From a Distance

From a distance we were close:

1.       Architecture of Reality: From the Perspective of my Father (the father is laying down in his chair the lights are rolling over his head.  Everything is taupe.)

This story will end.  There is nothing else to say.  These are my last breaths.  These are the last moments.  The hospital lights roll above my head, the faint chatter of nurses and the simplicity of it all, the routine dullness, the averageness, the sheets that I am laying on were made in a factory in China, the cotton is course and practical, there is a faint smell of rubber and a sweet smell to cover the fog of germs.  The walls are painted a very useful taupe.  No need to speak or say with aesthetics for gods sake!  These rooms upon rooms, practical shapes, boxes upon boxes must appeal to everyone, this is after all a place where people come to die.  These adornments of utter neutrality are the last images of so many lives, so many different lives.  Tacky in its numbness, its dumbness, the lack of voice.  These halls, if they were vocal chords, would resonate a low dull moan, and nothing more.  Unspeachable.  The florescent tubes are the same kind they put in factories, this is a sickness machine, this is a lab where the doctors challenge nature herself. 

The body at the end of the day reminds you that you were always a body, and it was always silently making itself up as it went along, without you, without your even realizing.  How sad to never know who we truly are and to only be reminded at these moments, when the body takes over, when all else ceases to be of import.  The world is becoming fuzzy and I am spinning ninety degrees, over and over again.  I have to stay conscious, I have to keep myself together.  I lift my finger to look at it, I try to bend it, but it no longer obeys my command.  Fuck, I am not god, I am mortal, I am being pushed on this generic chariot of metal and plastic to a room where so many others have looked up at the same spot on the ceiling and wondered what their bodies were up to and how long they could win the fight against themselves.  Oh to walk!  Oh to be able to do such simple things.  The most valuable commodity of life is time!  I know that we all want to be something to someone, to ourselves, to be remembered as a social monument or a familial one, for our lives to have meaning to and for this world, or to somehow constrict reality and know it well enough to let it speak its secrets to us, all those hidden things just out of reach.  All that stuff pleasant and horrible, I say stuff, because that is what the physists say, they call it all stuff.  Generic.  Keep it simple.  We have to cover everything here.  Where is my finger?  Where is my single self?  Where is the control that I always associated as long as I can remember with being a human? 

I no longer remember the age of great learning, where we slither around on our bellies and learn with great skill and determination how to lift our heads, rolling eventually from front to back, back to front.  Nothing else is more difficult than the first time the body moved.  And all movement then was done with the head, as though there were a foreshadowing that the head is so big that it guides my body, makes me think that I was somehow directing this situation with the weight of my knowing.  Rather my cells are dividing fifty times and then stopping, I am a new human all the time, and my nervous system is running at 60.3 miles per hour, and my reward system is triggering at 1 mile per hour, and I am not sure how.  I am sure someone knows, perhaps.  That is why we all gather together, like great books in the library of time, packing in a whole lexicon of experience to trade and whisper to the others, rubbing our spines and covers. 

I don’t feel like these people know who I am, doctors, nurses, experts of the body.  They walk next to me with the same urgency they apply to all the patience, routine chaos, a matrix of activity that they are truly in tune with.  Hospitals are like elementary schools, it is true that the doctors care enough, that they have favorites, that they need to get certain things accomplished.  But it is also true that there is a job that they are showing up to and leaving, that there are shitty bosses who tell them what to do, who they care how they look in front of them, that there are people below them or next to them, some of whom they acknowledge, others who they ignore.  There is always a job between good deeds and people in society, the rest is privatized.

Weirdly enough I am not dead.  That is the strangest thing, to actually be a something at all.  To have been tossed from gene pool to gene pool into this life, to have gathered a sense of self, an illusion of will, to be a something- and not even know it at all.  At the end of it all to learn the greatest absence was the body itself, it has been following me like a shadow.  Secretly speaking its name between myself and all the others, acting, seemingly, for me, my greatest advocate, and yet, my body shakes, I am shaking all over, I am shaking like the turbo on an engine, I am pulsating all over rapidly, and I am trying to stay conscious.  Trying to keep it all together.  My energy slips and I can’t move anything, now I can’t lift my- anything, anything at all, nothing is moving, nothing, nothing, nothing is moving, nothing- nothing, nothing is moving, nothing, nothing, nothing at all, at all, nothing.

