Gossamurmur (2 page)
The valley spirit never dies.
It’s called dark
female-enigma,
and the gateway of dark female-enigma
is called the
root of heaven and earth,
gossamer so unceasing it seems real.
Use it; it’s effortless.
—
Tao Te Ching
, sixth-century BCE translated by David Hinton
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
With gratitude to Peter Warshall, MaelstrÖm reEvolution, the Tamaas foundation,
Conjunctions
,
Denver Quarterly
,
The Brooklyn Rail,
Bhanu Kapil, Ambrose Bye, Pat Steir, Alexis Myre, Elliot Colla, Sawko Nakayasu, David Gitlen, Apsara DiQuinzio, and Gina Maher, who in her generosity gave home and shelter to this writing. Making up a small portion of the work are lines from
Entanglement
(2009) and
The Value of Small Skeletons
(2011), movies by Ed Bowes and several pages appear in
The Air We Breathe: Artists and Poets Reflect on Marriage Equality
. Also, sincere gratitude to my editor, Paul Slovak, who has supported my poetry for many years.
Gossamer is not used by any branch of biology
but there are phenomena soft, sheer, and gauzy
light and flimsy
delicate, tenuous, and airy
Gossamer means
summer goose
The time the goose plucks winter down
and lines her nest
and the down caught
in the tundra sun and breeze
sails off glistening
In Sanskrit:
ghans-sem
Probably a time some humans
collected either the goose or
down for themselves
For other species, gossamer is always transient
turns more tensile
pliant
or rigid
That’s the fabric of inner bones and muscles
and arteries
Moth cocoons, caddis fly catch-nets
Woven with a protein called collagen
The gossamer bodies of plants—
dandelion fluff or cotton—
are of cellulose
Cellulose is a complex sugar
A way pliancy can supplant stiffness
The way tensile strength prevents fractures
Some gossamers have extension
(distance divided by original length)
And the questions
stretch until you break
stretch until you cannot snap back
stretch until you reach some threshold of safety?
Poem as lute string.
plot rescues sanity.
recuses identity its floating world….
and allegory tests calamity
resilient or under siege
Once how delicate the gauze that adheres to and flicks off identity. Flips it. Becoming cartography.
Gossamurmur
occasions a transgressive vein, a body poetics with a bifurcated protagonist indicating two simultaneous and alternating realities. Often alarming. She and She. By way of a mundane
duplicada
experience (I noticed her she had a funny dayglow wig on she said my name when asked hers) I discovered my credit union had another client with my exact name. At one point our accounts had become transposed. I thought of Borges and his “doubles” and Thomas Mann’s
The Transposed Heads
. I fantasized about this meticulous, oddly coifed other and how she might spend
my
money. And then how I might spend
hers
. Bodies in a
materia infinitum
world that levels down to charnel ground. Where all detritus grinds down. Sing you there, my
duplicada
. I will find you there. We will spend our phantom money. We will meet without name without body without debt but that of past action in nominative karma. Who did what to whom. I will be your other, wisp of consciousness…and you will be mine in token of our name, a rare coinage.
And she was the trigger, the apparatus, of my composite allegorical destruction or rather of all I cared about in the mundane world which was the survival and oral archive of an excellent poetry and record of a temporary autonomous zone from which it emanated, close to a high-altitude Divide. And she was a grand
infinitum
, a robotic tool of the fits and starts of the dread Deciders who in a trajectory of willful ignorance and anti-art psychosis wrought their weird embryonic magic on my person and psyche and the fragile cassette and song files of a fleeting transitory poetics….
I spent her account on medicinal herbs and lozenges. Items for longevity. I spent her dollars on salvation, on books of remorse and redemption, on a complete revelatory encyclopedia, on the health of another, on a ticket to the opera—it was Wagner, it was
Parsifal
, it was on a night of full moon, he held me, and we wept.
I hate it!
he said. I hate this spectral life! I wish it would all disappear!
I said,
I love it!
And I donated to numerous causes including those toward the well-being and salvation of many endangered species. Whose sounds and cries and metabolic thrum and hum might soon be silenced….
The Sulawesi Dwarf Kingfisher, Ultramarine Lorikeet, Stump-Tailed Macaque, Sulu Bleeding-Heart, Tristan Albatross, Tehuantepec Jackrabbit, Zoe Waterfall Damsel, Zingis Radiolata, Zhou’s Box Turtle, Yellow-Blotched Palm Pit Viper, Yellow-Breasted Bird of Paradise, Mozart’s Frog, Old Narwhal, Marbled Malachite, Lesser Dwarf Lemur, Patzcuaro Stream Frog, Moluccan Cuckoo, Wild Asian Buffalo, Hyacinth Macaw, Hyaline Fish, Holy-Mountain Salamander, Pearly Parakeet, Javan Shrew-like Mouse, Ozark Cave Arthropod, Fiji Crested Iguana, Mexican Blindcat, Firethroat, Little Spotted Kiwi, Dwarf Tinamou, Esmeraldas Woodstar, Cuban Crocodile, Cordelia’s Crow, Chinese Pangolin, Dalhousie Hardyhead, D’Abrera’s Tiger…
I gave her money to organizations aiding the lives of plants, and of innocent victims beset by the tragedy of the New Weathers. Tornados occurring here and there should not be occurring there and here. Surprise of tsunami, shock of hurricane, earthquake, and fires prone to these extreme drought zones. I bought hashish and other elixirs. I spent carefully, I spent wisely, I spent with a sense of grace. I traveled to a jungle and washed my world away with a bitter vine. I had anthropomorphic visions. I saw demons with metal mandible parts, I saw impostors everywhere that resembled the people I knew, but if you look more closely at her ring, that is not
her
gold ring; it is not a gold snake ring with ruby eyes…look more loosely at the stone around her neck; that is not
her
onyx, her face suddenly unglued, askew…that is not
her
eyebrow. I saw myself transformed and disembodied and disentangled, then reconstituted. I heard voices. I invented a new name for my publishing company:
Sayonara
. I was confused.
