Biography of an Inventory

"To be torn from the earth, exiled in duration, cut off from one's immediate roots, is to long for a reintegration in the original sources dating from before the separation and severance." I. Forgot

"When the sky is the darkest, and my head out the window, raindrops on my cheeks, I see you now. There are thunderstorms coming." M. Blue

The rain falls like a strange language spoken quietly outside my window. I look to see what is there, but see only a black glass that contains the reflection of my face through fragmented candlelight. Beyond it there is nothing but soft sound, a silence that is punctuated by the fall of an airborne moisture that is either too tired, or too heavy to continue in flight.

Inside the warmth of my room the candlelight begins to breathe into fetishes, touches the naked breasts of a wooden angel. I hear her hissing as the rain falls through the chimney to kiss the log that burns in slow patience, and is aware that the light that consumes it is the source of life to my increasingly strange surroundings.  My table begins to walk, an image from a photo watches like an animal that senses a natural enemy. What it senses is Reason. Books begin to whisper amongst themselves, the stones I'd collected from the beach rearrange themselves, and a wishbone taken from a quail reads my mind.

In their play it is me who is lifeless, reduced to ornamentation. From where I sit I hear the tree outside scrape the window, beckoning to play with these creatures. Suddenly I realize that it is only when my matter dissolves into the saturated soil will I be free to understand all of this. Reason sleeps in me now, and I fear that when it awakens the flames shall gutter to nothing, the rain cease it's fall, the sun will rise, and the stones hold still.

I try to stay as motionless as possible while becoming aware of the life of each object. I feel it, that is, the life as it awakens. Everything as it rises from slumber finds it's appropriate place in my flesh that quivers just slightly from the fear or joy embodied in the nature of each object. I begin a partial death that corresponds to each birth, and my body begins to shut down cell by cell, one hair at a time, until soon every organ will sleep. It really is impossible with our language to convey how this feels as to do this would require placing one word over the next, rather than side by side, until the entire page would be blotted out.

In this lyrical reverie I count each thing and an inventory is shaped from this un-sense. Perhaps it's culmination will be manifest in my actual death should I not find a way to continue to accumulate, and endow with life, a river of objects that would then roar through this small flat of mine. But to do this would require motion, and with motion would come the annihilation of all the life that blissfully kills me now.

Very few possessions have survived with me through evaporated time. They consist of two marbles, a photo album, my father's watch and pipe, and a rather bile colored book entitled simply, "Satan". As I slip into objectification, what quivering, small deaths these things deal me also brings to me full knowledge of how close a relationship I've had with objects, a friendship that has had distinct phases or eras. 

Flooded as I am now, recollection is the flotsam that I first cling to, and in this tumult I am captive. Hung limply upon recollection, I drift to the first of these eras. While originally a citizen of this period, I was endowed with the properties and sciences that defined that space, and was capable of transformation into shapes, dimensions, and meanings wholly independent of original form. Indeed it seemed that objects or other people enjoyed this exchange as well, and I see now that it did not come to a halt until sometime around my twelfth year when the last vestiges of this magic disappeared altogether. From this time is the memory of the only total happiness or freedom I've experienced, as well as the first and severest wounds to that happiness. As I sit here, still, in this freakish storm, clinging to memory, the oldest of my possessions attempts a dialogue with that memory of happiness.

There was in our dining room a small, black, cast iron stove. In the coldest of those northern winters the whole family would sleep in that room designed for dreams with both it's knotted pine walls in which the wood grain contained frozen faces, and in the hastily jumbled together furniture which cast a myriad of shadow, pell mell, around the room. By the light emanating from the stove I would stay warm, sunk deep in the green shag carpet and witness the fire place's glorious transformation into a Louisiana antebellum plantation, and the carpet into vast cotton fields. The mansion's location, I see, was due to my obsession with the "L" volume of the 1969 world book encyclopedia. I would pull the book off a shelf greasy with children's fingerprints to stare at a particular photo of such a structure surrounded by cypresses draped with mossy beards. Laying then in front of that stove, my mother and father's murmuring would provide the hypnotic sound necessary to push all distractions aside, and I'd watch, transfixed to the specter of a mansion that found it's way from the pages of a book to the center of our dining room, catch fire. Soon I could hear the floors cave in, see small windows exhale curls of gray smoke, and fat women with shiny dresses sat on the porch and cried while the men eventually gave up.

