Awry

"Why do you do it then?"

She touches the twisted shape of the fence (I made this, perhaps she thinks with pride or disgust or calm disinterest) and this is the phrase that comes to her; we know this because it is occasionally found scrawled between the other symbols on the inside of the cell. The symbols that trace the outside perimeter of the cell have, after a few rain and dry spells, hardened in the clay; those written on the inside she often erases, a few hours later or a day, either intentionally with the sweep of an arm or unintentionally when she moves about the enclosure.

To this date, the aforementioned question has been written a total of 16--no, there were two more this afternoon--18 times. In only one of these instances was the question answered: "don't know," written with a quick, jabbing stroke. The question was erased two hours later; the answer hung around for six more hours before it, too, was smudged out (by a shuffle-walk that we suspect was intentional).

The writing of the phrase appears most often in conjunction with the feeling of the walls, either immediately before or immediately after. Sometimes, while feeling the metal, she will, with a sudden movement, bend them violently so that they cave in or bow out. The act serves no practical purpose, as the affected area is so small that it does not enlarge (or shrink) the enclosure in any significant way. Further, the same area is never bent twice, so it is clear she does not mean to weaken the structure (though the bending inarguably does weaken the walls, even we can see this, and if she continues long enough, we must assume she will start bending the same areas twice over, and thus begin truly damaging the structure in unintentional earnest).

We must conclude, then, that the bending is truly an impulsive gesture, perhaps a frustrated response to the unanswerable question that precedes or follows it. We cannot discern if the answer is known and ungivable, or ungivable because it is not known. For all the things we have set to paper in our hours of observation, this has been the most elusive. Not for lack of trying--there must be at least forty-two, no, forty-four pages on this already, and the script gets quite cramped on some of them. But in all these pages, we cannot quite say what is said. That is to say, our descriptions seem embarrassingly vain and hypothetical; there is nothing but cringing when one reads back on them. But strange thing--it is in these moments of realized futility when I think of the way the lone answer--"don't know"-- made its fleeting appearance in the dirt. And I feel very good, and very bad, and also, a desire to cast my pen down and write sharp, inconstant words in the earth that will not mean anything in the morning, that will beg, embarrassed, to be erased in the morning.

In these moments, I find the pen sometimes falling from my hand. But then some sound catches me, or some smell, or a movement at the side of my eye (the camp is often plagued by little desert lizards who seem to exist for the sole purpose of disrupting my reverie), and I continue writing where I had left off.

I must remember to tear these pages from the journal before turning them over to my colleagues, as they have nothing to do with the subject of study.

To Watch

Sometimes she feels as if she has spent her whole life watching things sleep--in envy, fear; in love.

There is a story that says "there must be someone to watch." But the story does not explain why. It is not the habit of this particular author to explain these sorts of things. It is not the habit of most authors, really, to explain the very point of their writing. This is not a little frustrating. Perhaps that is why Einos is a very difficult creature, or process, for us to study--it is not a speaking one, but a watching one, and so as scientists, watchers ourselves, this makes us feel very self conscious in our methods. We know she is not aware of us, and yet, this inclination to watch things that sleep--well, let us just say that it certainly has not encouraged us to happy, easy dreams.

From inside the wire cell, she can still see the forms of those that wander the desert. Some perhaps looking for her; some perhaps just wandering. When night comes on, they sometimes lie down alongside one of the walls of her cell to sleep. She creeps, then, over to that wall and, crouched down on her knees or balanced on her toes, she will watch them sleep all night, as if expecting them to stir (they occasionally do), or making sure they will not--we cannot really be sure of her intention (her face is always shadowed in these dark hours), only of her curiousity. Perhaps she does not herself know why she watches these strange, almost-visitors who come close to her only in sleep.

But they, unlike us, do sleep, and if not easily, completely.

