“In ‘The Premature Burial,’ Poe writes,
‘The boundaries that divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins? We know there are diseases in which occur total cessation of all the apparent functions of vitality, and yet in which these cessations are merely suspensions, properly so called.’3
Again there is the sound of something passing overhead, but nothing from below.
“Freud makes a distinction in dreaming between the latent and manifest content of the dream. The latent content of a dream (and what is ‘The Premature Burial,’ if not the dream of a claustrophobe?) is concealed from normal consciousness by the manifest content of the dream—by means of displacement or condensation. In the case of the excerpt above such a displacement is in evidence in the form of a reversal (as in the case where one dreams that one is being overly nice to someone one actually wants to harm). The latent thought of the premature burial might then be said to be that life itself is merely a seeming suspension of death. I am reminded of a quote from Nietzsche, ‘let us beware of saying that death is opposed to life. The living is merely a type of what is dead, and a very rare type.’ That’s from The Gay Science.4
“What can the cosmos do but suffocate ceaselessly? What are thoughts but so many little gasps for air? Thank you, that’s all.”
I leave the lectern in the silence I’d found it.
*
There is a rustling. The widows appear from a shady vault, their slender legs wrapped in black muslin and taffeta, starched stiff with graveyard dirt and damp. The tough fabric of their mourning is torn at nearly each of the three joints in their eight legs—of which there are six sets. I can hear them weeping quietly as they approach, a hushed facsimile of a human sob, breaking now and then into a click or a chaffing sound. A train, formed from webbing and the bits of their dresses that are left to trail from the spiny mass of their party, picks up bits of filth. One of their number has fallen and she is dragged along on her back unmoving, her legs tucked inward towards the shining junction of her abdomen and thorax.
The party halts and the largest of the bunch, who lacks a leg on her right side, and whose leathery flesh is notched with white scars, begins to speak. To a chorus of sobs she says,
“You’re going about this in the wrong way. Here,” she says, and pulls a yellowed photograph from her purse, showing it to me.
It is a post-mortem photograph of a little widow spider arranged in a little coffin beneath a quilt. She tells me the name of her husband and what he had been like in life. The rest of the widows pull out similar post-mortem photographs of their loved dead and all the while sobbing they speak of the ones they have eaten, of their virtuous traits and of their beauty.
“You’ve become fixated on one aspect of the night, is loss so total you cannot offer up a picture of his face?”
“No!” I say, “I will not look back…”
“We shall see,” she says, “we shall see.”
*
In a room not much larger than a supply closet, lit by a single bare bulb, a figure on a crooked stage flanked by curtains of black felt. The corpse of Antonin Artaud, when soaked in water, was restored somewhat to its original size. He has been dressed in a tight-fitting black suit and he stands very stiff, his fists clenched at his sides, leaning forward slightly, with sunken cheeks. Presently, controlled by wires, his mouth opens. The top of his head falls back dramatically (it having been cleft in half and put back together again with a hinge). Out I creep, up from the throat and along the dry scrap of his tongue, pausing at the bottom of that red carpet, before the footlights that have been drilled into his teeth. A gilded circular magnifying glass is lowered from the darkness above, and I approach it, so as to make visible, up to a considerable distance, my face.
“Have you ever looked at a spider’s face? Some people think the face is the most frightening part of a spider. They say this is on account of how alien it looks. But a spider’s face is frightening because it is familiar, because one supposes it even has something like a face, and because you see yourself in it. Yes, a spider’s face is vaguely mammalian. Though it has a great many eyes you see a large set placed centrally, in a way suggestive of a mammalian countenance. And here,” I said, pointing with a foreleg, “there are smaller eyes below these that perhaps suggest the nostrils of something warm-blooded and knowing. Even the chelicerae, which hide the fangs tucked beneath them, resemble a sort of cartoon mouth or set of bucked teeth. A spider’s face is frightening because it seems to grin at you in the same way that a dead human skull will, when there is nothing behind the smile in either case—for casual human interest—but danger, or its suggestion, in the form of the cessation of the human world.
“It is a ridiculous thought, but I have sometimes wondered if the human entity might not have arisen as the reaction of a curiously anxious nothingness to the appearance of false human faces in the forms of animals, or in nature generally—if human consciousness, or its model, is not somehow the internalization (into what, exactly?) of an empty, obscene mask. Smiling faces, cartoon faces, the true emblems of a sham humanity.”
Part II
The Discovery of Electricity Among the Dead
Or
Looking Back
When most I wink, then do mine eyes best see,
For all the day they view things unrespected;
But when I sleep, in dreams they look on thee,
And darkly bright are bright in dark directed.
Then thou, whose shadow shadows doth make bright,
How would thy shadow’s form form happy show
To the clear day with thy much clearer light,
When to unseeing eyes thy shade shines so!
How would, I say, mine eyes be blessed made
By looking on thee in the living day,
When in dead night thy fair imperfect shade
Through heavy sleep on sightless eyes doth stay!
All days are nights to see till I see thee,
And nights bright days when dreams do show thee me.
