. But close your eyes, at least pretend to be sleeping before I have to turn off the lights and leave the room. I don’t want to go, but I have to.
~~~
This is not for my or any pockmarked God. This is the presentation of the body as an archipelago, a body without organs, organs marooned on inked seas, inked seas lost to your eyes, the color of which I cannot guess to know. This is the sagging tissue of my weeping lungs, the webbing that ties my neurons like shoelaces. This is one-thousand doors, ornately carved, leonine and lilied, with nothing behind them.
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I’m not looking for a book that goes forwards. I’m looking for a book that moves like mushroom spores, as varietal and permanent as the bruised shin of the moon. I’m no longer interested in things that branch—trees and ferns with their tiny splintered roads, all of them less traveled by and therefore lesser than. I’m looking for a book that sidles off the shelf again and again, a book covered in the cracked mud of living that I have not done, that sits down across from you at dinner with dirty hands, and sings an image into being:
You are more yourself than you think you are.
In 200,000 words.
~~~
I can only see the moon in ways that might thrill you. “Now I see it peeling back into the sky like a car in reverse, headlights eclipsing with rust. The orange of old blood. Glaring as a missed beat. Hawk-colored, duneish, hawk-heavy, but with the same counterintuitive propensity for flight”. Every metaphor is a swipe and a stab, meant to sate. Are you tired? Hungry? Overheated? I lack the bravery and brevity required in real world action to mix you a drink and take off your coat, but I can attempt to spin one into existence. The problem is just that I don’t know your size.
~~~
Barthes wrote: there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author. The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology, he is simply that someone who holds together…all the traces by which a single text is constituted.
~~~
Appearing in seventh grade science textbooks everywhere: Did you know that every silence is the sound that my heart makes when it isn’t beating?
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For me: was it the circumference of my father’s balding head? Was it the white plastic sink basin in my sister’s bathroom? No. I can’t expect my life, so less-than-literary, to move you. I cannot make my days spark with simile. I have closets filled with barely-breathing living limp with overuse and they smell like moth-balls and they are closed.
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I want a book that marks me like a bite. I want a stippled ellipse, the ghost of sharp teeth, on my neck like a brand.
~~~
Barthes wrote: Life never does more than imitate the book, and the book itself is only a tissue of signs, an imitation that is lost, infinitely deferred.
~~~
Somewhere along the way, I began to believe that love was an assemblage of correct answers. Every conversation is a pop quiz that I’m studying for constantly. I’m reading up in a library that is always dark. I am always in the stacks, wondering why no one else is here. How maddening, that the disparate parts of your you-ness, isn’t caught within the climbing acoustics of your favorite movie soundtrack or the paint-drop tulips of that landscape painter that makes you feel filled with all the gaseous elements on the periodic table.
~~~
I’m a child who can’t understand that writing is a Christmas tree, and that the Christmas tree is the tree itself, and not the Faberge eggs, and not the tinsel slinging singing silver over everything, and not the candied winking lights. The Christmas tree is the pine-smelling thing, that giant blunted burr that we, for whatever reason, cannot bear to see naked. It’s just a tree. Born of earth. Brother of ten million others that are all the same. What a comforting thought. What a frightening thought.
~~~
You should not love only the parts of yourself you see in other people. We are not kaleidoscopes—if you do not like the patina of personality you’re greeted with at first glance, do not grind with closed fists to get a new pattern. How funny, that I can’t for the life of me remember who told me that. How tragic, that I can’t for the life of me remember who told me that. Only that it is now mine.
~~~
I’m a child. I’m 22.
~~~
Deleuze and Guattari proposed that literature relates to itself and the world not like a tree growing upwards, but like a rhizome sprawling out. Forever a middle unto itself. 1,000 plateaus building outwards and outwards happily, content to live on just hyperbole and no horizon. I would light myself hand by hand on fire in order to be, for them, a single word.
~~~
I am the author and I am not dead and I’m not sure where I am. Who are you and how do you want your moon served and can I stop now and could you picture yourself loving me, yet?
Photo by Christian Ronnel