After the wanderer has woken and left, she most often goes directly to her desk and writes, here eyes fixed a little unnaturally wide, looking not a little disturbed. Sometimes we catch a shining line tracing from her right eye to her chin--we never see or hear it, but it must be that she sometimes cries, though only from the right eye, it seems.

Ex Nihilo

Her name was Ella, like Eleanore, "like the president's wife," she used to remind herself, and she would shorten this to "like the president." And when she forgot that it was the name of his wife, she began saying "like the king," sure that somewhere along the way, she'd crossed symbolic wires, and this was what she'd meant. But she didn't remember any king with the name Eleanore. For two months, she did not speak her own name, but let the sounds mingle and brine in her brain, always followed by "like the king, like the king," as if to try and remind and bind them into some kingly form. The sentence came one day as easily as if it had only been waiting for its discovery: "Einos--like the king." She said it six times over to make sure it was good and right. And it was. It was wet and prickly on her tongue, like tannin, like how she imagined it would taste if someone held a piece of metal there until it was warm.

So she was Einos, formerly Ella, like the president, and perhaps, upon leaving Quarantine, she would again be Ella, and perhaps, to those outside, she was, still, Ella. But knowing not only both, but intending to know so intimately the second, should we call her Einos or Ella? The creature in Quarantine is objectively known as Ella; but the processes we will familiarize ourselves with begin with Einos. But is this name too close? If we use it, is there the chance she will hear us, gnaw on the noise and be distracted from her work, which is crucial to our work? There is a reason scientists do not speak of bears in bear tongues, or even man tongues--"ursus arctos," they write in little black scribbles, so that should the mentioned ursus find it, they should not know they are being written about. Their handwriting is probably intentionally bad for just this reason.

But we are far from her, too far to be detected, I think, so let us perhaps dare to use Ella and Einos both where it is appropriate, for it may be argued that they describe two different things, and there will the two different names be handy to us.

Einos was born in a self-created cell of scrap wire mash and sticks at 14:00 on a Wednesday; our observation of her did not start until two hours later. On the third day she surrounded the cell with symbols drawn counterclockwise in the dirt. On the fourth day she uprooted a succulent and replanted it inside the cell. After this she journeyed outside the cell no more.

Wander

I will pin myself to the backs of their late legacies.

There are certain authors I've wanted to talk to with tears in my eyes--not because I'm overly sentimental (though I may perhaps be), but because such would be the nature of the conversation. The deepest of secrets, dark only like night blooming flowers or the pinched eye of anise stars. But every one of them has died before I had ever even heard their name. My dialogues hop on one leg

Stretching legs, dark knit like a bug's

This is something only yellow, orange lights can do

If I am lucky, I will have what some of them had; If I am diligent, I will attain what all of them did; and if I am unlucky, and this the more likely, I will not have what most of them also did not have.

The softest part of the enclosure is dirt, then hardwood, then iron. There is a wasteful amount of iron in that place. There is little between the very soft and the very hard in that place.

I like to think of eternity in the terms of turtles and Odradek and labyrinths and hidden places, and honey crystallizing in blue-black nostrils. It is somehow easier this way--like walking in someone's footsteps, footholes, when the snow is very deep. I only regret that I could not ask them where it was they were going, because, strange folk, they have left such wandering and winding paths...

Patient Xerox

Sometimes, when she got very tired, she also got very angry, and she wasn't quite sure why, and was aware of how silly it was, really, but that realization didn't keep it from happening, and besides, she didn't even know what had started its happening.

Which isn't to say that it hadn't happened before. There was indeed a period of her life when she had looked for fights which she knew she would probably lose. Not physical--never physical. Everyone knew to not leave marks, even the far-gone sick, because marks are ways back to places, marks, like words, are some solid shit that must be acted upon, except worse than words, because they cling to the skin for days and days, purple and nervous and wanting.

So it had happened before, but that didn't explain why it was happening again, a done thing trying to be done again. There wasn't any reason for it.