---William Shakespeare, Sonnet 43
The last few warm days of autumn once more brought the window to the bedroom open, and the smell of death crept in. Lying drunk in bed with all my clothes on, I thought I was imagining it, but the next day, in the rosebush outside the window, I found the body of a squirrel. That night I dream of him for the first time. I am packing up the living room, it is full of big brown boxes. I suddenly realize that I’ve accidently packed his corpse, and now I have to find it. It’s in one of the first boxes I open. It is small and wrapped in opaque plastic. Now that he is dead he is only about three feet tall. There is no odor. I put his body in a blue plastic bag and as I’m doing this I see that there is trash in the bag, chip wrappers, dirty napkins, etc. I can’t begin to convey the sense of horror I have at this realization. I have a deep feeling of having ruined everything, and I don’t know what to do except to put him outside. As I wrap him up I notice he’s grown even smaller.
*
A light, a line in the dust. A crooked road into the mountains surrounded by horror movie trees and piles of rocks all along its edges—cliff falls. The tops of trees rising in the headlights are stark and raw looking. They sink back into blackness in the rearview mirror. Shadows also rising and turning in the headlights, big on the cliffs.
At the end of a dirt road: a haunted house in an old mining town, Trash Town. Rows of houses on either side of a single street constitute the place. The mines crowd the high cliffs behind and above the houses: a sprawl of catwalks and towers lit with yellow lights throughout the night, as though for a year-long, sulfuric Christmas. The haunted house is active only in October. It’s largely made of plywood, and a little train, like one of those found in amusement parks, takes you through it. The train rushes through a corridor, light flashing through the gaps in the wood walls. Fake spiders dangling from the ceiling brush against your hair.
*<
br />
He died in the summer, in June. It wasn’t until October that I saw him again. He’d gotten a job working at the haunted house along with some other boys who were also dead. It was convenient: nobody noticed their condition and they didn’t have to wear makeup.
*
Far below Trash Town, in the catacombs-cum-dormitory beneath the haunted house, I wake up smelling spent matches on the tips of his cold, calloused fingers, which are pushed against my face. Pulling my head back and looking around, I can see that here and there low burning oil lamps light the room. Quietly, I lie with him in a nook dug into the side of a wall of earth, soil against my exposed skin, watching the shadow of his unkempt, coiled hair on the wall behind us, a shadow as complex and marvelous as a junkyard. He is snoring gently, and there is another noise, from deeper in his body, a rattling, as of something loose.
*
The dormitory is square shaped with a central earthen partition, such that it is divided into two wings. On each side of the partition there are two carved out sleeping areas, one atop the other, and the situation is the same along either wall facing the partition. There is another single dugout or bunk centrally located in the wall opposite the end of the partition, possible as the partition is only connected to the opposite wall. From a corner of the room, the northeast corner made by the wall with the single bed, there is access to a corridor with a wooden stairway. The stairway is so long and so rickety I fear having to ever climb it again. Whenever Tyler struck a match to check our progress I saw that it ran through the darkness without touching any walls. Were it not for its shape and crudely hammered together bulk, it might be more correctly called a ladder, and in some places we had to hold onto it with our hands as though it were one. Sometimes I thought the huge groaning thing resembled the skeleton of a snake, and I could feel it swaying beneath us. Still I went happily downward, toward the occasional light below, from where he climbed beneath me. Seeing him look up at me in the light from his match, his eyes as deep and dark as the pit behind him, I was not afraid of falling.
*
The other boys are probably still asleep, hidden inside the two standalone freezers in the dormitory, one on the west wall opposite our bunk, the other on the opposite side of the partition. There is one boy in each freezer. Tyler explained that they sleep in the freezers to keep from rotting and that soon he will have to sleep in one too. I just heard a lid open.
*
Joachim sleeps in the other wing of the dormitory, which is nicer and has an Astroturf carpet. He has put up pictures of naked women and his favorite sports teams. The first time I met him he was shirtless and I couldn’t help but stare. In life he’d lifted weights, and now a deep purple bruise, like a thunderhead at the horizon of a winter sky (his flesh was white as marble), had spread across his massive chest, partly obliterating a realistic line tattoo of another boy’s face on his left pectoral muscle (near to the heart); a friend of his who had died, the ribbon beneath the portrait explained (dates). The bruise had also let out a network of indigo tendrils, webbing his taught belly with violet lines as fine as spider silk. Joachim’s cheekbones were high and sharp, so that, with his deeply set blue eyes and massive grin, his head looked a bit like a cartoon skull. It had probably looked much the same when he was alive, as that part of him was fairly fresh. I thought he was grinning at me because he’d caught me staring, but then he suddenly plucked his right eye from his head and stuffed it into my hand, forcing me to squeeze it by making a fist around my own. I discovered the eye to be a cool piece of glass. His grin widened into a sneer. With one long index finger he knocked his other glass eye back into the socket and swooped towards me so that I could see into the two dark holes in his head. Now his head looked even more like a cartoon skull, dusted though it was with peach fuzz. I’d never felt so intensely looked at by something that couldn’t see.
