4: Bollenia

This title means nothing. But it pleases me.

I had a moment today. I do not have many of them anymore, these days, at least; I did last year. I was an incredibly nervous person (still am) and it was more difficult to hide there, I think--I was poked and prodded and preened by every sound, every smell then; but I do not feel as many things now. It is a strange thing.

But I did have a moment today. In my Eng 350 class. So I stopped everything and wrote, before I forgot. I do these things without thinking. What? Play. Meshing. Thinking. Editing. This is how I entertain myself in class; this is how I find honey. And this, here, is as close as I can get to describing that process, which is not instinctual, but has come to be close to it:


Turn, turn. I am twisting my pen cap; micron .005. like it is the top of a pill bottle. With just enough pressure, it'll pop up a bit. But a little too much, and it almost slips out of my fingers. I jolt a bit, instinctively moving forward to catch it or collect it, wherever it falls. But it does not fall. I have felt a moment's anxiety for nothing. And as this moment happens, I am thinking of you; artfully, deftly, I smudge that feeling, that anxiety, into that thought. And it is beautiful and pleasing and you are whole. This is what happens when you make pets and toys of fleas.

This is a very difficult thing for me to describe, and even writing in the moment, it has come out garbled. The last line is the truest of them, I think: this is, indeed, what happens when you make pets and toys of fleas. When you play with...yourself, really. No lewdness intended in that statement.

In my Psychology class last year, we learned about the several theories about how reactions and emotions and input work--whether one sets off the other, they happen at the same time, or something of sorts. I forgot a good deal of it. But I remember one of them said that what we feel and what we think we feel are not always the same; responses are not exclusive. I heard that part at a lecture, akshully. It went kinda liek this:

Nora is reading an engrossing romance novel. The male character, Lonshawn, is a dashing cad, except his suddenly head over heals for Deli, the female protagonist. In chapter suchandsuch, Lonshawn becomes very disturbed after Deli does something maybe a tad dangerous. Goes out to get a fruit pie while her attacker is loose or something. Anxious for her sake, Lonshawn grabs her arm and pretty much drags her back to his apartment (all dashing cads have apartments), despite her protest (like any woman, Deli loves a good fruit pie). He says it's because he loves her--dragdragdrag. The violence of this gesture creates an anxiety in Nora; but the follow-up profession of love turns what might have been anxiety-fear-anger-getyourmisogynisticmitsoffmepal into anxiety-nervousness-love'spalpitations. The symptoms are misattributed to something else, something decidedly fluffier. Nora begins to dream of sonofabetch cads who would drag her around by the arm, too.

It is this sort of skewing action; I am aligning parts just left of what they should be to create a desired effect. In the same way that one creates a picture, I work to create a moment. The result is not the same as Nora's, but the action is--that's all I was trying to get across. The verb. The shift. There are very little opportunities for it, and very little time in which to work. It takes practice. It takes editing. It takes thoughtlessness.

The end result is this: I might have simply thought "Oh--that pen cap didn't come off as I expected it too. I suppose I look silly for having jumped a bit." But I covered this thought before it could breath. Instead, I saw a face; both horns and no horns, curled hair and shorn. I saw you, as I remember you; and you, as you are now--as I edit you.
It's become like a game of Where's Waldo now--in almost all of my poems and short stories since then, there will be a character that bears traces of you. I have become so terribly fond of breaking you into pieces: one with horns, one with clay, one a god, one a shade. There is something cruel in all this; but it is not enough to stay my hand.
I could say more here on you and on moments, but I will not; it would be ugly and denatured, and hurt more than just this blog.

It is a pleasant thing, for the artist, to sense the color that sits in the flea's belly through other means. When I paint, I feel it clinging to the corners of my fingers, drying quickly into a stubborn new smudge of skin. When I write, it stretches and shapes out before me, and I see all the things it colors; I see the form, the body of the color.

But artists are just men as well; Ettlinger went mad. He shows there is still a touch of play, a lean toward ruin in the artist. I am not mad; but I am not at all opposed to play. I enjoy what impressions I get of puce through all the world's art; but, at the same time, I take a certain delicious pleasure in squeezing the little bug, just a bit, maybe a bit more, until I can see that good, heavy color through the tight stretch of the flea's skin. It is enticing; it is incensing. It is all a very fine game to me.

And this is as best I can describe something that sits in a large green chair, beyond the reach of my brain.