She covered her hands and her shoulders and her brain because that is where it began, this strange, childish rage. She clipped her lips so she would not be tempted to bite strangers (and most everyone slipped in and out of her strangeness at that point) for this reason, this perfectly-no-reason-at-all reason. Later, she would skirt around such things entirely, fearful that even the sight or sound would irritate the constant nausea of her gut into a violent case of vomiting.

And whatever she had, she didn't want to pass it on.

So she avoided things that she suspected made her sick, as well as things she feared she would make sick.

And the world she inhabited was called Quarantine.

It was not often described, because its actualization in description broke many rules and pissed off agencies. What agencies? Just agencies. Inciting panic--this is against the rules of the just-agencies. The agencies themselves did not know of Quarantine, because making them aware would, still, require description, and there were no allowances to the rule: description led to trouble. People like to believe it leads to good noise, but more often than not, it leads to bad noise, because bad noise isn't necessarily 'bad noise,' it's simply everything else but good noise--it's just noise. You need not announce your presence to a zombie; make a sound, any sound, and it is the wrong one, because all are rendered down to "here I am/ come fight me."

There is a way to bypass this reduction of meaning, she suspects, and she has been trying to figure it out in all the long hours of her solitude. But she is no scientist--the work is slow. Sometimes she becomes frustrated and grabs the nearest thing to her and chews on it. Sometimes this is a pen; sometimes it is part of her lunch; often it is the first segment of her first finger. This is a distracting habit, and sometimes she forgets which it is, of the two, that she is supposed to be focused on; is it the chewing that distracts her from her work, or the work that distracts her from her chewing? It is slow work. She is determined, though.

Those that are immune were those with very good heads on very good shoulders and those who did not speak the language (as mentioned, it was not physical, but a sound disease). And this is very good company in Quarantine. And this is very good company in any world, really.

Something something something a copy machine on a coffee table something something covered in beetles.

"No fixed abode"

If this is not the calling card of the atemporal, then there isn't one.

They are hard to imitate because they are hard to find; even time travelers have a place, a time, to which they go back to, from which they first came, and which most owns them. But these, these they, are as much at home (which isn't to say that they are) in one time as any other.

And what is more: because of this, where time traveling things slip back into their time period when they are no longer points of interest for those in other times, atemporal things seem to disappear completely--out of mind, out of sight. Out of everywhere, until it should be summoned up again; not constantly, not on a whim, but risen, like the dead, through ceremony and necessity (it is extremely rude to wake the dead without reason, of course).

I have begun thinking the phrase "I apply no such criteria." I do not think I meant it (or knew how to mean it) at first. It was just a thing I heard in a book in a place. But the more often I say it (think it--I always mean to say it, but I never do. I think saying it would turn it into a criteria, somehow), the more it seems to..function. It is difficult to describe. Moral arguments are more quickly identified--and more quickly abandoned or skirted. If it is a bad idea, it will be killed; if it is a good idea, it will be fed. But still, we have not asked what it is. What a strange thing, this inclination to protect or destroy before just...sitting and staring. Before touching.

I do not know how not to do; I know only how to do and undo. I lose much time in this fashion, much more than if I knew how not to do. I will not say it is good or bad, but it is not very efficient.

The dogs that wander the cities, certain cities in particular, maybe, must live the strangest lives, I feel. In unpeopled areas, it is clear what will probably eat you, and what you should probably take a snap at yourself; in houses, your greatest worry is keeping your nose just far enough away from the table to entice the hand to mediate between the two. But outside of these houses it is a very strange. Who can say where kindness or cruelty will come from? If man cannot read the intentions of his own fellow men, what chance does anything born outside of a house have? It may perhaps not be very difficult to live (survive?) as these dogs do--perhaps there is enough food in some places, enough shelter, even companionship--but even still, it must be very confusing. Even interactions with other animals, half or wholly or not at all as acclimated as he, must be very confusing. I wonder how he makes meaning of these things. If he ever presses the soft top of his head into the asphalt and thinks of a peach tree.