*
Robert sleeps across from Tyler. He is a sullen punk with canines like a vampire, which is purely coincidental—he doesn’t drink blood because he doesn’t like the taste and it wouldn’t help his situation. Though it has occurred to him to try: when he was a kid he wanted to be a werewolf or a vampire and would howl at the full moon, and drink his nosebleeds every chance he got. Now he’s just dead and sort of depressed. He drops acid and watches horror movies all the time on a little television set sunk into a recess in the soil of his bunk.
*
The door to the bathroom creaks open. Unlike the rest of the place, the bathroom has been finished with tile and its walls are painted white. The entrance to the room shines brightly in the darkness of the lamp-lit dormitory. Through a small, black window in the bathroom I can see snow falling.
“I thought we were underground,” I say to Tyler.
“We are,” he replies as he drifts towards the light with a curious look on his face.
“Don’t go in there,” I say, feeling a sudden gust of cool air against my face. He goes anyway.
Outside the snow falls slowly, crazily switching the angle of its drift so erratically, in fact, that it sometimes seems to be falling upward from the ground into the blackness above.
Tyler clutches the edge of a sink as he feels his big black boots leave the floor. His feet drift up, followed by his legs, and he begins to laugh. All is suddenly silent as he leaves the floor, even though his body continues to shake with his laughter, and I think for a moment that I’ve gone deaf—but I hear my own voice as I call his name. Holding onto the edge of the sink he looks up at his floating feet, remembering when as a child he used to hang upside down with his head over the edge of the couch in his living room and imagine what it would be like to walk up there. He lets go and his feet touch down on the ceiling with an audible, gentle thud, as though he’d jumped down from a small height. He looks down at me in amazement and mouths the words to something I can’t hear.
*
Joachim traps wasps and keeps them in his freezer until they are immobile, then tethers them to the top of his bunk with pieces of strings. He watches them as they fly in circles and tire, rise again, circle, and tire. The following night Joachim dreams he is as small as an ant and being pursued by giant buzzing wasps. He gets trapped by Robert in a plastic coke bottle. Robert nearly drowns him in his urine, blowing so much pot smoke into the bottle that Joachim is almost asphyxiated. In the morning, I watch him watch the few wasps that remain alive as they spin circles. Suddenly he crushes them with his fist, not feeling the stinger of one as it sinks into the dead flesh of his knuckle.
*
Joachim and Robert have tolerated my presence up to now, but I think they are getting suspicious about the nature of my relationship with Tyler. They don’t understand why I’m so upset about his silence, and his being on the ceiling.
*
Joachim let me hold onto his eye for a while, and I kept it in my pocket. Robert elbowed me in the ribs and said it meant that Joachim liked me, so Joachim punched Robert and made a hole in the top of his chest, as if he’d slammed his fist through no more than drywall—there was even a puff of dust. Tonight alone—they are at work—I take out the eye and hold it in my hand. It gives me the weirdest feeling of intense privacy, like I get when I’m taking a shit, together with a sense of incredible intimacy. It becomes more intense when I think of how in his blindness his gaze is as present here, with me, as it is there where he is. He isn’t looking anywhere, but he seems to be looking at me from everywhere; the night is alive with his staring blindness. I hold the glass eye in my hand and squeeze it until I seem to feel the absence of his vision as if it is a pulse, though it is just the beating of my own heart, which I can feel in the tips of my fingers, dug hard as they are into my palm.
*
Tyler stays on the ceiling in the bathroom. He drinks whisky from a bottle pulled from the back pocket of his jeans and stomps around in piles of notebook paper. I can’t get to the ceiling; I can barely graze his fingertips when he reaches to touch mine, and he can’t seem to get down or say an
ything I can hear, even when he is shouting—and I know he’s shouting because a vein stands out in his neck and his face gets red. All the memories I have of him that I’ve written out, the conversations we were going to have now that I’d found him, these do however float. I found this out when I crumpled a page up and threw it at him. Here there is no heaven because there are no people to put in it, there is only silence after a change of state. The characters have nothing to do but wear themselves out: anything can happen here, because nothing happens here.
*
One morning over breakfast (rat again) I look up to see that Joachim is smiling at me with both eyes in his head. I feel my pocket, but of course the eye is gone.
*
Tyler is on the bathroom ceiling nodding out. Aside from the top of his head and his hands, he is almost entirely hidden by the notebook paper, which reminds me of snow. A glass syringe falls from his hand to the floor and cracks, releasing a mosquito. His other hand loosens and a red ViewMaster® joins the syringe. I click the first slide into focus with the little blue knob on the right.
*
First Tableaux
Tyler lies nude on a mauve fainting couch in a woods. His body is taut and bent backward across the single arm of the couch so that his face is hidden from view. It is turned up and back toward that area of the forest that is so black, it’s as though the shadows there were spreading clouds of ink in a scene suspended in an aquarium. His nakedness is bright in the dark, like in a tenebric painting. Frozen a few inches from the fingertips of his convulsed right hand, a fallen canister of yellow liquid, globules of it suspended in mid air like glass beads. At the back of the little red theatre inside the ViewMaster® his image is slightly off: his body is divided into flat sections that move forward in layers creating the illusion of depth. The scene is a photograph of cardboard cutouts.
Dadaoism (An Anthology) Page 25
