I don’t tell him there is no such thing as Claudia Lemon, she’s invented, he knows nothing about Clarise Lermontov, my ghost, my first country, there is no Clarise, only Claudia Lemon, and there is the young girl who loved squeezing lemon onto oysters, the oysters were still alive, eyeless, that’s what I remember about that little girl remembering, they’re eyeless, and I’d squeeze lemon onto the eyeless grammar of their forms and watch them writhe and think—this is life—lemon being squeezed onto eyeless things that will be eaten. That young girl was annoyingly philosophical. Her entire body was made of questions.
She came to me when I was a child. Let’s say when I was two, no three. She came to me when I was three. That is me, aged three, centuries ago, someone else’s tears crystallized into this frail pulsing thing, this life form, that is I and here she comes: an angel, maybe an angel, an angel why not with massive feather-ribbed wings which, when extended, generate a musical whoosh and siege of air that became hurricane to my small world. These wings went over me, caved three year old me in the dark, and I wanted to stay there, like that, a Braille carving, the dark, the cave made of wingbeats and windmusic—a cocoon—reeking of lilacs—I wanted to curl up and die—disappear—why had I come—whose tears were responsible for this—for birthing me here—if only—the lilac infused darkness went away—glaring whorish light returned—the angel was nowhere—I small and alone—utterly small and alone—someone came to pick me up, a mouth, a future—I went with them—what choice did I have—hands picked me up and took me away but I didn’t want them—I wanted the angel the dark the winds the lilacs—hands stole me from my deepest longings and desires—who cried me here—this world not my world—my world gone—I had no words for it—I would never have any words for it—wordless alone small worldless—but there was one thing—memory of the angel’s name placed under my tongue for safekeeping—a name that would remain hidden there— a sliver of broken star burned under my tongue—music of a scar—2066. My angel’s name is 2066. I must find her.
They taught us dust. Those were our lessons. There were other lessons but allegedly none more important than the lessons in dust the sermons. We dreamed dust. We ate dust. There was dust favoring the sunlight insisting upon the rotting wood of the windowsill. That sill was my edge, my fool’s cliff. I stared out the window for what felt like long deep spells. I learned everything and nothing from that window. When the window grew tired of its windowness it transformed into a small dark star-pointed bird and flew away. No one noticed. What kind of world was this? We had dust in our eyes. We prayed to the dust. Our Lady of Dust, in these lost hours … our voices were recorded and this prayer was played back to us religiously. We sat at our desks listening to ourselves reciting Our Lady of the Dust, in these lost hours … The rest was left unfinished so we could complete the prayer silently to ourselves however we wanted, that is however we wanted based on twelve optional variations for prayer continuance:
Our Lady of Dust, in these lost hours … we beseech your mercy.
Our Lady of Dust, in these lost hours … we ask nothing of time.
Our Lady of Dust, in these lost hours … we babble on crumbling.
Our Lady of Dust, in these lost hours … we clutch your hem.
Our Lady of Dust, in these lost hours … we are certain we don’t know.
Our Lady of Dust, in these lost hours … we invite you to dinner.
Our Lady of Dust, in these lost hours … we cannot for the life of us.
Our Lady of Dust, in these lost hours … where to next?
Our Lady of Dust, in these lost hours … what hidden, where hidden, how hidden.
Our Lady of Dust, in these lost hours … music.
Our Lady of Dust, in these lost hours … give us this day.
Our Lady of Dust, in these lost hours … what have the meek claimed?
We were taught away from learning with blind volitional ignorance. No one knows they are perpetrating ignorance. If they did, they would stop, don’t you think? All the fictions that came before, the fictions preceding us, couldn’t have been intentional, right? I made myself small and scaled the particles of dust that clung to our books and desks and collected on the walls. I hung out, kin to the flea or gnat, and gained a broader perspective. All while remaining seated at my desk, immobile, unflinching, a barricade and domicile unto myself.