2.       Hard-Ships: From the Perspective of Ruby to Deb (a color cube of primary colors, two basic form ships, everything is primary, the face the hair, etc.)

It’s hard, because I have to  let you be ugly, which hurts because you are a part of me just as I am a part of you, and when I make the vision of you being ugly it means that part of me becomes ugly too, both for thinking you and for being a reflection of it. And I want to tell you off, and tell you that you are not just neglectful to me but to everyone you care about.  I want to tell you that I am glad that you have put me in your diffused pool of attention, but you are absent with your attention to everybody you hold dear.  I should have known because you have enjoyed the company of others in short cyclical spurts, defining a year or two at most of your life by one person and moving on.  I was naïve to think that I wouldn’t be a part of this.  That the others were just easy to manipulate or lacked a certain emotional refinement to figure you out.  But it turns out that you are just a slippery fish, that you are interested in presenting a sweet face but the full picture, which they may have all known and I was on the road to finding out, the full image of you is absent, you lack all sentimentality, you choose to listen to your podcasts over talking to your friends, you would rather go to a dance party then listen to my need for you, or my love for you, you would rather have things than people.  The arts have always been compassionate and attentive, and that simpatico, that ability to align with people means that the great works can resonate through the centuries, the same opera can make generation after generation cry.  Science on the other hand can seem clever though the years, or wrong, by strongly embracing the outside world it is either right or wrong against it in this futile yet valiant attempt to discover that which is outside of ourselves.  I have the harder part of this negotiation because I am capable of feeling so much more than you.  So when you leave I am the one who is feeling neglected, rejected, who has to sit with herself in silence for hours and process the feelings, or have a strange physical response to you, like a lack of hunger, or a sudden thirst, or a pressure like a urinary tract infection, or strange visions, or drowning in the feeling of you while the air around me looks white, fuzzy, and illuminated.  I have to deal with the fucking fact that I fucking feel and I fucking am trying to stop feeling so much for you.  You act like this is normal behavior, to just move away, and no big deal.  But then again you never knew what was going on in my life.  In some ways I always felt like we were in the middle and yet just beginning, always going deeper and deeper into the fact that we could truly comprehend each other, and be bigger thanks to the support of the other.  It hurts me now, like a shadow of a statue staining the ground once the monument has been removed, I feel imprinted with the void, the negative space, and the hallow resurrection of some shallow imposter that tries to fill in part-time where you once stood.  You pay attention to me when it is convenient to you, like all of the world was your mother, patiently waiting for you to be through with whatever you were preoccupied with and give attention to the feelings.

You make me feel tragically sad, which means that I tragically need to get over you.

3.       The Dance of the Flowers: From the Perspective of Ruby (like a Japanese drawing, all white and drawn lines, Ruby keeps looking over her shoulder turning to the camera at every line.  Sometime we see the whole room.  Stephany is played by a woman, the old boyfriend is played by Steven)

I looked up when she came through the door.  But said nothing.  We are close enough now that I don’t need to speak.  I think that says something, not speaking, not making words through tone together, not needing to fill the void, but letting it sit there in the room like some pet.  It is like the silence curled up at our feet and neither one of us needs to stroke its back, put a hat on it, make it do tricks for us.  There is no need for any clowning around. 

The weather was dreadful and it effected both of our moods.  Neither one of us was great at speaking on days like this anyway.  She simply hung-up her coat, dripped water all over the entryway, tilted her umbrella against the wall and came into the kitchen to look at the mail.  She sorted everything while I sensed her body in the space.  Now I was the cat, knowing that she was there and pretending to read.  Pretending that my attention was not focused on her.  I was glad that she was home, it was nice to see her.  She always makes me feel like my life is safe, like everything makes sense now.  That is the problem when you fall in love with someone, they make sense with you, and the body knows itself as not a self, but as a space that inhabits two people.  The body was never just a body, it was always also the things around it, always an echo and regurgitation of the chair you sit on that forms the shape of your spine, always the behavioral pattern of the person you are around all the time, always the exchange between yourself and the outside world.  My friend Jeremy has gone on for days about the Cartesian distinction between the outside of the body and the interior, but it is like telling a child the name of their hip, it is just applying words to the thing that already existed, it was there before a name came around to claim it. 

