008: That Conversation I Remember

May 29, 2010 – 9:47 am

I had a dream about lines, monkeys, the smell of baking cakes, a wall of frozen rodents, the smell of a room after sex, ozone in the air, which I could see they looked like the tips of nails violating the ceiling, two shoes on the wire under which the big trucks drive, swinging things, trees, buns and buns of trees, transparent leaves, elaborate colors, like those inside the colon or heart or ear.

Slow movement and jaggy lines, which are things from another work, which has yet to be spun out.

Lilly said it was all oh so much homespun and yarning. Anybody, she said, can make a random list and make it mean something to someone; it’s all about odds making. How many recipe poems have you read about grilled squirrel.

Dream something else, she said. Dream a river with just as much flotsam as water, wait for the one face to rise to the oily surface and pluck it out, just the head and the suffocation-white face, and kiss it on the lips, which is what I had a dream about two weeks ago. Just kidding.

I had a dream about different ecologies, I said. I climbed to the top of a tree and saw a line of purple ants. A big blue slug was curled on a frond and watching it with a lamp of dinner in its eyes was a thing that was both a chicken and a shark, which is about as real as I can get. That’s how I broke my arm. I woke up on the floor. I’d fallen from the top bunk. It wasn’t the pain that woke me up.

I study the brain under the conditions of REM. Still, sure, I watch you in your sleep, you sleeping just yesterday. At lunch the other day a woman persisted in looking at you. Her shirt was blue. Sometimes she looked like she was about to come over, ask, do I know you, did we go to school together, are you my long lost brother? But then she appeared to forget what had been on her mind. She went back to her lunch, which was some sort of soup. You didn’t even notice. More than three quarters of a day is pure solipsism.

No, it wasn’t the pain that woke me up, I said. It was something else.

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007: Life is Good

May 28, 2010 – 10:08 am

“When dreams finally descend,” Lilly said, “we wake up.”

“That’s probably true,” Henry said, laughing.

It was a hot day, a day that would require lots of water. I remember mountains a half-day’s walk in the distance. He said he was going to them and that we would maybe see him again in a two or three months. We’d just let him off, an hour’s ride out into the desert.

“I’ll follow them north,” he’d said.

We spoke little on the way. Henry watched the flat land pass. He watched the clouds. When Lilly spoke, she whispered. She whispered, “What do you think the cat’s doing? Do you think she’s sleeping?”

I felt the road beneath the accelerator pedal, the staccato thrump, thrump, thrump of cattle guards, pebbles under the tires.

I whispered a response: “Probably sleeping.”

Henry appeared at the house a few weeks before this drive. He had a big pack and a weathered book in his hand. Over dinners we talked about French films and Mexico and, of course, dreams, which is Lilly’s research. We said that we should see each other more. He took allergy pills and repaired his sandals on the porch. Small red ants walked on his hands while he restitched the straps and hammered on new rubber soles. Lilly watched him work. She watched the ants. When he was ready to leave he told us so. He asked would I drive him and drop him off in the desert near the mountains and that he knew exactly where.

“This is good. This is the place,” he said. I eased off the accelerator and slowed to the shoulder. Lilly, Henry, and I got out of the car. I opened the trunk. Henry pulled the pack out and put it on, smiling with the labor of it. He said, “Thanks.” Then he started off toward the mountains in the distance. He stopped, turned and waved, and Lilly and I waved back.

We drove home without words. Maybe Lilly was imagining the cat. Lilly might’ve been wondering if cats dream when they sleep. Do they watch themselves in their dreams, if they do dream? But I suspect another possibility. Something in her might’ve been wishing she was Henry, a wish we might’ve shared on the drive home. While the cat slept.

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006: On Listening

May 27, 2010 – 9:42 am

When the storm came, I thought of signs. A red Budweiser memory speaking in almost unintelligible script, a women with long blonde hair and a knife in her pocket that took me back to the sounds of church and imagined images of ghosts, the powder smell of a man’s shoulder in a crowded room (I must brush against it and hide from him because he will soon be murdered by time), a room that had never really been crowded but that I remember as empty and long, colored by the glow of candles in burgundy jars, and still echoing with the music of troubadours and heavy with the smell of ink and ivory and the repetitiveness of funeral smoke. False poetry.