In school they taught us how to breathe differently. There were other lessons but this was considered the most important one. We had to learn a new way of breathing. Techniques, exercises: what to do, what not to do. They showed us videos. The videos seemed to go on forever. Sometimes I couldn’t handle that forever feeling, my hands and feet shook and my head would start throbbing, so I’d look out the window, see the dust swirling, turn back to the video, forever droning on, me wanting to puke, out the window, the world of dust … We can’t breathe the way we used to, our teachers instructed in a unified voice, an audio blanket of solidarity. To live in a world of dust we had to become new to ourselves. Could we find new differences to help us move on? What did we know about metaphor and parable? Could we forego the fictitious past entirely? Could we? I looked out the window often.
One of our teachers, a man with a thick reddish beard and delicate looking ears (that’s all I remember, the beard and ears), taught us that the day was coming when we, and by we we knew that he meant us now, and us later, and us later than later, we would grow gills and learn how to breathe underwater. Right now we breathe dust but later we will breathe water. The teacher seemed excessively proud when stating this, as if he had invented dust. Or water. Or breathing. All three. We are rewatchable to ourselves, the teacher’s lecture went on, and we exist as the mothers and fathers and gods of our future amphibious selves. So, the teacher reasoned, your capacity to breathe underwater is already latent within you. It takes a long time, the teacher concluded (yes, even the forever speeches of teachers must reach some sort of conclusion), it takes a long long time to meet all our selves that incarnate on a soul’s migrant journey. That teacher was fired. For using the term—soul’s migrant journey. He had, in the consensus opinion of the Board, gone too far. To say soul—and migrant—and journey—to combine them into a single phrase, to conceptualize them as a unified notion … the teacher had overstepped his boundaries. It is fiction (according to the Board). The dust is not fiction. It is metaphor and parable. Not fiction. Yet what that teacher said had stayed with me, grown roots, and in the bathtub at night I would stay underwater for longer and longer spells trying to expedite the blossoming of my gills. I wanted to give my future self a head start.
Our destinies are molecular, uniformly bonded, an immaculately charged cluster fuck of singing particles wedded to a liminal bubble bath … that is the beginning … we are not alone. We see god drop the soap, intentionally, perhaps the precursor to a gag, and watch her slip under to retrieve it, when he remerges, face caked in frothy beard, we laugh and laugh, god is a champagne rabies monster, we laugh and laugh till our sides ache, till it hurts so bad, we consider drowning as a viable port and call to dreaming … so this is what it is like to take a bath with god … recognition and awareness flicker recalling that old glittering adage All roads lead home so if you were to slip under the water as god did your eyes may become dreaming eyes and your breathing dreaming breathing.
Where is god the champagne rabies monster? Has he gone? Did she take the soap? It appears it is just you and the tub and the water and this is how the resounding what-ifs begin, how the inconceivable becomes a minor plague, and as you search for the means to drain the water from the tub you wonder if this is what is meant by throwing out the baby with the bathwater, in other words, you’ve contracted the bathwater blues side effects may include amnesia dry mouth shortness of breath, bathwater blues as a timeless melody and riff causing many everywhere to wake up weeping motherless, god the champagge rabies monster is the ventilator through which the weeping breathe, but where is she, what happened to god with all his wonderful antics like sporting a slathery beard of bubble foam, where’s the gag, and alone in the tub you find yourself contracting and expanding, contracting and expanding, a fear-inflating pufferfish with water on the brain, and not knowing what else to do or how else to do or why else to do you begin singing I’ve got the bathwater blues and the echoes of your own voice, coming from a far distance, splinters you to no end.
