Childhood is an ongoing historical fiction that changes based on who you are when you’re examining it.
Who you are in certain periods and chapters in your life, determines what your childhood is.
Was would imply that childhood is fixed in some kind of static port, but that would not be accurate.
Is because it changes according to you, the viewer.
(Photo by Henri Cartier-Bresson)
I tell myself stories in the dark, Anya.
It helps. Or maybe it doesn’t.
Maybe it makes things worse. Or keeps everything the same. Which is a different kind of worse.
Anya I long to reach you only because I know that you are unreachable. It keeps my longing in a chrysalis state, a cocoon state. Nothing ever grows, it simply hums and palpitates and aspires toward growth. It is the shadow twin of growth.
Anya I couldn’t reach you in life, not your deep and true center, and I cannot reach you in death, so my relationship to you remains one of thorny and perpetual expectancy. To reach you would mean a betrayal of dreams. Or perhaps they are illusions masquerading as dreams. How to tell the difference?
If the center is where grief lies, I have been spanning the perimeter, dancing the same lame jig for far too long. Someone once wrote you should proceed from the dream outward. What about proceeding from reality inward?
What are we gonna do with ourselves Daniel?
Like right now?
Like ever. Are you gonna go to college?
I don’t know, but I don’t think so.
Why you’re smart?
I hate school. You know what Mark Twain said?
What?
There’s nothing wrong with school, just don’t let it get in the way of your education.
Ooooh, I like that. That’s a good one. Well whatever you do you’ve got your stories. You’re going to be a famous writer aren’t you?
I don’t know.
Well I do. And you’re going to be. Trust me. I know these things. I may not know what . . . what was that word again?
What word?
Petulant. I may not know what petulant means but I know you’re gonna be a famous writer. World famous. And I’ll say I knew you when. Remember how you used to put me in some of your stories? Do you still do that?
Sometimes, yea.
Good. Keep writing about me okay?
Okay.
Anything you want. Just include me in your stories. Don’t forget about me. Write whatever you want. Write about the time your crazy friend Anya came to the schoolyard at three o’ clock on a Saturday with a bottle of stolen peach brandy and . . . and you and her got drunk together . . . and then . . . and then she kissed you.
She kissed me?
Which is exactly what Anya did.
Her head rose from my shoulder and her mouth pushed into mine. Her tongue snaked past my lips and initiated my tongue. Wagging, jostling, probing, pinning, curling. A sloppy and frenetic tango, a fevered joust.
A part of me stood outside myself, watching, recording, narrating.
You are now kissing Anya and Anya is kissing you. This has never happened before. It is happening now. Notice the slitted dance of her tongue. Notice the peach-heat of her breath in yours. The bulging rhythm of her jaw. Her hand on your cheek. The wet, clicking unity of your mouths. Notice these things. If you pay strict enough attention, if you crystallize with rapt intent, you will always have this moment. It will be yours forever. It will deepen over time. It will grow in value, depth, complexity. You will be able to live and die inside of it repeatedly, endlessly.
Pay good, strict attention.
You are now kissing Anya for the first time, always.
Remember when we were kids and we’d sometimes have sleepovers and listen to the dark together? That’s what you called it, Anya, listening to the dark.
Sometimes we’d pretend to be camping. We’d set up a tent and eat candy and look up at the glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling, and the planets and meteors too. The stars were yellow and the meteors were red and the planets were all different colors. And you’d say let’s be quiet and listen to the dark and we’d listen for a little while but you could never keep quiet for long and you’d start asking me questions like what did the dark sound like to me and what was I thinking but my favorite part were those intervals of silence when we were not only listening to the dark but also breathing it and perhaps dreaming it. At least that’s how it felt to me.
And it was because of you Anya that I started naming different types of dark, listing them. Warm-dark, cave-dark, void-dark, womb-dark, sleep-dark, Eros-dark, blank-dark, siege-dark. And then there’s that anonymous dark that gets inside your head and behind your eyes and coils around your lungs and constricts your breathing. There is also curse-dark, which casts a prolonged spell, a pall. And then there’s lonely, but naming it doesn’t help. Not in the same way.
Now that you’re gone Anya and I’m still talking to you I wonder what kind of dark this is. Communion-dark, veil-dark?
We used to listen to the dark together as kids and now I talk to the dark with the hopes of hearing from you again. Echo-dark. Or better yet, Anya-dark. An entire category of dark devoted exclusively to you. How do you feel about that?