I waited for you in the rain. For years, drifting years. I waited for you in the pews on which the midnight attendees had left their bibles opened to pages I read one by one, re-imagining their experience of homily and devotional horror. Their conversations were cluttered with sins trivial as toys, expressions of guilt they’d read about as children, of feeling about feeling and loss and gain; and in between breathing, in those prepositional pauses (but prepositional to what?), where listening is the accumulation of beats, I heard water, water dripping, drops falling one after another. I listened harder. One second, one drop, another second, another drop, several echoes, and the soft brushing of candle flames against the air, which is the sound of a sleeping house, then thunder that sounds like the cracking of stone.

I waited for you in the rain, like a forgotten film. I listen. I watch you penetrate an empty room. Look behind you now. It’s possible I could be watching, breaking the logic of the order of things: successiveness, passage, syntax, endless doors, hierarchy, juxtaposition). My life is pure speculation, an infinite circle of edited scripts.

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005: On Polygons

May 26, 2010 – 2:06 pm

I met him in a place where the pigeons gather because of how, by 4PM or so, the reflection of the sun burns against the brick wall of the Federal Bank across the street, and pigeons, I assume enjoy the diminishing of the day. From below our table we heard the ripple of flags in the breeze. I was counting polygons in my head, sipping beer, considering their prevalence in the built environment, and wondering about the relationship between the crystal and the fruit, the screen and cloister cell.

“I wonder what Nana was thinking, staring at me from inside the rectangle?” Henry asked, suddenly.

I was a little surprised to hear that Henry had somehow guessed my own thinking. “Nana?” I asked.

“There you are. I admit it. I admit wondering about it for significant periods,” Henry said.

“You mean what Nana must have been thinking?”

“No,” Henry said, “what she was thinking inside the rectangle.”

“I see,” I said.

I watched the lines of pigeons on the cornice of the bank building. Their numbers also weighed down the cables that suture the electric template of our lives. I concluded that curves could be the result of the sun, of time, of birds. Then my mind turned back to the nature of polygons and their prevalence and of Nana and, most significantly, Henry, who assumed just then the posture of a man with too many secrets to tell, which is the posture of one hundred pigeons forming a curve above the road.

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004: Breaking Stasis

May 25, 2010 – 11:57 am

He said to himself that every day he would perform the same act. Significantly, this act could not be a trivial or everyday one, such as drinking an inebriating liquid or showering at precisely the same time each day. It would have to be some act that had significance, meaning beyond the act itself.

Immediately, he sensed a problem with his decision, even during the performing of that act. We should probe it. One problem was the question of sameness, which is often confused with the concept of change. Same, for example, is an adjective. It can be used in this sense:

“Let’s go to the same place we went to yesterday,” he said.

“If we go to the same place as we did yesterday,” his friend said, “I will flood the injectors with gaseous Cryonetrium.”

“But today,” he said, “today, it’s a different restaurant by virtue of this being a different day.”

“Just because it’s a different day, Captain, doesn’t mean it’s a different restaurant or that the food will improve.”

He sought to verify his friend’s notion. He drove to the restaurant and found that the restaurant was, indeed, a different restaurant, as this day the sun was hidden behind clouds, giving the restaurant a different profile on the street, where, on the curb, different people had parked different automobiles.

He phoned his friend, whose name was the same this day as it was on Saturday and therefore doesn’t require revealing. “It’s a different restaurant. The sun’s behind the clouds. And if you recall, yesterday there was a green car at the door. Today, it’s a red car.”

“That doesn’t mean anything, Bones.”