Nineteen rifles and the village was burned to the ground nineteen rifles stolen by rebels and then came the awful burning down what was called scorched earth policy. My mother my father my brother were burned down to the ground and god knows what else with nearly two hundred others my god the atrocities committed my god I go on repeating numbly coldly meaninglessly in someone else’s voice not my own my god the atrocities. The village. I escaped. I don’t know how. Later on I heard the story it was on a radio program a story about a man this painter who went to the village the ruins of the village and painted. Every day he went to what locals from neighboring villages now called the Vanished Village he went there to paint the bones of the village the ghosts wanting to paint what the land held its hissing and fractures telling him what it tolled. The program said the man was a medium between the living and the dead and that dreams had led him to the village to paint to listen. The man went there with a dog his dog’s name was Ginger or the dog was ginger colored or maybe it was both the name Ginger and the color ginger I can’t remember but the dog went rooting around and found a doll with broken limbs half buried in the earth. And when the man picked up the doll when the man held it he said torrents of grief rushed through him the grief the voices the burning. The doll it seems was a medium between the living and the dead a gateway a portal. The man painted the doll. In painting the doll he felt the presence of the young girl to whom the doll belonged the young girl who had been the doll’s best friend and this is where I come in wondering if the doll had belonged to me. Was I the young girl? Were me and the doll best friends? I don’t know. My history isn’t mine. The village has been barred from my memory. I was told it was my home once upon a time and so in that respect I have inherited its ghosts but what else. Mother father brother. These are words almost like stones dropping into a dark well echoing sometimes feelings sometimes sensations. They are dirges memoryless calling to me from far off places from graves I don’t know. When I hear the voices calling I feel as if the fire is moving dangerously close.
Storytellers of different ilks different beats different leaks of internal graffiti yet the word always at the heart of it barrowing out into light what comes from shadowlands within. Stories within earshot as eavesdropped whispers Stories like moonshots catapulted with cosmic pop and intent Stories as trespasses keeping roadside crosses warm Stories mnemonic in their wanderings to find out where they are Stories honey blonde and licorice dark in their creeping spread upon the world at dusk. I remember one of us once said I tell myself stories in the dark. From out of the dark things emerged things that assumed shapes forms it was birth and cryogeny all at once the sap of flow bubbling and running within the cast of petrification. I tell myself stories in the dark he said. We felt him. We adopted his line as creed. We tell ourselves stories in the dark. Amidst fractures and parallels merging we are unified in that story is the cause. The be all end all. Without story no voices and we fade to void. We are purest simplest mathematics in this respect. Addition subtraction all that jazz. That is us. Addition subtraction all that jazz. Within story the formless chaos of all that jazz assumes forms such as hard bop swing gospel scat fusion. We tell ourselves stories in the dark seeds born from the bones of word winding back to In the beginning.
So, to example: There was a tramp both in and out of time, an iconic tramp who is now and always, he is not old never old, not new never new, he is ever and now and always this tramp shuffling splay-footed making a cakewalk of his hesitant ambling, this tramp full of pluck and vim who she heard of, how she heard of him she doesn’t know, legends have a way of snaking in, he this tramp is coming, once upon a time and coming soon are one and the same wedded to symmetry and cocoons, he is coming, he has come, how soon is now, when will he be here, remember when, all these terms stitches in the prevailing symmetry, symmetry being beyond time, 1844 and 2066 are completely and utterly irrelevant terms—you who have died have yet to be born—which brings me back round to the iconic tramp, his wiggly black fish of a moustache, his dusty bowler and too tight vest corseting his girlish frame, torn baggy trousers and spindly cane, this tramp is one of us, one of the children of the dust, when I woke up and knew I was in a world of dust, when the screens and typeset had melted away, I was left with more or less dust and a sense of the moon, plus imperturbable calm, which enables me to wander without ambition or regret or purpose, I am, just like the tramp, cakewalking through dust, on and on-going with the innate claim tramp-born that all is about how you walk in this world and how you fall, all walking and falling and going on always going on, therein lies the tramp’s guidelines for existential flaning.
When and where time goes unrecognized there is a beautiful purposeless freeze, the swiftness of eternity so swift there is no race at all, no motion, just music, which is why shakespeare urged one and all to play on, why coltrane played until his fingers became burnt bulb prophets, in these wanderings no time at all, there is mystery, vast limitless spates of mystery that open out onto further fields of mystery, more mystery, more, none of it without absolute symmetry.
John Biscello 