Same as Stephany, she is in the kitchen with or without her name.  I often think about all the things collected by one name, the variety of Stephany’s, the fact that there is no specificity about what a Stephany is, it’s just, her.  I look up at her now and think about how she has folded the name to fit her form, like a tailored piece of clothing she has wrapped the word Stephany around her body like a sarong and made it make sense to me.  How many Stephany’s live in how many minds, an ever flowing and changing ordering of people collected by the randomness of a name that doesn’t even make sense.  And why Stephany at all?  Why and how do so many mothers and fathers agree that this is a good name, the right sounds to always call a person with.  Her name, Stephany is like a code dialed through the air by all the voices of her lifetime, from birth to death, she responds to the code of Sss-tu-fone-eee.  She looks in my eyes differently, relates to me more candidly if I have said ‘Stephany’ before saying other things.  Somehow, for some reason, when I use this word, it brings her closer to me, it compresses the space between the two of us and all the world grows fuzzy and white.  Her eyes are the only thing I can see and they radiate at me, they grow in size and they sound out through sight in resonant syllables.  The name Stephany can do that, it can look through you when you use it, it can sound out in all the posters on the subway when you think it, all those eyes, the brown ones like hers, the brown eyes now will always, in some way, carry her name, they will always speak to me when I think her or think her when I see them.  She is so beautiful.  Not in a normal or boring way.  Not like her nose is really small, and her cheek bones protrude just so, but amazing in how I have adjusted to her, grown to her.  Like the shoes that brought me to her when we first met, she is always there carrying me places, making me think new and wondrous things, the kind of thoughts that can only happen when you are madly in love with someone, when you feel them from a thousand miles away, or- those eyes, those siren songs that sing to me forever in an instant, the kind that will never stop looking.  These things mean Stephany or rather it is this kind of stuff that Stephany has come to mean.  She has come looking for me, because I was looking for her.  We never find something if we weren’t able to see it.  People work like ghosts, they are always around, just sometimes you orient your mind right and then they illuminate, they show their face, or you turn your mind away and they politely pretend like they were never there at all. 

After Stephany finished sorting the mail she came and sat down across from me on a chair, her feet propped up on the wooden coffee table, her mood was insular.  I am of a similar disposition.  I thought about all those bills that wrote her coded name, what she meant to them, to the people who collect the money.  Stephany can also mean ‘the person who pays us $80 a month so that she can have heat’, that is also what Stephany means.  Stephany can be a statistic, Stephany can mean next to nothing at all.  That is the funny thing about collecting, when she becomes a number, just a Stephany, the kind without eyes that look at you and read you to you, when she is a number, then she means something only as a constellation.  She loses meaning, she spreads herself out across a wide surface and becomes a line between points, some haywire Sol LeWit, the topography of the cosmos, some telephone line, some internet.  She is interesting to some as part of a sum, as part of a larger whole.  Stephany means so many different things, how many Stephanys are alive right now?  The name can be a Ready Made, something found and repurposed with a new meaning.  Stephany herself is a Ready Made, I am always finding her, and she is always changing form, she is always interesting to look at, and completely absurd.  If the Ready Made takes away the hand of the artists in a Dadaist gesture, then the statistic is the best Ready Made ever made, it lacks the human touch- the way her eyes fall all over you, all around you, the touch of the eyes or the hands or the anything.  Stephany can be at a remove to some, she can remove you from yourself too.

Stephany leans back in her chair.  A postcard that has a kitten on it is thrown on the yellow table.  I will never know that Stephany, the one that lives in the friend Manon who wrote the postcard.  That is the hard part of living, loving so much and yet obtaining so little, being able to only contain a certain percentage while the rest runs around wild in other people.