Excerpt from No Man’s Brooklyn:
I put on my headphones, turned on my music and hit shuffle. I eased into Nina Simone’s version of “I Shall Be Released.” I wondered about the state of Anya’s soul, and then thought about her body and where it might be buried.
Anya’s funeral had occurred and I hadn’t been there. Did she look pretty? Had they falsified her with one of those frigidly beautiful funeral makeovers? What color dress did they display her in? Were her hands folded neatly across her chest? Anya could never keep her hands still. They were the primary extensions of her whirlwind personality. Death had stilled the whirlwind.
I had been at my mother’s funeral. Or some part of me had been there. Another part of me had been absent. All I remember is that she seemed waxy and unreal. Like the plastic fruit people put in bowls. Ever since then, whenever I see plastic fruit in a bowl, I think of my mother, my mother’s neatly arranged corpse, and I feel a little queasy, a little sad.
When my grandmother died I didn’t attend her funeral. I was in L.A. and didn’t make the trip back. I didn’t see the point in attending. We hold secret funerals in our heart all the time. Between the living and the dead, the silent communion never ceased.
Excerpt from No Man’s Brooklyn:
I come from nowhere Daniel, and nowhere is the exact center of the world. Isn’t that exciting?
I agreed with Anya that it was, even though I wasn’t sure what she meant. And I knew if I asked her to elaborate she would simply repeat what she had said—Nowhere is the exact center of the world. Anya’s way of explaining things was to repeat whatever she had said with greater emphasis, with italicized boldness.
Anya was perversely proud of the fact that her unofficial birthplace had been a Brooklyn trashcan, and that her original background remained an unsolved mystery.
I was sometimes jealous of Anya’s origins. I wished I had come from that special nowhere, and that my family wasn’t my real family but stand-ins for my other family, the real ones who I didn’t know. I didn’t want to meet my real mother and father. I wanted them to remain an intrigue and a possibility. A shadowy idea to which I could feel tethered.
I think Anya felt that way. She never talked about wanting to find her parents. Then again, would you really want to meet the mother or father who would dump you in the trash and leave you to die?
That being said, she never spoke of her circumstances with rancor or bitterness but rather with curiosity and zeal. Perhaps, in her mind, there was no heartless abandonment, because she truly believed she had come from the center of nowhere.
Review of Carmen Maria Machado’s exceptional collection of stories: Her Body and Other Parties.
“Imagine, now, an episode of Black Mirror, in which the female-body-as-haunted-house is the prime subject, a corporeal metaphor undergoing a cinematic vivisection. A symphonic series of camera angles, close-ups, rapid cuts and fade-outs commingle with bones-in-the-attic narrative and feminist bloodletting, Camille Paglia channeling Shirley Jackson, and we, the viewers, are riveted to the screen, to the exposed interior of a haunted house that seems never-ending in its shadowed corridors and passageways. The episode closes with an appropriately unsettling final scene, a cryptic air that slows time and promises an emotional hangover. You stare at the silent blackened void of the screen, waiting for music to play, for credits to roll, for something to happen. Finally, words appear in white block letters — Written by Carmen Maria Machado. This stirring episode hasn’t yet aired, because it hasn’t been written, but in a parallel realm where I get to play Netflix exec, Machado has been commissioned to contribute her unique and considerable talents to the Black Mirror universe.”
To read the full review in Riot Material, click here.
Radio interview on Cultural Energy, revolving around Nocturne Variations, the writing life, youth, Taos, Brooklyn, and other assorted ramblings.
(Show is listed as a link under December programs).
Posted in Audio, Press, Prose, Publications, Uncategorized
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Tagged Cultural Energy, John Biscello, New Mexico, nocturne variations, novel, radio, the writing life
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Leave your favorite mug
out in the sun for several hours.
Bring the mug back inside
and sit on your favorite chair
as you drink the light
that has collected inside the mug.
Feel your stomach glowing,
and tell yourself—I will drink
light more regularly.
Ask a tree to play hopscotch with you.
Ask a stone to jump-rope with you.
Ask a blade of grass to tickle you until it hurts.
Ask a bird to help you remember how to fly.
Ask a child for a piece of bubblegum
and chew it and chew it
and then blow the biggest bubble you can
and let it pop on your face
and listen as the child laughs
as your heart does cartwheels.
Then do actual cartwheels,
making sure to fall.
Just because.
John Biscello 