Vol. III, Issue 1
September 2007
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006.30.000
By Thomas Heise
I sat in the Region of Dis-Similarity, on the edge of the river F______ until the Reader, sensing I was aging and on the verge of giving up from fatigue and lost morale, materialized in my brain looking for me. And I suspected at that moment the Reader was my prodigal birth-mother who had like a stray thought abandoned me years ago to my own degradations, chance-offerings, and a story I was unequipped to tell by other means, and who now, imagining herself a suitable replacement, returned to supplement where I left off. I still feel deep in me a glittering but inaccessible wealth, but the use-value of this knowledge is as limited as Vermeer’s sunlight and moves not even myself to wonder if its sources are proof long ago something occurred (an “event”?) to produce the fecundity of some very base material. When the Reader was elsewhere those years and I was here alone talking in circles with a red parakeet (R.I.P.) left to me as a gift, I would like to think it was as if we were mutually incomplete, but to think so is selfish and is unrealistic, because I know and remember no more than what I write and because I have not written this idea prior I can be sure it never occurred to me and certainly never to her or to You—if you’re there. We sat beside each other and for hours as the river moved with spotted carp we exchanged roles, my “mother” writing the journal as I read the story of my life told by another and learned about events that had never happened to me but reading made them happen, altering what came before and after in the accrued history of words. Nearly 40,000 by this point. I was newly unsure of who I was or had been or was going to be and felt my origins lay in the future, but I hadn’t learned this for sure and there was a chance I never would if I ever stopped reading. I could spend the rest of my life reading the journal, each memory burrowing into me like a termite, until all my memories were from the text and everything, even the most buried and repressed love, was colonized by it. The world disappeared sometime around 2XXX or perhaps I had become blind to it, a difference without a difference, I learned, and in its place a polycentric and sprawling imagination of highways deferred forever one’s arrival at a mark where all my longings terminated, the spot where X, resting under crocus blossoms in a cobblestoned, terracotta courtyard, waited with a blood sample to test to see if his corruption was shared. The New Imperial City was “both-and” and nothing, not even stacked concrete apartment blocks whose logic doesn’t deconstruct, only reflects, could pry it open. Obscured by words was the pathway through it, so one wanted a map’s clarity of legend and ideogram, but they weren’t forthcoming. Just grammar and syntax morphed by encounter, friction, happenstance page after page mutating into foundation, wall, circuitry complex as the shark’s navigations when a single red droplet makes contact with water, triggering a chain of reactions. By now the Reader was tired but writing furiously, fast as my eyes zigzagged left to right thankful for the opportunity to participate and witness. Adumbrated warehouses on the perimeter mirage gave way to where détraqués once had gathered leaving bits of dark rye bread and a trail of stones as evidence of the last diaspora, it was as if I were traveling backward in time to the birth of the first urban ruins that would make Motoda swoon like a somnolent girl and I saw before me the erasure of a parking lot and beyond a diagram of the bridge where X and Y were to intersect at the moment I would begin to shape the nexus of two chromosomal markers into a sign I would call “writing.” An inch of snow settled in a white circle around us. The page was overwritten, had become a palimpsest in her dry bony hands and there was no sense of it ever ending, so I asked her could I call her “Y” and she scribbled something in the margin and we sat there and we sat there and we sat there and I asked if this was permanent, but she has yet to answer.
Copyright © Thomas Heise
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