She spent my hard-earned working-cash on dining out. Taunting me as if to say,
You are poorer than you will ever be.
That was it. She raised the ante on dining out. She was a classic, addictive carnivore.
We crashed. Or rather she crashed.
I kept writing checks on our twinned account. I spent hers on salvos. On political campaigns. On candidates that furthered the existence of literature. On death and a birthday. I spent hers on an exit strategy that almost worked. I died a little. A part of my identity chipped away. I did not mind and then I did.
What are we worth?
I mused.
What is our exchange value on this vast meddling market?
I left my marriage. I left multiple lovers. I abandoned the rock star I had served day and night. I walked home late and thought again of our finite coinage, our value as a minted “thing.” I saw she-who-carried-my-name on Patchin Place. Not far from the credit union near where I lived. There was a moon hung low in the sky. I encountered the djinni of Djuna Barnes whom I had seen frequently in this place decades before, aging…. Djuna had morphed. She had crashed. She was restricted in her motion.
Her eyes had the glow of smoldering cinders.
The double is always present in our psyches. I follow her. What is hidden responding to what is revealed is the binary axis on which the investigation pivots. I hide behind the screen of my own investigation. Still longing for my shadowy, more flagrant, more casual other
cause.
The double writes books on desire and the need to colonize the host bodies of the Deciders.
Long fascinated by the stories of “double women,” I pick up the tale of the two Lilas, which presents us with the woman’s view, and that of a double or shadow. In one story the woman has two husbands—a demonic husband whom she loathes and an incestuous lover whom she adores. Both women share a single lover in the other story. He is cunning. In older variants of the tale of the shadow woman, the shadow “other” serves to protect the woman from any defilement or stain at the hands of the demonic husband. The shadow also keeps the “pure” woman of the real world separate from the lustful, passionate woman of the subterranean world. The shadow woman seems to be more like a shard of a dream. I study types of dreams described by Cicero in
De Divinatione
lifted from Philo Alexandrinus’s
De Somniis
: night apparition, oracular, enigmatic—
horama, oneiros,
chrematismos
. There is also a sense of double
universes
as time and space are both mapped separately in a Vedic cosmology, although the two dimensions are parallel. This mythology tells not only of double people at two points on a spectrum, but of double worlds that provide two layers of the spectrum of space-time. The doubles in myths or dream or illusion make possible a process that seems to protect the presenter-in-this-life from the dangers of complete solipsism.
Or you might go mad.
…
The Deciders kept interrupting the narration. They controlled the Base.
The Deciders create their factotums; they create Impostors.
What might they do to interrupt progress? They were bound in that—interrupting progress. Was it just a suicidal death wish for all humanity? They were in on the ruse to circumvent the machinations and desires of lovers of language, of linguistic fun and folly, of non sequiturs or where you write a poem without knowing where it would lead, where the poem was like the mind of the poet, stopping and stuttering and starting. Indeterminacy—how language pushes on you, and if the relationship between word and concept is arbitrary, then the attitude toward language must change. Instability of logic, ad hoc forms, delete every second word…might…do…interupt…they…bound…that…progress…it…a…death…for…humanity.
They wished to interfere with the desires of the Original Anne, she who writes this, who struggles in real twenty-first-century agon to warn the world of the impending collapse of generative language, of the Deciders’ impulse to control or destroy the narratives that are anything but master. That are anything but fascist. That are anything but gloomy. That are anything but manipulative. They record heart and breath and tongue and pause. And rest in analogues of thinking one thought instanter upon another. And the New Weathers? Take heed of them in our endangered orality.
Spool the tape. Rewind. Digitize. Listen. Good a thousand years?
In many mythologies a sexually or psychologically assaulted woman is permanently transformed into a plant or an animal. Would this transformation preserve the resources of future revelation that she carry this seed underneath her inchoate identity? Circumvent deciding in a human form.
Deciders resent an upstart woman with upstart larynx.
Consider:
Minthe
the spearmint
Leuke
a white poplar
Side,
pomegranate
Lotis
, the lotus tree
Daphne
, laurel
Philyra
, the linden
Kallisto
Io
See:
Versipellis
and therianthropy
Notice the ways they morph on you.
The Decider stood hovering over me with menace saying, “
I thank you for your passion, Original Anne.
” He was making a list of all the Deciding Categories the Original Anne would be excluded from.