The smile left Djamilaa’s face. “I see you’ve been at it again,” she said.
“Been at what again?” I asked.
“Dreaming about a certain someone,” she said.
“Not necessarily,” I said, immediately noticing how weak it sounded and how weak it was but having said it before giving it any thought.
Djamilaa got out of bed and stood up, her back to me. I couldn’t help looking at her ass, whose bottom half her nightie left exposed. I gave a thought to the workings of the carnal plan, the carnal setup, the carnal eye, her ass’s magnetic draw. I stared as though her pendant cheeks and the cleft between them proffered a magic exit from all that was fallen and profane, fallen and profane though they themselves were thought to be. “Denial makes it worse,” she said, sitting back down on the bed, looking over her shoulder, her ass no longer exposed.
“I’m not denying,” I said, “I’m complicating. Didn’t you say it was Penguin’s dream, not mine?”
“That only makes it worse. Your thing for a certain someone has to be pretty strong to have to go thru channels.”
“A certain someone is no one,” I said, more confident now, “No-Show Sunday’s bequest.”
The balloon disappeared as I spoke, an evaporative remit appearing to confirm the disendowment I noted, a certain someone’s inveterate nonchalance, chronic no-show, the someone one could only not know, nearly know.
“I’d like to say, ‘Well, now that you put it that way,’” Djamilaa said, “but I won’t.” She stood up again, her ass’s redolent cleft exposed again, carnal provision posed, it seemed, against disendowment, an immaterial musk filling the air clouding my mind if not the air, an imagined musk where there was no musk, all the more intoxicant not being one. I wanted all the more, that is, to whiff the musk that was, press my nose to Djamilaa’s ass’s redolent cleft as to an actual rent in time (chronic rift, crack in the cosmic egg), the rending of time whose proffered exit took me out.
“What if I were to swoon?” I said, syncope’s famous last words it turned out. I spoke them as I succumbed to a rush and fell forward Djamilaa told me a few seconds later when I came to. She was beside me now, in the middle of the bed, cradling my head in the crook of her arm, my head against her breast. My face was close to her cleavage, another cleft, my nostrils wide with the overnight smell on her skin, the morning musk I love so much.
“I was teasing,” I said, nose between her breasts, nuzzling her cleavage, her close-to-the-bone beauty all over me, the cracked cosmic egg’s repair. The heady smell of her skin kept my nostrils dilated. “A certain someone,” I whispered, “is no one but you, you know. The balloon was right between your pillow and my pillow. It was no more my dream than yours.”
The smell of Djamilaa’s honey-based lotion joined by overnight sweat suffused her nightie, a light, penetrant funk my nose filled with and would’ve followed to the end of the earth. I wanted its translation more than the musk itself perhaps but words fell teasingly short when it came to capturing it. I imagined a work of audiotactile sculpture that would, her light funk’s pheromonal embrace rendered equal parts haptic and sonic. I semiheard, semitouched an atomized, ambient advance one would apprehend as a cystic self-equation cut or carved out of capric dispatch. Djamilaa’s goatlike beauty, that is, assailed my inner eye, my inner ear and the fingertips of my inner hand, my overt nose’s introvert accomplices, her long-faced forbearance a boon given over to study, aesthetic remit.
Djamilaa-the-Muse was in full effect, Djamilaa-the-Beautiful-One-Has-Come in full effect. The sweat-accented, honey-based lotion smell took me in as much as out, a mustiness of cleft and contained space and a cystic attar opening a faintly beckoning realm. I whiffed and whiffed again and again a remote, redolent beacon broadcasting intimately from afar, a synaesthetic transfer tendering mustiness as light, light funk’s multiplied import. There was a deep inwardness, awayness and nearness her smell reposited, inwardness, awayness and nearness rolled into one.
It was a nearness as near as I’d ever know but somehow, nonetheless, not available, an everlasting no-show allure a certain someone or a certain no one was known for, not to be known otherwise, an awayness as near as any I’d ever know. The reticent, so-near-so-far sound of a French horn might be its aural analogue.