When tired of the mansion burning night after night, I'd move to sleep under the table that food was served at, which was carved in an intricate Victorian fashion. Under that table, the high, vaulted ceiling above me roofed an immense cathedral supported by thick dark pillars that were the table's legs. A brass ornament that adorned the place where the legs converged served as the tabernacle, which in turn, housed the temple of King Solomon, and the wooden rail that was once a footrest became the communion rail.

In a similar shamanic magic particular to children, that strange species that is half human and half god, my eyes would become windows to an airplane on my daily walk to school, through which passengers saw thick forests of firs, pines, and cedars in the grass below, and highways that winded from one driveway beach to the next were occasionally washed out by the asphalt sea, and the wrecked remains of tin spacecraft that scattered across forest-lawns. Through those same eyes, my bed sheets became a lunar landscape.

Sometimes I would be compelled to sift through the ashy remains of the southern mansion to pluck out my mother's partially burned cigarette packages to survey the damages to the spacecraft that they had become, counting the injuries to the passengers, the most severe belonging to the ones who had sat where the package had dented or burned, and I'd come up with a timeframe in which the ship would be again operable.

It was also during this era that one object had inspired or planted in me, my first nightmare. This object was a portrait of Jesus that was darkened with the hairy oil that comes from cigarette smoke and dust. In this dream, my sisters Robin and Trisha, Mom and myself were in the large bedroom upstairs, and Mom explained to us a game that was similar to "hide and seek". She was to be "it", and the three of us would hide until she found us. We nestled into the woolly smells of the closet and waited. After the length of a week we began to feel hungry, and Mom had not yet found us. We were reluctant to break the rules of the game, but hunger prevailed and the girls soon left me. Alone in the dark closet, fear left my body, and sat as two invisible beings on either side of me. At once I fled the confines of the closet and headed downstairs, pursued by my invisibles. At the bottom of the stairs hung the portrait that even when awake I hurried past, not liking his look. In an attempt to pass him, Jesus thwarted me by leaping from the frame, and began to choke me. I twisted in his arms in such a way that I soon saw the heads of each of my family members, severed and fastened to the ceiling with bloody crucifixes.

This portrait has been long gone now, and the memory that inspired it has swirled beneath the surface of these waters. From my place in the chair, I see the marble, pipe, book, and photos have exhaled their first new breaths in years.

The secret of the marbles remains embedded deep within their spheres, and they have robbed me of what they used to mean. However, from where they sit now on the display case above the fireplace they glow softly from deep inside. I can't recall what sway they had over me as a boy, and sit motionless, waiting for the glow to render them transparent.

These marbles I dropped one day while hunting lizards in the juniper. Soon I grew despondent at the lack of tiny reptiles, and reaching into my pocket, I realized that I had lost my marbles. The rest of that afternoon was spent searching the garden for them in the long shadows that cut across the yard in late October sunlight. It was years later, when as a young adult I rented that same house, and pulling weeds one day from those same juniper, that the marbles surfaced, webbed in a clump of root and soil. I haven't lost them since.

The pipe used to roost in the wooden brackets that surrounded a smoky, glass tobacco jar. This particular pipe was the most ornate of the collection, and I remember the fear it inspired with its carved lion's mouth and sharp teeth for a bowl. This cavernous maw would curiously glow a burning orange color, and the thick, sweet smoke my father would draw from it escaped his lips in silence. It seemed they enjoyed a pact of sorts, my father and this beast, but now it inhales from me the bluish smoke to sustain the glow it has acquired, and the fear I felt seems well founded.