“Yours is a problem of precision,” he said to his friend. “Consider John Timmon’s short film entitled change, which is strangely familiar to me even after all these years, or Carianne Garside’s painting called at the same time. No leaf can ever be precisely the same as another leaf. If I decide to place a leaf on a surface every day, the leaf will have subtle differences and the surface I lay it on will have a different accumulation of particulate matter. Nor can I claim that I as the actor will be the same actor as that actor who began the action, as one day I may be rich, another day, poor. When we claim that one man is the same man we mean this as an act of identification or complaint not as an act of intrinsic validity. What’s more, if we perform the same action as the day before we are enacting or performing, rendering an approximation of an image we hold in our minds and attempting to confirm some subtle sense of historical phenomenology.”

“Shoot me, Lieutenant, the Borg’s crushing me to meal,” his friend said, closing the line.

But even though he knew his friend was no longer on the line, he said into the phone, “Let’s go back to the painting at the same time, Carianne Garside’s painting, whose title mocks us with its fascinating irony. Its circles form a counterpoint to the angularity of leaves and fingers.”

How did the question of sameness and change come to him? This doesn’t matter. Perhaps it might in a different fiction.

We can, however, speculate that the concept of stasis played some role. All about him, on his drive home, on his journeys to the market, as he straightened papers on the judge’s desk, he witnessed the panorama of what his life had become. This is when Timmon’s film began to haunt him even though he hadn’t seen it in years. He heard the speaker’s voice come to him on the wind. When he woke in the morning, he heard the last echo of the voice trail out the window: It would have to . . . It would have to . . . and the song of the birds would rise to wave the words away.

And later, as his friend compared the present world to those claimed by science fiction programming, words such as ritual, great purpose, and systematically began to form as regular patterns in otherwise banal surfaces and phenomenon. He saw the word purpose form in the regularities of brick walls. He identified complex conventions in the heads of lettuce. In the sound of running water, he heard the chanting of monks. In recent election results, he formulated a new equation for calculating moribundity. He began to long for states of changelessness or equilibrium or unchanging rhythmic repetition.

He ran to the cinema. He sat in the flickering light of that lonely place and watched the film. He watched it several times. He watched it again and again and, after several more viewings, something stunned him, a realization, a recognition, a revelation: on the screen he was witnessing his own hand. He watched his own finger over and over press that leaf onto the surface, and that by some mysterious method, some confounding or weaving of time, the filmmaker had captured his daily ritual, an action he thought he’d kept secret.

Still more terrifying, the image of the painting suddenly came to him, Carianne Garside’s painting at the same time: those green and orange circles, wherein, with a brush, the artist had captured the repeated patterns of his daily movement through life.

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003: Why I Went North

May 24, 2010 – 8:48 am

Soon it clear’d up; the clouds began to fly,
The driving north refin’d the show’ry sky;
Then to pursue our journey we began:
Ovid, The Metamorphosis, Book 6

In 2015, he asked when had I learned the color yellow and the sound of chimes. He called them “travel things.”

My father reached into the mountains and pulled a goat from a high, narrow place, as it was about to fall to the stones. It hadn’t yet experienced the art of slipping. I asked him what he was making. “Problems for you to solve,” he said. “Everyone knows the last thing Brutus saw was the sky.”

In 2017, it died in my arms. I watched its bones grow in the garden, in the lawn, like mushrooms, in the thinning shapes of winter in the distance. I asked my father where I should put the color and the sound, these “travel things you say you made?”

He said, “Those in the north dream of the south, and everyone knows the converse. Your problem is that you didn’t make the world and everything in the world–roads, clouds, the wind, especially the wind; I think you can guess why–makes you envious that you didn’t make it and that you’ll never ever be first. You can be many things, but you can never be my father.”

“I’ll go north then,” I said.

“Why north?” he said.

“Because east and west we’re blocked by water.”

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002: What I Saw in the Baker’s Window

May 23, 2010 – 9:42 am

I wonder about my face. It’s something I’ve never observed.
Lucy told me once, “But you have mirrors in your house.” I said, “You’re crazy if you think what’s in that mirror is flesh and bone?”

And so, I wonder about things I have yet to see in the round, width-blown vision of my own eyes, which has never really observed the sun but has (vision has) an enormous experience with light. I have yet to see China. And the moon I simply can’t resolve.