“Well, now that you put it that way,” Djamilaa said, “I agree. Yes, here we are, two no-shows, erstwhile no-shows I’d say, two certain someones who might also be no ones, each the anyone the oneiric arcade parades all night.” Her voice was low-pitched and husky, a kind of catch in it as though lemon and honey might be in order. The faint suggestion of the latter, combined with the sweat-accented smell of her honey-based lotion, took my inner frenzy further, a would-be match for her synaesthetic beacon’s far cry.
I sat up, pulling away from Djamilaa’s cleavage, catching, as I did, a whiff that came up from farther down, a more pungent waft coming off her loins and what lay between them, a less light, more penetrant musk rising from the hair that lay there and what lay under it. Oboe, English horn or bassoon to her sweat-accented honey-based lotion smell’s French horn, it pierced my nostrils and pervaded my thought to a degree that threw me farther atilt. Oboe, English horn or bassoon, I wasn’t sure which, as it may have been all three blown as one or blown in unison, a chorusing call or cry of come-home or come-hither, home’s far reach and provenance, inner frenzy’s far reach and rule. I was nothing if not such reach’s vassal, low-lying musk the principality I swore love and loyalty to.
“I’d like to write something,” I said as Djamilaa slid to the edge of the bed and stood up again, her ass’s redolent cleft synaesthetically broadcasting again, “not simply a musical piece but something that would be that plus what visual artists call an installation.”
Djamilaa was standing and she turned around to face me. The carnal plan, the carnal provision, the carnal setup occurred to me again as the tuft of hair between her legs below her nightie’s hem caught my eye, so casually, nonchalantly there it furthered my inner frenzy a bit more.
“Audiotactile sculpture I call it,” I went on. “I want the listener to be able to step into the piece. I want it to be a step taken off a ledge to be unexpectedly caught by a pocket the air offers, a pulverous nodule cut into empty space. I want it filled with streaming powder, uniformly blown powder perhaps, powder the listener leans into as it catches him or her, coming toward him or her like tactile, particulate wind. I want it to hit like a dry, particulate emission propelled from an enormous aerosol can. I want it to feel caressive and custom-fit, pointillistically tensile and precise, an enveloping provision of support. I’d like to call it ‘Copacetic Syncope.’”
So I spoke at the time. If I had it to do over, I’d add that the streaming powder would have a rushlike quality to it, as though it were the inversion or, more exactly, the inverse mold of a swoon or a keeling over, convexity to the swoon’s or the keeling over’s concavity, concavity to the swoon’s or the keeling over’s convexity, the music’s haptic equivalent custom-fit.
Djamilaa stood listening as I spoke, her pubic hair’s visibility incidental and moot if she were aware of it at all. She was attentive to what I was saying but she also seemed a bit distracted, as though on her way somewhere else or to something else. When I finished she said, “Sounds good.”
Djamilaa sniffed the air a couple of times, having caught a whiff of something it seemed. She lifted her right arm, turned her head to her armpit and sniffed it. She then lifted the hem of her nightie to her nose and sniffed it, her belly and the full extent of her pubic hair visible as she did so, offhandedly, nothing if not blasé, me further atilt even so, especially so.
After she let her nightie back down she looked at me and said, “I need a shower.” She turned around and headed for the bathroom.
Sincerely,
Dredj
13.III.84
Dear Angel of Dust,
Yes
, another cowrie shell attack. All the fuss about the balloons must have brought it on. The balloon-on-balloon visitation and valence at the Comeback Inn gave us lots to think about, the unpredictability of the comic-strip balloon appearances, the anaphylactic effect passing out the literal balloons possibly had, the balloons’ apparent channeling of Drennette’s bicycle ride with Rick, their dystopian tweak of “Some Sunday’s” great-gettin’-up morning expectation not the least of it. Then there was the simpleminded review in Santa Monica Weekly, which not only gave us more to think about, more worry, but generated some controversy as well. This week’s issue carried a few letters to the editor that were written in response to the review, ranging from ringing endorsement to variously critical, the latter complaining that the reviewer “drank the Kool-Aid” at one end of the spectrum and that he got us all wrong, praised us for all the wrong reasons, at the other. Not to mention the queries, comments and opinions of friends and acquaintances. All the buzz, the balloons again upstaging the music, must’ve gotten to me.