The book, "Satan" was on the highest shelf of the bookcase in the dining room, and sat there, inverted, so that the title faced the wall. It was precisely this position that lent it taboo, as if exposing that name to the room would in some way manifest the diabolical presence. When I was still very young, I'd simply wait until the parents had gone outside, or across the street to Grandpa's house to leaf through the illustrations in the book that reproduced images of everything from Tibetan demons to surrealist paintings. This was the beginning of the eroticization of the profane, a thrill I received that was tinged with the pornographic on a cerebral level, not yet directly connected with genitalia, but none the less something to be hidden. In this way, for my own reasons, I would return the book to it's proper place with the title again facing the wall. Even the foul color of the binding I had connected with the pleasure contained in the act of browsing the pictures of this book. When I was old enough to read, I devoured the chapter on the possessed nun, Jeanne Ferry, who had sliced a communion wafer with a knife, whereupon it expired in blood and light. This description of an object endowed with life, no longer fully an object, struck such a chord of sympathy in me, who had been living this way with things my whole life. Upon hearing the soft flow of these words, it occurs to me that the heavy iconography of the catholic faith must indeed be living to children, who know nothing of the symbolic, and through whom everything is alive.

It was as such a child that the muscular god crucified in the center of our church emanated such an agonizing masculine scent that floated from his crotch, filling the empty space in the church's vertiginous heights. I'd stare at him each Sunday, memorizing every contour of his body, not resting my gaze until it set upon that place where the loose fitting cloth draped over his sex. This Jesus, the once dream murderer of my family was becoming my lover.

"His assassination? When he was killed everyone seemed to fade, I believe that was really when the threads began to disintegrate. I've always been dreadful over the future. What if he had never been born?" M.Fass

"God, why can't I get him out of my soul. His hand prints are all over my heart and soul. I want it clean and he keeps creeping through me casting shadows all over and through me like a Zoetrope. If I could cast light in through myself he'd cast his shadow, and that is all I get is his shadow, his handprints that won't go away, there are always these smudges, this residue of him. He is my angel, my eternal empty cup."K. Diggins

Seeing him there, beautifully, and painfully hung, I knew there were two of me inside my chest, trying to beat their way through my ribcage, but the noiseless rhythm that pounded managed only to drive me deeper into the earth in slow, but sure steady movements.

A room formed around me, far under the church where I sat devoutly with my family, damp and smelling of piss. My eyes rolled backwards until I could no longer see, and I breathed to that rhythm until I no longer knew who I was. Blue smoke in total blackness slowly gave in to a soft light that I followed, though I could still not see in the usual sense of the word. The light came from a hallway that water streamed through. I came to a small room that was inhabited by myself at the age of nine, where I lay in a bathtub fingering myself, thinking of what the soldiers did to Jesus. Imagining God, being both God and his executioners, being both participant and the voyeur, brought both of us to orgasm, and one of me came in ribbons of blood, the other in ribbons of semen, and the room was permeated with the scent of jasmine.

Sex and religion were forged on the same iron. As a boy, I'd masturbate incessantly, as if to excorsize myself of this desire which expended itself in white pools on my belly. I knew that God watched this each evening, this frantic ritual, and I developed a complicated feeling somewhat akin to an exhibitionist who ultimately realizes that the voyeur holds all the power in the relationship and is inclined towards violence. Finally, to absolve myself, I called upon Lucifer. Behind my sweaty brow, fevered prayers were offered to him, the only one I knew of who had escaped God's realm to abide in a world of his own fashioning. I prayed for him to appear to me naked, and to kiss my groin with a burning tongue, to which I'd respond with a reciprocal act. But like God, Satan remained mute, indifferent to my suffering, and I hated them both for it.

"I remember when I was a young boy lying on my back in the grass, gazing into the summer blue above me, and wishing I could melt into it, become a part of it. For these fancies I believe that a religious tutor was innocently responsible: he had tried to explain to me, because of my dreamy questions, what he termed, "the folly and wickedness of pantheism" with the result that I immediately became a pantheist, at the tender age of fifteen. And my imaginings presently led me not only to want the sky for a playground, but also to become the sky!"  Lafcadio Hearn