As a child I saw myself in corners or spaces of thinking. What mirrors framed could be stunning and disappointing. What do you see when the light goes on and you compare what’s in the mirror to the nightbefore’s concoction when you watched yourself walking through an alley, when you heard yourself speaking in Hungarian in another room, when you leapt from the rooftop to rooftop and at the edge of a friend’s house at the bottom of the neighborhood and stretched yourself into the wind and flew into the clouds lit above in yellow by the moon?

I told Lucy: “I am a line and a circle.”

Lucy said, “Stop smiling like that.”

I said, “I didn’t know I was smiling.”

Poor Lucy.

Yesterday I had shorter legs. I stood as my mother had always wanted me to (or was it my father?): with my back straight and my eyes unblinking in the blinking eyes of the enemy who wanted me but couldn’t find the words to ask. I pressed a point and was made Queen. I measured myself by the marble statue of the Lonely Statesman rearing above a pool glittering with pennies and nickels. His stone fist is impossible to discompose. He once looked out onto a field where in the distance a country needed making and he would shape it and survive. A small brown bird stands on his fist and now he stares into the window of a bakery.

Where I stand watching his reflection and the reflection of the bird–the fist in the air, the eyes an accretion of purpose (as purpose must have gravity) or terror, his old frock coat opened just enough to suggest the dimensions of greatness and the pathetic imagination of the sculptor–with a bag of bread. In the corner of my eye, I see a tall woman. I want to keep my eyes on the statue. But she calls me, this image in this public mirror, this woman I’ve never seen, standing and watching. I have to look. For a moment, I imagine that she’s a stranger or that she’s returned from a trip that took years to complete because the ship was slow or the roads were poor, and that, in this mirror, as the others pass with their own bags, I’m seeing myself in actuality for the first time, which is, of course, impossible.

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001: On Precision

May 22, 2010 – 9:18 am

“That night–I remember–it was so cold, we didn’t want to touch each other,” she said. “It was blue, cold, a night without constellations.”

He said, “It was a long time ago.”

She took this response to mean: He doesn’t remember the night. She took this to mean: In ten years, he won’t remember me.

“You’re referring to the walk,” she said, “the walk we took, the walk we took through the snow from the station. Was it Rome, Hartford, was it that junction in New Mexico when we got lost later in the mountains and we almost froze?”

He persisted. “It was a long time ago.” He watched her through the candle light. He watched her watching him. He took her persistence to mean: She doesn’t remember the night. What is she, therefore, remembering?”

Both recalled many nights where things went without touch, when his fingers tapped a few times or did nothing but rest on the linens; when she flipped the switch down and all he heard was steady breathing; when he stood at the window, framing himself against the moon’s blue light, which, they say, is the ocean insomniacs fall into.

Neither of them remembered the precise night. Maybe he’d been guessing. But she wondered: would she remember his eyes by this night’s candle light? He wondered: would he remember her eyes, the way this candle flame, like two white icicles, sliced in her eyes?

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Bio and Project: 100 Days Summer 2010

May 13, 2010 – 5:07 pm

My name is Steve Ersinghaus.  In my main work, I’m Professor of English at Tunxis Community College, where I’ve taught writing, literature, and new media courses since 1995.  I moved to Connecticut from El Paso, Texas that same year.   I am also a poet and fiction writer.  This will be my third year participating in the fun, exciting, and challenging 100 Days projects: year 1 I wrote one hundred poems; year two I wrote one hundred stories; this year I want to move to a new category: fictions.  These fictions will be built from the short films generated by John Timmons or other work generated from his.

What do I mean by fictions?  Mine is a loose definition.  By fictions I mean imagined writing that can range across narrative prose forms and may involve philosophical, analogical, historical, character-driven, or anecdotal subject matter.  A fiction may be an imagined artifact, carrying the architecture of story as a means.  Or it may simply be a conclusion or argument advanced by an imagined character or structured in an imagined world. It may be a way of searching for form from an origin without having to worry about what that origin may be.

