Part One: How To Say The Thing, Finally
The thing as slippery as an ancient eel, as mammoth as The Aleph
Maybe I want the book to be only pictures. Maybe I need to make more goals for the book. I have dreams but no goals: the book will be A BOOK OF WONDERS. But really the book will be a book of ghosts. - undated diary entry
Author’s Note: the final two paragraphs today have changed slightly from the Voiceover.
1.
Maybe trying to write an epic for children should be left for another day because it does not seem like a world for children right now. Often I wonder if I’ll have another day or what that day will look like or how that day is different from today and what, aside from the calendar and the clock, the physical reminders of date and time, how they are separate from wonder and ghost, while being the very things that grind both wonder and ghost into dust and mites.
Maybe I can’t do too many things at once or maybe I can’t see too many things at once. Or maybe all this holding too many things at once is the problem.
Our collective hands are so full holding so many things at once. All this rubble at once. All this destruction at once. All is so large and so far away and so close and so many things but somewhere it fits neatly into the eye of a pin—you look up, you run, you hide, you might be found, and then there is only two ends of you threading the needle—you juggle nothing or only life and death. Or you hold everything at once as well. I don’t know. But I have chosen to imagine. I have always chosen to imagine.
Anyway, when I was avoiding another thing, the writing of a “more structured manuscript,” I text C. I speak with K. I hold my writing friends dear, as though that will solve the mystery of why I can’t sit still to do this other thing with this big other thing in my mind at all times. I chatter with M.C. on discord about the awesome prospect of a publisher wanting to see the thing at all and the way I mutter “more structured manuscript” as I walk around my house with my hands full of everything, safe, sound but never safe or sound. M.C. is the master of learning other’s processes. My pacing and muttering must be part of my process. C says, “yes, the spinning is part of the process.” K. says, “yes, this is hard.”
“Come on!” I say to one, “Can’t someone else do this for me?” C. and I text about all the things we do in order to avoid the thing we have, by our very dreams alone, set out to do. She tells me she signed up for a humor class and then keeps forgetting to go which seems like the humor. We decide to share a document of avoidance, detailing how we don’t do the actual thing by doing every other thing. By holding all the other things as we begin to make the document, its as though everything we list is also threading the needle, missing the eye: comfortable things, terrible things, funny things, worry things, and it’s funny to look back on it now after my own thing has been done, tried, submitted, the thing itself, the thing I was procrastinating was either rejected or accepted, who knows because the publisher never wrote back, and in all the ways it doesn’t matter either way.
Today is a new day or another day which are old sayings which watched the way a moon rises and falls and saw bombs resume through any kind of weather and now there are much harder things to say and process and not say and not process. There are demands now on this day, demands to say the thing but there are so many things to say and how do I tell you I am compromised and imperfect without you screaming at me: How is this NOT SIMPLE?
What if nothing is ever simple, especially this murky lens and all the dust and ghost-mites that have destroyed it. Maybe the only simple thing was always to write down every little thing until it is all funneled through, put through a sieve and distilled into one thing straight through the eye of the needle?
But the sieve keeps revealing not one thing. The sieve keeps revealing it is how its always been. More blemishes, more bombs, more rubble, more death, ruin, displacement, relics, artifacts, last sighs, final breaths, and now we all live in the rubble and the sea, some more than others. For some. it is tattooed on us like a number, like an unfulfilled story, like the meddlesome past saying to the cumbersome present, which with every tick is some future, I told you so.
Is this The Aleph that Jorge Luis Borges writes about?
“How, then, can I translate into words the limitless Aleph, which my floundering mind can scarcely encompass? Mystics, faced with the same problem, fall back on symbols: to signify the godhead, one Persian speaks of a bird that somehow is all birds; Alanus de Insulis, of a sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere; Ezekiel, of a four-faced angel who at one and the same time moves east and west, north and south. (Not in vain do I recall these inconceivable analogies; they bear some relation to the Aleph.)…In that single gigantic instant I saw millions of acts both delightful and awful; not one of them occupied the same point in space, without overlapping…” -Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph
Many times and then again I have this dream that someone tells me what is good for me, then silences me, then asks me to speak, all at the same time? Then I learned that it’s not a dream, it is always real and is just my needle to thread. It is a many people’s needle to thread. For some they live with the great privilege of not having to thread this needle but perhaps this the product of the imperfect artwork that is humanity or humanity under the last patriarchal 1000 years. Whole populations keep attempting to thread this needle and collectively will never even make it the hole, the hole the crook of the aleph’s arm, the curve of its hip, its wholeness blown apart and put back together as the alif…is also the alif. The aleph is alif, the alif is the aleph and that has always been true.
I am writing everything as though it is a list or a school of fish and each sentence is a fish at the bottom of a bowl. Or maybe I am writing a can of sardines.
I guess I’ll know soon enough but for now, I’ll end and tomorrow will share part two tomorrow, an excerpt from my side of a shared list of avoidance, the list of not “saying the thing” with C., warts and typos and massive realizations and all.
As an aside, the thing was finally done and nothing has come of it. Maybe I’ll add a yet because I hold out hope for only this one thing. With conceit, I’ll report, being asked for a “more structured manuscript” was very “nice” and I continue to lay out big sheets of paper and dream a book of wonders or a book of ghosts. I do this while sorting the only things I, we, have: feelings that feel like facts and facts that act like feelings and maybe this is story.
As my last aside today, until tomorrow, A few weeks ago, inside the blur of October and November, a person I don’t know well wrote and told me that it is my confirmation bias that keeps me defensive and looking for excuses. It broke me down and changed my internal churning for answers. My reply was that I thought nothing inside of me ever has ever felt confirmed, it is all juggled constantly, inside is a door, inside is the eye of the needle. But I have been examining this Thing, her words, and I have not stopped examining and churning and holding since. Sometimes I get a reprieve and rest from it, when my ghosts visit, their wonders and their terrors, their stories and anguish. But the Alephs in my dreams dance with the Alifs, not kill them.
Tomorrow is maybe when I keep learning how one holds so much space for it all, becomes it, sees their own unremovable tattoos and an impossible future when there isn’t space enough in the aleph for it all, for us all, for the beauty and the loss and I’ll use a flock of pigeons, a school of sardines for words.
Listening to this in the midwinter predawn darkness I feel like you are sitting next to me as we wait for the sun to rise- beautiful
You write so beautifully about the horror human brutality and the creative process and how to even begin to grasp this thing that is making and being alive whilst being witness to all the suffering. Amazing Deb x