It occurs to me now that religion may be the perfect appropriation of the childhood world. With the death of living imagination, and with it the world where the human interacts with objects in a space and time where the limits of both space and time are suspended, the need for that lost harmony is supplanted by it's parody. But because this parody is not only an external construction, but also refuses motion and dialogue (the sacred objects of religion refuse to move on their own, God and Satan refuse to speak) The chief element that sustains it is fear. The sacred world of childhood was fluid and living because of the lack of boundary between self and other, while the parody of that sacred in religion is immobile and silent because of the boundary it requires. One cannot command God to speak because one is no longer God. The fear inspired by this alienation and silence keeps this false sacred alive, as to lose this would be a loss of all sacred and magic. With the original having been forfeited, the human would experience a loss of identity, and be commissioned to be the tool, or a function. In this way identity is entwined with the magical, the sacred, the object, and it's relationship to the imagination, whether real or parodied. But here I must end this analysis, counterproductive as it is to the reverie that consumes me, as I watch the photo album that sits on the walking coffee table turning pages of it's own accord, as if stretching after a long sleep.

In the scene from the film, "Blade Runner", where Deckard examines a photo by using a machine that he commands with his voice, perfectly exemplifies the multi-dimensionality of any object. By using this machine he literally journeys into a photo to search a room. The machine, an object, is used to betray a photo, another object, by subordinating them both to the laws and logic of an outside universe, that of the world of utility, the world of man. The photo is a frozen record that invites the seer into another universe, that of imagination and unreality, and when thus seized and forced to betray that imagination or unreality, Deckard turns objects against each other, thereby reducing the magical interplay between the seer and the thing to a hierarchy of use, an arrogant negation of magic, and the slavery of imagination to science.

Here, my own photos that remain from my childhood will not be thus betrayed, will be used according to the laws of imagination, as equals that are portals defying "real" notions of space and time. I see that we are equals in this play because without the communication between us neither of us would exist as such, both seer and seen are necessary for this play.

In turning the pages of the album, what captures my attention is the almost liquid quality of these images held under the transparent sheets. It is if they have become the various rooms or exhibits of an aquarium. They absorb me like sugar into brandy. As layers of my tissue dissolve, I become everything contained in the photo, yet somehow manage to retain my consciousness even when deep inside many images at once, and know them and me separately, even while being them.

The ghosts of an overexposed family blur my vision upon entering them. Becoming thus infused with my family, I dare not speak of the sorrows awaiting them on the other side of the plastic sheets that comprise the pages of this exhibit. Seeing my father, being my father, as well as the others in the family, how can I share my love for them, so aware of the death and failure so closely surrounding them without betraying the sacred unreal? The past, it seems is better only lived once, then even burned to prevent return, blessing it in this way by consigning it to the abandonment of space inverted.

I'm not sure if it is tears that soak me, or the dew of an imprisoned time now that I come to, but the deep, heavy beats of a heart throb in my ears, little by little reduced to a click of a watch punctuating empty time. With each click something dies.

The click sounds from the shiny thing that now lays stashed amongst the cookbooks in the pantry. I seldom look at it, and up until now have only been dimly aware of it's presence. One time long ago, it sat on an end table, marking silence in an room with shades drawn. With it was monogrammed handkerchief, wallet, keys, cigarettes, comb, and a belt. They, themselves did nothing, they had nothing to say, but alone the watch cheerfully triumphed over a malevolent silence. Fearing this silence, and the clicks that divided them, I abruptly left my skin to hover in a corner of the stained ceiling and observe.

A young mother sat on a legless couch, her eight children perched little sparrows at her feet. From where I floated above, through clicks of that shiny thing, my father's watch, I could hear my mother's words. She was telling us that our father had died that evening. A click brought on momentary blackness before it seemed a succession of television shows played, finally stopping it's electronic parade at one show that portrayed us. I remember paying the closest of attention to the actors not to discern the plot, but to avoid the persistent sound of the clicks of the watch.

A week or two later when the watch was given to me it had stopped. No more punctuation, only an even silence that seemed thick and reigned over everything it touched. That silence expanded to vast proportions, and remained sovereign over my life for many years, and helped to extinguish a relationship I shared with objects, a pact I had in mutual complicity with them to destroy space and time. With the final click of the watch came the end of the first era and the disappearance of the object. I then continued to exist in the shadowy ruins of a boy's world, and when not at school or doing housework I'd wander among the cinders of the mansion, all airplanes and spacecraft absent, and the moon's surface forever lodged in the sky. For the next ten to twelve years this was the new playground, one formerly populated with endless adventures.