Why would I chose this method?  One reason is to play with a variety of potential themes as devices for organization, word-play, association, and exploration, unencumbered by the requirements of story.  Other reasons also come to mind.  Certainly a writer can develop an image in poetry or story.  For my purposes, I’d like to understand where an image might go in a string of language originating from another work.  I’d also like to play with phenomenological dynamics such as color, spatial scales, actions and causes, and sense shapes in prose or hypertext.  Let’s call this the metaphor of a water drop plopped onto a complex surface.  Where will the water drop go?

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100 Days 2010

April 25, 2010 – 10:01 pm

I’ll be participating in this summer’s 100 Days project. This year I’ll be writing fictions on the Borges model, meaning forms unconstrained by story frameworks.  Last year I lead the project with a story a day for one hundred days.  Doing this was an amazing experience.  But now, rather than form, I want to concentrate on language, which I hope will help in the writing of my next novel, The Man Who Fell Into the Sky.  This year I’ll be focusing on developing language from John Timmons’s short films.

It’s going to be a blast.  We start May 22.

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100. The Receiver

August 29, 2009 – 10:10 am

The football game didn’t go well. Half way through the first quarter a herd of bulls stampeded down the stadium tunnel and scattered on the field. The quarterback had just fallen back. The receiver was thinking, “I’m open.” He saw the ball in the air and as it was about to float slowly into his hands, a perfect pass, a perfect play, he smacked against the solid wall of an impassable bull. When he got up, he thought, “I haven’t seen anything stranger than this.”

At a bar in Manzanillo, a man told a woman, “Bulls interrupted a football game in Los Angeles. They just ran in, something like fifty big bulls, down he tunnel.”

The woman disagreed. She said, “I heard it was over one hundred bulls.”

Word got out in a Shanghai neighborhood as such happenings often go global. It was a girl this time who told her father as he came home from work.

“Bulls, bulls, bulls in the stadium,” she said.

He said, “In LA. Yes, I heard.”

At dinner he told her a story about the mountain deer, how one time his father’s father had been working a garden under the shadows of the mountain. His grandfather looked up at the sound of thunder but saw no clouds and in the sky above the shadows where he often watched the birds fly he saw hundreds of deer in a great herd as if they’d been called to war. They were more deer than he’d ever seen passing under the mountain, more deer in one place than he’d ever see again.

“What happened?” his daughter said.

“Well,” the father said, “he watched them go by. He watched how they raised a tremendous amount of dust. But then they passed and for a moment he watched and listened and when everything became very quiet and the birds started to sing again, he got back to work.”

The girl waited for something more profound, she listened for the magic that typically follows, and then it suddenly struck her and she laughed. Her father laughed. The mother, who came in with more food, laughed too.

Word had already travelled through Australia, New Zealand about the bulls in the stadium.

In Belfast, a police officer said, “What happened?” Two men were in a ditch with their car. Their foreheads were bloody from the accident but neither man would let go of a radio.

“It’s bulls,” one of the men said.

The other man said, “Bulls in a stadium in Los Angeles. We were listening to the game and the place was overrun by bulls.”

“Bulls?” the police officer said.

He slid down the ditch and asked the men for the radio. But they wouldn’t give up the radio. The police officer grabbed the men’s knuckles and all three of them tugged, looking like wrestlers, as each in his own way and each with his own strength fought for the radio.

Two hours after the interruption the bulls had been removed from the stadium. People with bags and small shovels cleared the field of debris. The concession stands saw increased sales. Officials called in people who knew how to handle bulls; they called in cattle trucks. The crowd and the players and the coaches waited.

But what neither the couple in Manzanillo, nor the family in Shanghai, nor the Irishmen knew was that when the game resumed with fewer people in the stadium, the receiver glanced down field every time he was thrown a pass. He would run, a bootleg maybe, make his motions, and as the ball approached, he would take his eyes off of it, glance over his shoulder, expecting a powerful blow. He remembered the impact. He remembered the hard impact of his body against the bull’s body as he reached high for the ball. In his mind, he felt the memory as an immovable and illuminated surface against his shoulder and ribs and hips. He would carry the memory of the collision for the rest of his life, and even when he forgot the bulls, as everyone else would, the memory of the bull’s impassability remained, like an extra skin or elastic organ, so that he always felt like he was in close contact with someone who wasn’t really there, sleeping beside an enormous but invisible membrane, or in conflict with an additional enemy on the field.