The yellow coffee table that she has her legs propped up on is very stable and hard, yet she throws the card and it floats down upon the breeze of her gesture, like some paper crane that she mindlessly sent into flight.  The little kitten on that flat card was airborne, if only for an instant, and floated freely to the table.  Now it sits there, ever so, silent and picture perfect between us.  The silence of Manon’s knowledge of Stephany to me, the innumerable gaps in knowing Stephany as her expanse, her character through time, her residue in everyone she touched, effected.  The kitten between us is our pet of silence, we constantly reach out to groom the unknown realms between our knowledge of each other.  We comb the fur, we upkeep, we manhandle it to make it do what we want.  Sometimes it scratches our stomachs and we admit that it was our fault for being so ruff.  Absents is the beast between two people. 

Fortunately for us, love is flexible.  Love is bending to the shape of someone else’s logic, their invisible architecture, their true surface or depth.  The table is practical.  Nothing is more stubborn than objectivity.  There is no fun in it.  No fun and games without lies, without making up our humanity together, fibbing and believing.  The space between two. 

Jeremy also told me the other day that the word fun doesn’t even exist in every language.  He felt that fun was very American.  I realized that fun is very powerful. 

Please list the ten most powerful properties that rule the world: (When the number flashes, consider your list in your head)

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

The kitten is just an image, perched.  A façade.  The presence of absence.  The injury to truth.  All advertising is one giant party.  All the images dance together like flowers, a coded field of Pantone reality, a love letter to the fake.  All images are like Atlantis, they create dimensions in spite of our recognition that they are not there, yet we enter, we land, we are in utopia.  The image contorts comprehension, redirecting us from reality even though we know that what they represent is not real, just an afterglow of some other time.  Another ghost. 

Stephany: Hey girl, how was your day?

Me: It was not the best not the worst. 

Stephany:  What’s the matter?

Me:  Nothing does it seem like something is the matter?

Stephany:  Yeah, you look upset. 

Me:  Nah.

I shake my head.

There is no way that I can reach across the table right now to touch her.  There is just no way.

1,000 years later we are both dead.  10,000 years later the world has no more humans, but there are the remains of all the roads, all the temples to consumption.  If there were intelligent life it would look at us and wonder why we did nothing to stop our demise.

Stephany is interesting to me.  That is something that I can say about both of us.  We are absolutely interested in each other.  For now.  For now at least we really do care, and we really do try. 

I pick-up the postcard from Manon.  It is a short note, not saying much.  It makes me think, maybe I should send cards like that, for no reason, to say ‘hi’.  Saying ‘hi’ is really cool, it acknowledges that we are thinking about each other, and that alone is really special.  There are people in this world who literally no one thinks about.  How sad.  I don’t know who I would be without others, everything that I do is for them in some way, even the time that is for myself, completely for myself, is understood as an exchange that means I will be ready to give out more.  Give in, give out, like breath, all actions leave us and enter a something, or a someone, something happens, and that is the strangest thing of all, that at the end of the day, something happens. 

When I was in high school and still dating men, I was not out of the closet yet, I had a boyfriend who would fight with me about the phrase ‘you learn something new every day’.  He always said that some days are just boring, some days are just the same old thing, and I would jump on the bed, and shake my fists over my head and shout at the top of my lungs, that ‘No!  No!  Everything is always different, everything is always changing, there is no such thing as a return, it is always a new thing, every moment exists just for itself, stranded in time, singular!’  He fought back that ‘Difference does not mean learning’.  And I said, ‘Everything is learning, everything!’  I guess there are just some differences that can never be overcome.  I no longer date men.  And every woman I have been with is always teaching me something, and I like that.

Red: From the Perspective of Deb (background is painted like the sky and her face, make-up and clothes are all the sky too)

The very first time I saw Ruby I did not understand who I was truly encountering.  I think that is the way we meet, in a total cloud about all the enormity yet to come, as average as any other day directing our course, and telling us only half truths about its endless secrets.  Apparently the two of us met at the New Museum, but I have no recollection of the first encounter.  She was a very plan faced woman, seemingly, with blond hair and soft skin though she was a smoker.  There was nothing much to scream at me that she would be the love of my life, or that we would write each other’s stories in the silence between two bodies glowing in the speech that logic desperately tries to drain.

The party was the same as any other opening, there was vodka and lots of people trying to look pretty and comfortable in the shuffle. I was there with a friend who worked in the education department.