Very small loops, I was told. Gad, if only you knew. But eventually, they are escaped, I am also told, though because I cannot remember the source of this one, perhaps it is only something I have told myself.

"This poem is one that's sort of haunted me ever since I first read it"

I don't collect these things like I used to, like a Mike Rose-Richard Rodgriguez sorta scholarly kid. But some of them I write down, or keep, because it..it's important to be understood sometimes, or at least think you're understood sometimes, if only because constantly feeling as if you are not quite probably leads to some sort of deep neurosis. Or boredom. Or something or other.

"I'm sure it means something"

"And I don't get it"

Hearing this (and..I don't quite know why I wrote these down too) is nothing bothersome in and of itself--not at all. It is just a note. But a single note, over and over, ceaseless, is--

Can you imagine? an island, filled with a single voice? A single song?

This is why criteria does not matter; context, the notes around, can do anything to anything. I do not care if it is good or bad. But if I have haunted someone, if I have scared someone...there is function to that.

I am very tired.

I am very tired.

I am very tired.

When I can think of nothing else (which has become increasingly often), I think of some, or all, in any order, of these things:

4

2

2

clockface

Palimpsest

Atemporal objects must be hopeful things; I can ascertain little else as of yet, but this must certainly be true of them. They have no place in the past, and their ties to the present are tenuous, at best, made to rely on the object permanence of weak brains. Such a well of hope they must keep, then, for future days which will again raise them to life...

Devil Console

"What are you listening to?"
No time to lie-
"Backstreet Boys," she blurts out. Her voice is her sister's. It happened sometimes.
He smiles, and, though small and placed without intention, this gesture is, nevertheless, placed just so as to scatter him out into a collection of particulars: a name, caught and bagged; a way of leaning without slipping, precarious tectonic laziness; hair kinked from being pulled from history, prehistory; a certain ease--


But perhaps this is also just what we call human: a collection of particulars, always. It is only the distances between them that we busy ourselves with agreeing and disagreeing over.


The secret to chopping quickly and efficiently is to forget you have fingers. This way, when you think of the knife, which you must in order to use it, you will not think of the knife in terms of fingers, in terms of the inevitable bloodsliceslip (because this mindset is not meant to keep this from happening, it is meant to economize and make efficient) and you will cut as knife, only, and not as man--but let us not forget what tools are for: the knife will cut faster, the apples will cook sooner, and the man will be fed sooner, and this is better, certainly. All roads lead back to the flesh; most especially those of polished metal; most especially those grafted in.
And perhaps this is what we will call posthumanism in the kitchen.


Devil console gunn cum fuh me
gunn cum fuh me wen no utta lookin
wen no utta dea tuh see dem bright devil e-yuhs
no utta but me
it lookin at me
wit dem ten windeh e-yuhs
an I kno
gunna take-uh me 'way
an wen yoo fine me in deh mornin
yoo not fine me
I be taken
yoo not seein me--
yoo seein wutda devil console dun decided tuh leave uh me.


/hurderp


Behind me
a boat
with sails made outta
bedsheets
handkerchiefs
and
...
snot.
/can'ttakeyouseriouslyworthtwoshitslol.

Mistake

Angel hair pasta spilled and looping over a mossy carpet

Broken bowl, broken planet

woops woops woops

Yours, just a little lighter

The sorta curly green stuff that grows at the crumbling edges of peat fields

Training me alive

Training me alive

Gomapda, little face

I'll try harder next time

The first time I read what is now one of my favorite short stories, for a class, it scared me. Not the story itself, but the day after in class. Everyone very clearly, very decisively spoke of the main character as crazy--and she was. And a part of me knew that as I read, but most of me did not. And so I wrote questions in the margins of my paper and my class members kept ending their comments with "because she's crazy."