These years I obsessed over the end of the object. I'd wander the woods in search of decrepit farms, crashed cars, or the foundations of homes long gone, where often the ancient entry steps led to nowhere. Many afternoons were spent in graveyards. Not the newer ones with those shiny, sterile flat stones and manicured lawns, but the variety where the weeds grow waist high, where leaves are no longer raked, and the monuments vary according to the wealth of the deceased. The greater the wealth, the more magnificent corpse and mossy crypts.

These mausoleums were the closest I'd get to my southern mansions, these that were lifeless and corrupt. Broken windows were another object of contemplation. I'd imagine them to be somehow related to my lost world, and I'd take endless photos of them hoping in some way find a way back, or even to prove to myself that my former world ever existed. The wrecked cars I would happen across in some way were a pale substitute for the grandeur of cigarette spacecraft. Because all things from this era were dead, I have nothing of them but these words, which fall short of the meaning that they then had. This second era, then was itself a sepulchral built to house an absence or void, and in this sad labyrinth I remained until two epiphanies provided me with a forecast of another transformation.

The first was the sight of a rat decomposing on the street, it's flesh pulled away from the ribs, baring its tiny heart to ravenous maggots. I walked by to examine the thin bones and matted hair. To the right was a fenced lot where a guard dog rushed to me, gnashing teeth in a fury. Suddenly the dog sniffed the air, and retreated just in time to escape a violent outburst of rain. As I walked away, the rat felt the rain filling it's ribcage, soothing a long felt thirst, hoping the rain would rip loose a dead heart, washing the last remnants of existence into the gutter.

In the second epiphany, an angel spins slowly in space, just above the range of light, holding onto a piece of driftwood. The setting sun lights her wings aflame in gold and red, and casts shadow around her breasts, between her thighs, and upon her closed eyelids, giving to her the illusion of being shadow and flame. Her body has been incarnated one thousand times to perfection. Her hands are clasped in prayer as she clings to this driftwood and spins against her will. She prays to be released. Each metamorphosis has been to her sorrow, and she remains servile to this faith, this driftwood that is dead, mute and never has known will. Her hope is that one day this mindless thing will set her free. It is her captor, and her freedom would be the fall into empty space, where she would find that she always could fly.

As these words get closer by the letter to the end of the second era, the kingdom of the End, I find myself catching hints of a third. Certain scents, the angle of shadow or flickering light all hint or intimate the seedlings that push their way through the coarse ashes of the dead kingdom.

Objects no longer extend from their bodies, expanding and melting, but rather from a distrust of humans, they maintain form, if only externally. To look upon them one sees just so many things stranded on walls, shelves or floors. The extension or metamorphosis that they partake of is within, an inward expansion of what is the spatial as we know it, but inverted, flowing within any object we may see. Think of this, passageways that may return to that primal world or state! I now understand the necessity for these corridors to remain disguised, thinking of the ruin man would cause to gain one last colony, just as Deckard had colonized his photograph. Sensitive to the touch, these living objects will in panic shield all access to these tunnels should they sense Reason. But if a magician or child should hold them, he would discover a passage unlike any other he may have traveled. The nature of such a travel is entwined with the nature of the object. Here they have individual consciousness, but the purpose they hold in common is the preservation and defense of the world concealed at the end of the passage.

Walking along the cliffs that rise abruptly from the surf, the sight of rusted remains of sunken ships breaking the water's surface from an ocean that was living a tumultuous state of being had weakened my mind. Seduced by the idea of wreck, of jagged formations within that living sea that were capable of producing the demise such a large work as a ship, the sound of wind in my ears, and the secretive waves, all conspired to reverse my senses, to push them within, that I might find such tunnels as these. The desire to overturn rocks and boulders seized me, it seemed the proper thing to do, and I remembered doing just that as a child, but then with the intent of uncovering the mass movement lurking beneath. Potato bugs, spiders,  and worms, all in motion, at work on their own lugubrious projects. Then, the act of uncovering soon became ritual, with meaning that went beyond simple unveiling, and the rocks themselves appeared to have their own agenda. What exactly this agenda was I could never ascertain, no matter how hard I would try to converse with them, the stones responded with characteristic inertia.

