A Different Body Experiences
A Different Universe
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re-interpretation
re-formation
We sat in rows. Bright then sharply dim lit faces, not knowing each other. In ‘Vendredi Soir’ she picks up a stranger. They sit in her car at the start, hardly moving in the endless gridlock. My scarlet hat rolls in a shine from my knee. Sits red in the gloom upturned.
Just at waist height, when you're sitting in a wheelchair that is, the large tail curled around not you but almost, then was gone. Of course, I'd seen the rear end of the large rat disappear first; turning a corner or a slow bend in the ledge which runs through the middle of everything. Usually we miss it, just feel the tip of the tail as it moves past in a flash gone. Sharp now the rush.
It’s interior a soft, fluctuating glow, turned almost away to the screen.
The man next to me in blue becoming darkness, leans forward almost imperceptibly.
He has to readjust, perhaps will not attempt - a pause. This close front
row is used, when it’s used at all, by those unable or unwilling to climb
the steps to more distanced seats.
I sit, have to, in the middle of the row; one of two empty spaces each
encroaching the other, dead centered. Next to me the man resumes a definite
attempt.
It’s our encounter. He leans, pick up my hat and with one movement hands it to me. I too have to readjust to ensure it will not fall onced grasped and leaning slightly turn to whisper,”Thank you.” My hair falls forward.
Somewhere in his head he wanted to keep it up, could run on at this pace for ever perhaps faster and faster until he had become running but, just as his legs were about to tango tangle, his breath became difficult to maintain.
Fractionally before the credits finish I leave — a disruption some think unforgiveable but I don’t want to relate. These brief encounters might be the way we project our desires on to an unknowable figure. All the more desired for that, as god, but it leads to more, too much and rounds out into a lack of autonomy and self-reliance; caught in disappointment and habit yet again.
The acute steepness stopped, drifted to an easier slope. He was still running of course but the motion of his legs could be individually distinguished, perhaps a fall was imminent with this slowed current but I didn't see it. He was still there running but I let him go, for a while at any rate.
Sound tiered out and spun about the woman, the woman in a grey cardigan It came to rest around the arms of the jumper, not cardigan. The jumper, which might have been a dress and her silver hair styled like blonde to curl under her face, but was definitely not blond. She might have worn jade wool though. All seemed to bounce out, bound in a curve not quite statuesque. Across the other side it sat on the platform.
Violins pulled in quick succession, relenting to a pluck, strident but still a finger touch, pluck. Then fierce energy, in the nearest thing to a pit-a-pat glissando, now taunts the somber pomp of earlier ceremony a funeral or sovereign procession but all the time straight trees bred for straight after lives, lining the motorway.
I discovered the word 'bleak' yesterday - was it that close? Perhaps the night before. No yesterday, early evening. I'd been looking so long and there it was, apt.
In an orderly file carrying things, their orders under their arm or in their heads, or swarming up and over the platform as happened later, sometimes tripping
She sat in the tree waiting to murder the next thing to pass. It was sound.
She squeezed and stretched, straining every particle in her extensive,
unsatisfied self until sound stopped.
I thought, I don't know what to do but she knew, as i did, that I had
to do something - uncover the wreck perhaps.
Of course all words buzzed around the tree determined to find a home anywhere,
wet or dry. There was no place but that didn't stop their looking, hijacking
a faint, imagined rustle and eventually they took to waiting in the head,
or the potential for them hid there, until some generation or grouping
became aware of their presence, or force. We should say 'might,' no necessity
ever for any grouping to become conscious.
"Oh she died. Dolly died but we told Ida straight away"
But did they repeat and repeat over days, weeks until they caught a moment
which had enough concepts present to understand a little of what we mean
by death. I expect not. No wonder present memories aren't made and the
past is returned to as if a present re-collection.
We edged over the side of the bridge, sticking our hands into small holes thinking of the bite of rats, scared they might, scared we'd loose face too if they did.
"but she has made another friend, Annie. She's the new resident." This woman talking to me, with big, bright red hair, seems to lean this head-and-shoulder-full nearer, conspiratorially and rolls a whisper towards me, "She's a schizophrenic." Then, lest I'm concerned at the uselessness of Ida, that is of my mother, with Dolly dead, she reassures me, " but it's good, as Ida seems able to calm her."
She looked at them looking at her, her ire and self-consciousness rising until she was reluctant to go back later, to get out of the car and go in through the doorway; windows watching. I asked "Are you watching them?" She looked to say ‘yes’ then as it formed so did suspicion.
Annie's hair had been curled into metal furls; shavings from a lathe. Threatened and elusive looking like a deer in a forest played out in a symphony. With red lips a perfect pointed bow; eyes forestalling the arrow. On display for us she recoiled the springs, mind looking away whilst eyes continued their direction towards middle distance; the space between us all. I watched as best I could.