“You’re just a little slower these days,” the offensive couch said. “Not much but just enough.”

“Just enough for what?” the receiver said.

“You haven’t gained any more weight,” the coach told him, “but you’re just a little slower. And your reaction time. What’s happened to your reaction time?”

The receiver stared at the coach. He said, “I don’t know.”

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99. The Sentence

August 28, 2009 – 1:23 pm

He started drinking at 6 in the morning, was sober by 2 in the afternoon, but for the life of him he couldn’t say who that was showering in the bathroom, whose or what gray cat had just started up the hall, why the room’s width had grown in size, and what was that shape in the smoke curls above the ash tray, a mouse tail, a hook of hair, a suggestion of surf, or a letter of some language he was as yet unaware but would soon learn?

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98. Lily’s Trash

August 27, 2009 – 9:55 am

Down for review.

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97. Barry

August 26, 2009 – 9:29 am

Bart, for example, who was never associated with great tragedy but with awkward steadfastness, Bart, who would never be associated with a memorable wedding, watched his father quickly taken by cancer. His father had stayed active for as long as possible and made sure that every morning and every night Barry, a lab mix he’d found late in life, was fed. And then Bart’s father died.

The day after his father died, which was the day of the funeral, Bart walked into his father’s house and saw Barry standing on his haunches in the doorway of the kitchen with a peculiar seriousness on his yellow face and in his large black eyes. Barry’s tail swished back and forth behind him. He watched Bart with unnerving and concentrated expectation. But what was Barry expecting?

The sun shone brightly in the room. The light through the kitchen windows had a certain white slowness, a cold angularity that slanted onto Barry’s tail as it swept back and forth across the linoleum, raising a gold dust of hair and motes into the air.

Bart stood watching this amazing confluence of light and movement and time. Bart for all his steadfastness suddenly understood what the light and Barry were telling him. It wasn’t a revelation. It wasn’t a stroke of religious validity or, as they say in literary circles, an epiphany. It was nine o-clock in the morning and someone needed to feed Barry and Barry was probably very hungry. No one had fed Barry the night before, at least Bart hadn’t remembered doing so in yesterday’s confusion.

And so, from then on, for Bart, Death became an image. Death became a dog sitting at the door to a bright room. The light is white. It breaks through the windows at an angle. In this light and in this room a dog wags its tail, waiting to be fed.

Sometimes when Bart came home from work, Barry would be waiting at the door, wagging his tail, and Bart would think of his father and smile.

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96. Remember the Time Travelers

August 25, 2009 – 8:41 am

“Remember the time travelers?” the velociraptor asked.

“I remember,” the other velociraptor said with grinning, dromaeosaurid wistfulness. “They were so crunchy and gooey and helpless.”

“Not so helpless.”

“Yes, helpless, coming out of their machine, setting up shop so close to the house, raising sounds that would’ve made grandmother water the weeds with her breakfast. Rude they were but with that delicate crunch.”

“What was that, that loud machine, they called it a gun? You’d think they would’ve learned to use it. Remember how that screaming time traveler fired the gun every which way? He was tasty.”

“But I still don’t know what it was. It was a gun but what was it?”

“No matter,” said the velociraptor. “I wish more would come, with their serious faces, their serious instruments, and the way they stood amazed to be here, excited like the little ones get when the garden eaters migrate.”

“I can still taste them,” the other velociraptor said. “I wonder if we could be time travelers, too. Their machine is still here, unused, wasting away.”

“That’s true,” said the velociraptor. “I remember the sequence of numbers. We can appear in time wherever we wish and then leap back. We’ll snatch some of the time travelers, bring them here, and breed more of them. We’ll never lack for that delicate crunch and those tasty heads.”

“Let’s go then. Let’s go to that place they called the desert,” said the other velociraptor. “It’s feast time.”

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