It was as Djamilaa and I sat in bed talking about the balloons the other morning that it hit. I’m not sure it was anything in particular she or I said that set it off so much as the overall strain of having to think and talk about them so much, simply that of having to think and talk about them at all perhaps. In any case, that’s what we were doing when I began to feel a tightening in my forehead, the usual sign of the onset of an attack. I had just said, “There can be no adequation,” but, as I’ve said, I’m not sure that’s what triggered it. Whatever the trigger, cumulative or momentary, the attack chose to assume what I’ve come to think of as its classic form—the shattered shells embedded in my brow, the packed or compacted transparency everything seemed encased in, Ornette’s “Embraceable You” piped into my head and so on—though not without some of its more recent features.
Djamilaa says it was clear to her right away what was happening, that after announcing, “There can be no adequation,” I broke off speaking, went sort of blank and when I spoke again asked for pencil and paper, which she got up and got for me. For my part, I felt I sat at Dredj’s desk, Dredj’s hand had hold of mine. What I wrote was the letter you received a few days ago. The attack subsided, thanks to Djamilaa’s presence and care I think, a few hours later, with no need for a trip to the ER or a hospital stay.
I like Dredj’s “Copacetic Syncope” idea. I can’t promise to deliver on the audiotactile sculpture part but I’d like to write something with that title, something along the lines suggested in the letter. For one, it put the sound of the French horn in my head so indelibly I haven’t been able to get it out. The ring it has or the reminder it gives of a faraway haunt, a faraway hunt, a faraway homing, won’t let me be. I’d want French horn to be a large part of the piece. Ideally there’d be three or four of them, a French horn choir chorusing the harmonic equivalent of “What but that solace, that but what other solace,” repeatedly plying that qualm, that claim. Going at it ourselves, we’d have to make do with Penguin on bassoon and me on flugelhorn (barring a crash course on French horn) chorusing behind Lambert’s tenor. The inflectional weave and the harmonic wrinkle that would encode “What but that solace, that but what other solace” of course remain to be worked out, as does pretty much, I’ll admit, everything else. But Dredj got me going and “Copacetic Syncope,” I guarantee, even if I do have to take a crash course on French horn, is on its way.
Dredj’s evocation of Djamilaa’s exposed ass and pubic hair (just happening to be there, just happening to be devastating) keeps at me, a vulgar, vulnerable regard the French horn’s muted howl would harken back to, a retractive sound as of a world more near than far but not enough with us. I wonder if what he means by “a pulverous nodule cut into empty space” is a compensative step one takes wishing it were otherwise, a would-be, wished-for presence or plenum that, would and wish notwithstanding, conduces to dust—an aggressive, propelled, propellant dust fitting one like a glove. I see root people convening at water’s edge, low boat-hauling voices deep in their throats and lungs, “There can be no adequation’s” rejoinder. Or is it a reconvening, a round or return whose recursive charge obeys Dredj’s “enveloping provision of support’s” mandate? I see gopher holes eaten into atavistic ground. I hear “What but that solace, that but what other solace” beaded on a thread Penguin’s bassoon lets hang, lets dangle, love’s don’t-get-me-started reluctance and woo.
As ever,
N.
16.III.84
Dear Angel of Dust,
Thank you for your thoughts on Dredj’s “late arcade.” I’m not sure I see it the way you do. In fact, I’m sure I don’t. I even think I’d like to see it that way, but I don’t. I don’t hear a lament for times past. I don’t read the roof blown off the mall as a critique of the present, “a redemptive critique hearkening back to sturdier social relations,” as you put it. Dredj was getting at something deeper than that old chestnut. We tend, I think, to forget that the annals of the past are not the past. We confuse the felicity of the book, the felicity of the museum, the felicity of reminiscence itself with a lost felicity actually lived in the past. It’s too easy to throw rocks at the present, too easy to make fun of the mall. Dredj, I’m sure, was up to something else.