Again, "How do you know if they are looking at you unless you are looking at them?" She, waving her arm, said, "Oh you." but she seemed to feel their glances resting on her too strongly and I thought, we never fully wandered through this now loop closed as she watches unexplained.
Red hair controlled, hardly noticeable. Her brother had died last Saturday; a suddenness, she confides in the midst of writing a receipt for the £15 I've paid for Ida's unknown sweets bill. Now it's Wednesday.
Words walk over water and drown in the copies of documents.
Wasps spun around. I tried talking to one "Ah, Ah" as it moved in, "No, don't do - Ah - that." on my "Ah. Ah." food - it had as much effect as wind whirling arms batting wings from table to table, person to person, hand to grievous hand.
She's "better at work." she says. The fan gives a relaxant breeze; whirrs on. The day is hot still continuing, in between the weather forecasts, “He was 38.” Doris walks in, rolls her sleeves and words, talks of her mother and slaves and made up words. Tumblings of sounds edge and carry her meaning, thick encrust decoration which warms.
Sometimes, as she waves wasps or gestures a staring, she catches sight of her hands winding veins, like someone using as a signal to lucid dreaming - that key to awareness within the dream.
Her legs recalled by her words stick out from rolled up sleeves, then change back as she's slyly told, "They're your arms not your legs." but for her the forward thrust of words and meanings isn't halted or changed and we walk through the scowl, leaving the office to collect Ida.
She calls out, "Where are the girls?" meaning my PA and including Ida in this pluralised question. It's not a class thing, all are working class, but how else to call the woman to wheel me out of the room because she hadn't asked me but gone ahead in that force of propelling body.
.. scurried by bent as an upside down 'L,’ capitalised. She looked with nerve, overdoing the spy measures, past one then another aisle. Suddenly by the till she turned a basket of reduced, as the sell by raced past, into pale kittens or cats; not ginger but pine. The woman behind the counter said a price, "One hundred insects."
Some of the others, no, it's only Carl who actually pushes me out of the almost glass lean-to but solid office to find my PA. Asking me first though, as he does. Propelled again by their physicality; walking, a form of falling and retrieval of balance continuing.
He sat on the rocky ledge. He wanted to move his legs, to swing them over the edge but all he could do was dangle himself, his lifetime accomplishments until he became sore with the effort. Only for a short time he could see that. He kept hearing the loud repeated simple sentences that passed for talking amongst men he'd known. How they'd come up to him, or he'd heard other's conversations, "Is that the car?"
"No this is the hire car they're collecting this afternoon, when they bring back the other and older version of..." (Nods towards vehicle with whole upper body, like a rubber ring toy. Such emphasis.)
He jumped out in front of the dance, much as kids, or a suicide jump in front of traffic. He hesitated, looked startled, then joined in trying to disown his body, individual part, by individual part, or so it looked to those who noticed and had an opinion; not many I grant you.
"So that's the car." A conversation ensues, reshuffling the words, saying only the gestures.
Or, "Baz's all right." Loud, rolled round his mouth like a thunderous statement.
His arms seemed to be the least wanted, or the most reluctant to be disconnected, no matter how hard he flung them away from himself. Their shape like the tails of that ghost orchid in the film. The cut-out of children, jigging away in barely a breath, give a wind and they became as the demented arms so locked in at the shoulders.
"Yes Baz's all right but he's a bully"
(The 'bully' needing to come out, even if squashed by the disbelieved acquiescence of 'rightness'),
Move with the rhythm, any rhythm, man but feel it, feel it. Then your body will leave and rejoin you like mercury - but no, and who's to say this isn't as much his dance, his playing of a rhythm as the insect suiting the plant, as the guy in the orchid movie said — we just missing the attraction. Though I suppose even it becomes fashionable every now and again like wearing alligator and leopard skins.
"Is Baz a bully?" (As if a new version of something has been spotted; a game, or tool-kit.)
"Baz's all right" Thunderous as the first. If a recording made and tested it would be an exact replica of the first in intonation, tempo and feeling, like a cloned phrase available at all times out of a side pocket where slide rulers used to be kept. (What happened to 'slide-rulers?' I suppose they went with manufacturing.) — and so they continued until voices fragmented and disappeared with the distance.
She needed something to happen to change things. Of course this sudden interruption, veering disruption, wouldn’t happen; it never had but then she wasn’t living her own life. Someone else should rightly be living her life if she hadn’t so embedded (handful by handful) herself there by trickery and dint of persuasion; of herself mainly.
Sometimes there’s a downturn and I turn up my collar against writing; against writing about the visits and attacks of strangers. Attacks in their spiky relating to her, afraid of the shiny newness of difference which is old, which is aging, or spreading the rubberised soles of voices, aimed to blockade an outpouring of feeling or reason. My attitude eludes me often; the felt of absurdity threatening to smother in laughter, or the hysteria of impotence.
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Bodies
of Difference
A Different Body
Experiences
A Different Universe