Here then, above the tide, the rocks slowly rose from hibernation, glowing with a new significance. I felt as if the lapse of time between my original long afternoons spent with rocks, and now, had evaporated or otherwise vanished, bringing me to the place of no severance. Obeying instinct, I began to overturn these creatures without real purpose, only to find others beneath them that in turn demanded attention. The frustration I felt from my impotence at never being able to understand their language overwhelmed me to the point of tears.

Following the path as if drunk, my foot stumbled over a small, insignificant, and rather ugly stone. I continued on, looking at the larger rocks for something, thinking them to be of more importance, but each step that distanced me from the small stone I had tripped over increased it's prominence in my mind until the memory of it loomed as large as the unseen rocks that ruined ships. I ran back to it, noticed again it's unattractiveness, and picked it up. It was the sort of rock that years of exposure to the wind, sun and salt air causes to break up over the years. Upon dislodging it from the path, the stone crumbled between my fingers whereupon a multitude of voices in all languages, the sound of the surf, of countless foghorns, and the cry of gulls burst forth from its craggy surface. Although these sounds were released simultaneously, I had understood each of them as separate, and then realized that the nature of rocks is that of the historian, that they absorb all sounds around them, holding those sounds close to their hearts, and that all of the creatures that crawl beneath them must use the rocks to gain access to the worlds denied them as a result of their proximity and confinement to the earth's immediate surface.

All boulders, stones, rocks and pebbles were now seen to be tunnels not of passage, but of sound between earth and sky, and a dialogue was now possible not only between myself and insects, but between soil and air, the living and the dead. How sad to see a widow, silenced by her grief, kneeling over her love's stone. If only she knew! Maybe by removing them I have faulted, but now here in my room I am soothed by the soft murmuring they issue, and sleep, I feel will be easier. I see now the imminent reemergence of the object. Gone now is the fluid play of external metamorphosis, but gone also is the dry desert of it's death. Now each object lives within it's own consciousness, they are at once interdependent and representative. They link me to the real and unreal worlds. These things can remain solid, impenetrable markers in space, or doors to another space. I've come to seek particular objects in order to open these doors.

The real is a labyrinth of prisons. Who benefits from this imprisonment is unclear, but it is clear that the real body is the place of solitary confinement, the "hole", as prisoners commonly refer to it. When a body, or any other object exists solely in the real, it is a prisoner or slave of utility, the warden of the real world. Bodies without the unreal serve money, work or power. They become first cadavers, then dust floating in the harrowing void of nothingness that life without the unreal has become. Prisoners are such because it is with their bodies that they have acted in an assault on the real kingdom of use, so it is that real policemen enforce real laws to throw the rebels into real prisons. These prisons are the most concentrated models of larger society. It's ironic that what lands the prisoner in prison is precisely an attempt to escape.

On my first visit to the island prison of Alcatraz, I had all this in my mind. When in the shower room, I became dizzy with the images of muscular prisoners bathing and shouting obscenities, bursting with a sex energy that expended itself in nooks and crannies, or in cellblocks with other men. I noticed an electrical outlet torn from the wall and laying among bleached seagull bones and discarded soda cans. It's one more thing that I've collected, and it's sockets are subtle, violent orifices, through which I periodically attempt to escape the real.

Several other things reside with me here, classified falsely as art, literature and music. I have on one wall a flower that threads a man upon it's stem. Across from it on another wall an adolescent is frozen in the moment before he would otherwise blow his brains out the back of his skull. A stone angel prays as she drowns, and an infant with one arm suffers the rusted nail driven through his heart. Above the fireplace a young girl is blowing a party whistle as she falls down a shaft. My books and music smile now at the lessons they have so gracefully taught me. These troubled beings console one another, as well as me, and together we stave off death. In a sense they have saved my life, calling me to play here sheltered from the oblivion of utility. My apartment has become a wildlife refuge of endangered species, and it is here we play in the best recreation possible of original imagination, away from the bounty hunters of Reason.