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Jan. 23rd, 2012 05:14 amUpon discovering my body was a time machine I began to take notes on the changing behaviors of the peoples of the different years, the more of which passed the stranger these became. Ways a group of nomads settling an empty city would never be, never dream of being are followed without question by their descendants of the fortieth generation. Itself now a city, the world's strangeness curls it tight beneath a chemical menagerie.
In my thirty-second year it was decided that there was no north. All compasses and compass roses were destroyed as bad influences. Maps and globes were dismounted, stuck to wheels, spun, remounted oriented the way they came to rest. The axes of the globes were not changed - this was not an anti-intellectual year - but they emerged from long stems bent like straws. Most looked like single-ornament mobiles.
The awkwardness of the latter led to mass burnings before I turned thirty three. That year we all walked north in protest. No one remembered which direction north was, and for a few days there was confusion. Accreted subliminal course corrections based on the behavior of others soon gathered us into larger and larger marching unisons, until all had melted into two great tribes which clashed disastrously in Brazil at nearly opposite angles.
The survivors declared individuality on my 34th birthday. North, it was decided, was within, and speaking of your conception of it to another was considered as bad an influence on your own as it was on theirs. Vibrating in the outside air as scream and symbol was unhealthy for a north. Silence about other matters became the custom as we forgot what might not entail to the north. Suspicious silence, maintained by lonely lurkers in shacks eating from cans piled up in the canning craze of my twenty-ninth autumn. Only at night did their eyes glitter with love of seven billion distinct sets of northern lights.
As the new year started and my hair fell out, a common sickly weariness settled in and a spontaneous gathering in Cape Town followed. A frowning child became our prophetess by speaking first, proposing each paint their conception of north. North no longer meant a direction, but the hidden integral truth to things, outside of which nothing could matter. Despite this conviction there were no arguments as the fingerpaintings were passed about and discussed.
One showed a hole deepening down through absolute black and past context in which bright entities half fish and half firefly half flew, half swam, slowly, never seen but suggested through a mixture of the intolerability of their not existing and subtle inequalities among different total darks.
One showed a wooden staircase falling to pieces, through the cracks and holes of which a second staircase was observed, parallel, stone. A descending fluid sheeted the inner stair, reflected in which were the great clouds that rained it, shaped like hands and arms stretched toward one another in yearning, layers on layers of them, overlapping but never touching, pink and green. The spiders on the outer stair had everything, cared nothing, least of all for the clouds they spun then kicked absently into the holes.
One showed a great crowd painting with their fingers, but each hand of fingers was stylized as hatches of four thick lines, and larger than both painting and person, and the various disparately directed fingers, focused on, formed another picture, of another set of stylized, paint-smeared fingers gesturing out toward the face of the viewer.
One showed a globe with a stack of tiny chairs emerging from a pole - identified by a barbershop helix discarded to the side. The chairs, of all types, climbed up high, through the clouds, reappeared through a gap and seemed to encircle the moon, became too far away but then back into view to end near the opposite pole, where a headless figure seated on the topmost reached up to just barely touch earth with its thumb.
Everyone agreed that all were true, however inane or impossible. Everyone except me. I painted, using the set of logical symbols then in fashion, a simple proof that a proposition and its opposite cannot both be true. This too was held to be true. I tore most of the hair from my machine in rage. They danced a happy hair-tearing dance around me, mimicking my expressions of fury but delighted.
This year we're weaving the fallen hair in with our own, all into a great, single mat of live unity. I'm sewing it to my armpits in protest. I am no longer fashionable so the gesture will not be imitated, but my hope is that the scorn will be noted, will weave itself in with the stuff of the next.
In my thirty-second year it was decided that there was no north. All compasses and compass roses were destroyed as bad influences. Maps and globes were dismounted, stuck to wheels, spun, remounted oriented the way they came to rest. The axes of the globes were not changed - this was not an anti-intellectual year - but they emerged from long stems bent like straws. Most looked like single-ornament mobiles.
The awkwardness of the latter led to mass burnings before I turned thirty three. That year we all walked north in protest. No one remembered which direction north was, and for a few days there was confusion. Accreted subliminal course corrections based on the behavior of others soon gathered us into larger and larger marching unisons, until all had melted into two great tribes which clashed disastrously in Brazil at nearly opposite angles.
The survivors declared individuality on my 34th birthday. North, it was decided, was within, and speaking of your conception of it to another was considered as bad an influence on your own as it was on theirs. Vibrating in the outside air as scream and symbol was unhealthy for a north. Silence about other matters became the custom as we forgot what might not entail to the north. Suspicious silence, maintained by lonely lurkers in shacks eating from cans piled up in the canning craze of my twenty-ninth autumn. Only at night did their eyes glitter with love of seven billion distinct sets of northern lights.
As the new year started and my hair fell out, a common sickly weariness settled in and a spontaneous gathering in Cape Town followed. A frowning child became our prophetess by speaking first, proposing each paint their conception of north. North no longer meant a direction, but the hidden integral truth to things, outside of which nothing could matter. Despite this conviction there were no arguments as the fingerpaintings were passed about and discussed.
One showed a hole deepening down through absolute black and past context in which bright entities half fish and half firefly half flew, half swam, slowly, never seen but suggested through a mixture of the intolerability of their not existing and subtle inequalities among different total darks.
One showed a wooden staircase falling to pieces, through the cracks and holes of which a second staircase was observed, parallel, stone. A descending fluid sheeted the inner stair, reflected in which were the great clouds that rained it, shaped like hands and arms stretched toward one another in yearning, layers on layers of them, overlapping but never touching, pink and green. The spiders on the outer stair had everything, cared nothing, least of all for the clouds they spun then kicked absently into the holes.
One showed a great crowd painting with their fingers, but each hand of fingers was stylized as hatches of four thick lines, and larger than both painting and person, and the various disparately directed fingers, focused on, formed another picture, of another set of stylized, paint-smeared fingers gesturing out toward the face of the viewer.
One showed a globe with a stack of tiny chairs emerging from a pole - identified by a barbershop helix discarded to the side. The chairs, of all types, climbed up high, through the clouds, reappeared through a gap and seemed to encircle the moon, became too far away but then back into view to end near the opposite pole, where a headless figure seated on the topmost reached up to just barely touch earth with its thumb.
Everyone agreed that all were true, however inane or impossible. Everyone except me. I painted, using the set of logical symbols then in fashion, a simple proof that a proposition and its opposite cannot both be true. This too was held to be true. I tore most of the hair from my machine in rage. They danced a happy hair-tearing dance around me, mimicking my expressions of fury but delighted.
This year we're weaving the fallen hair in with our own, all into a great, single mat of live unity. I'm sewing it to my armpits in protest. I am no longer fashionable so the gesture will not be imitated, but my hope is that the scorn will be noted, will weave itself in with the stuff of the next.