What that something else was I’m not sure how to say. He said the music went deeper into his ear the longer he walked. He said the stores turned into booths after the wind blew the roof off the mall. The wind, he seems to say, converted the mall into a bazaar or a Renaissance faire, which does imply a reversion to the past, I admit, but he goes on to say that the music in his ear kept him up all night, kept him visiting booth after booth, which I’m not convinced is necessarily a happy situation. What’s a late-night, insomniac promenade offering temporally remote solace, the sought-after someone lost, but a lament for the present, nostalgia for, if anything, the present, a dismissal of past amenities (if that’s what they were) as irrelevant, insufficent, moot? This is the present dressed in past accoutrements only to emphasize they don’t apply.
He said, in fact, that it was the music in his ear that visited booth after booth. Did he mean that the music traverses compensatory ground, that the music is a consolation prize or that it seeks to be, that it shops, as in olden days and vainly it would seem, for the thing that would deliver solace, consolation, compensation? Again, that’s not, it seems to me, a categorical felicity. A certain someone not present, the present itself not present enough, seems a lament for the present, not the past, a post-expectant lament borne by see-thru auspices, inertial everydayness’s return. The balloon bearing “late arcade” was a third eye (a fifth eye really) that lay between Dredj and Djamilaa, shared by Dredj and Djamilaa, a shared, post-expectant arraignment of any such trappings of the past as booth and bazaar. It augured a necessary appeal to the ordinary, the everyday, the unspectacular abidance I’ll continue to call post-expectant.
Unspectacular notwithstanding, “late arcade” works deeply allied with “copacetic syncope” I suspect.
Yours,
N.
18.III.84
Dear Angel of Dust,
We couldn’t resist any longer. We’ve thought of issuing another press release following the Santa Monica Weekly review but we kept deciding against it. We can’t respond every time someone gets the music wrong we’ve told ourselves ever since putting the first press release out. But Braxton’s advice or idea or insistence that one has to provide the terms for understanding one’s music, develop a language listeners can learn from and deepen their listening thru, has long spoken to us as well. The hubbub surrounding the balloons’ most recent appearance, given the spark the Santa Monica Weekly review gave it, finally got to us and we decided another press release, a second postexpectant press release, was in order.
Enclosed you’ll find a copy. It was a group effort, everyone contributing input (you’ll notice we went with Aunt Nancy’s insistence we use her coinage Santa Monica
Weakly), and I think it pretty much speaks for itself. We were a little surprised, in fact, to find ourselves speaking with such authority and, at points, so didactically about something we’re so bewildered by. It’s as if the review’s easy presumption of knowledge nudged us into knowing by not knowing, a position of knowing that would acknowledge not knowing.
If you have any thoughts I’d love to hear them.
As ever,
N.
POST-EXPECTANT PRESS RELEASE #2
Santa Monica Weakly got it all wrong. It wasn’t a matter of making peace with the balloons. No one knows them better than us—no one, that is, knows better than us that they’re not to be known—and our experience has been that no peace is to be made with them. Legibility, we know, is an inflated claim, the very claim, were it that simple, the balloons embody. But it’s not that simple. The balloons are a hedge against that which they otherwise embody, ostensibly embody. True self-critique or disingenuous dodge, they are not to be bargained with or bartered with, either way. We intended the literal balloons not as a peace pipe, an olive branch or a peace offering but, as one of our members put it, a prophylactic. That they turned out to be anaphylactic proves our point.
What Santa Monica Weakly fails to note (or only, at best, implicitly notes) is that the balloons are a bluelit brigade freighted with our wildest wishes, a wildness or a wilderness of wish we sought to bring the audience abreast of at the Comeback Inn. It wasn’t so much about the balloons as about them, which is to say about us, our shared arraignment of a hope hoped against hope, the knock, hard albeit soft, of what would not (could not) be. Santa Monica Weakly fails to note that a low throb knocked at our door and we let it in, a faint beat that was nothing but anaphylactic willingness, wish and fulfillment, the fullness of which we knew to be fleeting, secret, discreet.
Late Arcade Page 14