After the second reading of this story (I've read it in at least three different classes now), I stayed behind after class and hesitantly asked the teacher if she thought the character was crazy. She told me she thought the character was responding to the situation in a way that made sense to her, and no, not really--though here, I think a faltering in memory leads me to paraphrase this a bit incorrectly.

This is a thing of great importance in my head, though I'm not entirely sure if it happened the way I think it did.

Taking some good advice.

"Someday I gunn go crazy, Jim. I gunn go crazy and you can't come 'cuz you the only thing that keepa me sane."

and

I remember lying

against your black and tan belly and thinking

I don't know how I lived without this

But here I am

steam filled organ sending rust to my knees,

costing my shoulders into

cheap

chop shop windmill blades

This is called living thoughtlessly [Iamtold]

In the present [itiscalled]

Because memory spurs desire

Wants for future

And in this form

I cannot afford

Tell yourself:

That memory's a dream

That picture's a lie

and you didn't die--

you're just sleeping

just sleeping.

I hate that my first inclination is to apologize for shortchanging out a bit on social interactions today. No, I don't hate the inclination--but if I were to actually apologize, I'd hate that. But I won't. I spread myself thin and if the fails went unseen then they didn't happen so there.

I remember precisely two things about today, and they happened within ten minutes of each other

A text and a touch

Everything else ran together like the weather

Today was entirely orange, I realized; and that is not an allusion or a metaphor, it is just a sense.

I am tired of thinking of waste and money and little toys screeching and going in circles when the lights go down the volume goes up my flesh curls right off my arms, I feel, and my ears do not know how to save themselves and I cannot bring myself to cover them and show that I hear sounds that are notsounds and

in the hospital a child with sooty eyes peers around the thin blue curtain that divides the beds. He looks at me. He looks at my legs. He looks at my brain. He looks at me.

"There is a way," he whispers, small sound, but it finds me and stings me and stays within me. I look at him. His fingers crunch up the curtain and twist at his side. I look at his hands. I look at him. I look at his hands.

"I can't hear," I say. "I hear everything." He nods quickly, looks away, at passing things, and back at me, my legs, my brain, back at me.

"That's alright. it's a secret anyway."

I watch his hands. Fingers curling.

These things should not be so tiring

Shiranaiyo--I don't understand

Even the things that are good decay into this

Fuck entropy

When I was really young I used to have a blinking tic. I didn't remember until my sister told me recently--I'd never thought of it as a tic, as something I did involuntarily, and I still don't quite. There were just always these...sets of things that I had to finish. There were others. In hindsight, it was pretty weird. I wonder if I was trying to swallow a clock. Just...doin' it wrong.

No crime has been committed And so Unforgivable unforgivable unforgivable and yet-

we shall yet call Kafka's servant a servant in the absence of his service; but should the master of the house appear and still-

unforgivable; he traitorizes his title and bastardizes his place in that house; his words become unbelievable and so he becomes unbelievable. He is not believed in.

I do not want to go back--I just..want to stop going in this direction, maybe. One-winged derp.

I am sick of kitsch I am sick of cruelty Stupid petty cruelty

If you're gonna do it, do it where it's deserved Where it'll mean right

Of repeated sounds and things that do not replicate with purpose

(EVEN THE REPLICATORS HAD A PURPOSE RAAAAAAAHHHH I miss me some stargate)

Sometimes I think my heart has grown two extra chambers

These, exclusively reserved for boiling

Connected to the main four by stiff ventricles

Sometimes I want to sigh like a steam engine

Sometimes I want to hiss from every cracked valve and vein

FUCK THE FUCK OFF

Virtual memory low--increase RAM

It don't remember most things

It don't remember headaches

It don't remember six-point pains splattering across its chest

Ain't got no ram just a buncha chew-necked sheep, Babe

Don't want nothin' if it won't be mine

Take what I get so don't go and give

Done

Out

Done.