I

I sealed a manila envelope with nothing in it, glancing at my nifty geochron – a map of where it is night in the world – (we were walking towards __ in heavy snow) – I drew the sigil you drew back then and took it to the dead letter office, where I wrote Robert Podgurski, Esq. in the hand called "Jackal's Scissors" and asked a postal employee to throw it at a passing train, but she passed it to a woman who is sure to give it to you

(less a woman than a hand, one of those torche'res from Cocteau's Beast's house). The ink was gray, the silvery gray used to print the warning on mirrors (OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR) in a stencil script, I heard you saying "hands are very important," you meant all eight of them, you meant the delta Dee used to draw phlogiston – I tried to concentrate but couldn't, too many places in time, they flew like kites from their graven names –

(you were with me within the massive sundial smashed by the storm, late August near Nida – a week ago – I needed to recite "The Wives of the Nehrung-Fishers" – needed – when did I last feel such need – but I couldn't remember a word, only the sounds the madwoman made when the fishermen returned empty-handed. Instead I remembered "Always to be named:"

"And who will teach me
what I forgot: the stones'
sleep, the sleep
of the birds in flight…"

(you were with me on the face of the sundial, its obelisk smashed in the storm, looking towards the frontier of what is now Kaliningrad. Nehrung – Neringa – it has no fishermen now, it's swarmed by tourists, the dunes below Nida right out of Lawrence of Arabia, sandwiched by a picture postcard sea).

And then we drove north, to Pape, to the marshes where the wild horses have moved into an abandoned house. "They inhabit it as if it is their home, moving from room to room." The drought was everywhere evident. This places you in time. Dust covers the stunted pines on both sides of the narrow road to Papes ķoņu ciems. The grass in Ausma Brenča's garden is a golden brown. Every night in dream the moon is sinking, but checking my handy geochron in the morning, the moon was always exactly where it should have been, unmoved by sleep, its phase as clear as the amount of milk in the glass you lift to your lips. Ausma Brenča, barefoot, takes us to see an oaken dugout the sea washed up. A thousand years old, it drifts into your sleep. The hottest summer in history, a red moon rising, a few drops of rain.

 

II

"No tenses. The words tumbled from all the mouths of the god at once.
He rubs himself with his utterance. He shines."
           – Gerrit Lansing

A circle shaped like a teardrop, widdershins, out of the interior. Age is making less sense. "Call the color age, or of the work't, silver…" The age of your sensibility, the terrible natural inclination to return unchanged from terror, to fill your father's outline with the ineffable, to hold the fort, to squeeze received ideas out of your pores, to hold still in the light of them.

We were walking towards the Capitol in heavy snow, after absinthe. Long live the academy d'absomphe! The trouble is with the pronouns – who were the "we" and all that jazz, I lost my Leitmotiv on Blueberry Hill, I live in a country where time is confused, the dead boat is not seaworthy, fuck the cyclical, make japa upon causality-wine.

In the next dream it was paint-by-number, mixed with the stick-on parts of the human anatomy, which were very confusing to me as a child (I lost the testicles, they were tiny). The adhesive social systems and the shame of one's position! Paint-by-number on the cheesy velvet of Novalis' night, the solar system, Velveeta orange for the angry planet, rotten milk for the stars.

Spirograph and Tinker Toys. Old poems about an ideal body politic. Indoctrination.

Age is making less sense, is trusting to the madness of dream once the meaning of each face has been evacuated, chasing the corner of her lips ever downward, hunting her down, "in the lamplight… with light brown hair," bearded, bartered, in love with a final anonymity.

We were walking towards the Capitol in heavy snow. Gerrit had said to focus upon the personal. I had the green curry. A little girl drew us in green – after absinthe, as if moved by our aesthetic experience. The landscape speaks in an extinct language and Ausma Brenča collects stones. The things she sees in them are there. They are as real as

 

III

Where's the transcendence? If you stare at a spot in the dream long enough, will it (deepen it, will you get through, is every place blotter for the Doctrine of Signatures, to know what the mark is – to act upon the mark, is this not a sad string of subtitles for the Life of the Soul? Do you still labor beneath that?) – shall it rescue you from the inanity of Self? Woo-ha! I always wanted to be an old man, a still life. Nature morte, the wild horses were imported. A bad biography is better than a slick one, the archetypes slipped beneath oilcloth. In the very last dream we had to find out how to live. How to make a life or love, how to trick ourselves out of our fabled destination.

 

IV

You want to say something awfully clear. I have come to distrust clarity, I prefer – like the next guy – I prefer to prefer, I let my fingers do the walking in the Yellow Pages, I am on vacation, I have vacated my position – only to return to it like a swallow through a hurricane, to find my way home. My prince is a palm tree sprouting between her legs in orgasm, my prince is something she came up with, I am her prince. Old, sad stories told until you no longer believe in anything, and then revived, o' ugly rustlings of a simple desire to be carried away. Shut your trap et cetera. To be tired for real long time and without analyst, to play
you were my lover I am sorry
you went mask-like,
I am sorry
I am sorry,
mea culpa
all the way.

To want to get somewhere where it is clear
I will never get there, start to build a house in hopelessness, scratch a barrio, do make something out of it, it stands for something, you do grok the vile, ephemeral nature of my architecture, don't you? I have been lifted from this; I have been lifted from this before. This old look-at-me, this torturous structure. To strip off

 

V

I sent off a manila envelope with nothing in it, only the swish of wheat and in the end the door, or the odor of wherever my fingers had been that day.

Fuck your soul, o fuck your soul, fuck soul itself.

Stick to the personal.

 

VI

What is the difference between the story and

do nothing to wake her – I hate complexity, stick it, solve
et coagula, draw your own awfulness
out, replete with pleonasms –

we live in different worlds, gimme
gimme, I hope (Gimmler, Gitler, German Gesse) –

SALVE – when them civilizations clash, it's good to be at home.

I had nothing to tell you and mailed you a letter –

I hope you are at home.

9:41, 2002. 31. VIII., upon returning from Courland

Copyright © Pēteris Cedriņš, 2003