1.
4.27. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: Any combination of states of affairs can actually exist while the other states of affairs do not exist.
. . . other states of affairs do not exist. In not existing they
none
the
less
form a set (the set of the non-existing).
What is in the set of the non-existing? Among other nothings, that which seems. Seems? says Hamlet. Nay it is; I know not seems.
Subjectivity, that zero, can cause things that don’t exist to (seem to really) exist, or things that do exist, to (seem not to) exist. There’s always a conductive thread through space for an untenable position, wrote Etel Adnan, in Premonitions.
That is to say, once we went to Albuquerque . . .
. . . or so we were given to believe.
Actually, we were in Kentucky.
I had an image in my mind of Albuquerque from that supposed trip in childhood that didn’t square with geography as I later came to learn it. A desert was missing; weeping willow trees swayed in its absence. Lakes of blue muscled water. The desert I’d been to was a lush and stormy place of magnolias and sassafras. No sage, no cacti, no mesas.
My being in Albuquerque was a state of affairs that did not exist. I was unaware of it not existing; for me it existed. I was in a place called Albuquerque, as far as I knew.
My being in Kentucky was a state of affairs that did exist, that I was unaware of. I was in a place called Kentucky, thinking it was a place called Albuquerque, and being a child, therefore unworldly, I made no bones about it. Becoming worldly is losing fixity. Becoming worldly is becoming a person who thinks, maybe. The child, believing what she is told, thinks, definitely!
I lived at once in a fictive and real world. The fabricated world was real for me; the real world was nonexistent. The made-up world was a cover (a fabric, a fabrication) and in order for it to be believable, one believed it. I did not pretend to believe it, or hope to believe it, I simply believed it.
To be a human being of any age is to believe what is not true at least some (if not much) of the time, at the very least because one simply is unaware of what is true. There is a field dedicated to the study of ignorance: agnotology. It is not to be confused with the study of repression, projection, and wishful thinking, which belong to psychoanalysis.
By the time I learned where we really were, two decades later, I was able to reason well enough, and the explanation made sense. I felt no anger or betrayal. I didn’t need to know the facts at the time, which were that my siblings and I were deployed for cover when we were too young to consent to it, which doesn’t bother me on the face of it, for children have almost never consented to or chosen their conditions, or the human condition, and we don’t, as small children, have preconceptions, how could we? The pre of conception is as wee as we are. Conception was hard enough. And then, what are concepts? It takes eons to see the mind’s fabric, let alone its fabrications. This is why the enlightened ones have compassion.
No, I did not mind, yet, one can certainly trace some part of one’s early psychic disarray to these kinds of things, a very early sense that facts were slippery eels, that stories beget stories, and a tendency to test the children around me, to see how much I could get them to believe. I soon realized one could claim the most outrageous things, and children would adopt these claims as cosmologies. One might even be able to fool adults, though more rarely, and the risk was terrible.
One has no illusions as to the preferability of a “normal” childhood. The imperative of normalcy is the totalitarian regime of children, the Big Other that none of us could hope to satisfy, though we made the attempt, stealing new clothes in order to try to look like people who didn’t need to steal to have new clothes.
In the non-existent state of affairs that was an Albuquerque I took for granted, and the existent state of affairs which was in fact a Kentucky I was unaware of, I befriended a toddler named Welcome. Her eyes produced an unusual amount of sleep every day, so that she needed her eyes cleaned gently, regularly, and carefully with a warm washcloth.
We all had new names. Fake names? No: alternations. Mine was Mirabella. I took her to heart, was her. Close to my own name, with a little bell on the end, a ringing mnemonic, easy for a child to remember if anyone asked. But what do we mean by fake name? A name describes who?
In Emergency: Reading the Popul Vuh in Times of Crisis Edgar Garcia writes of the Popul Vuh’s conception of the perfection of animal speech, the whip-poor-will for example, whose name and voice, speaking and being, are one, in contradistinction to human speech, while the poet thinks: I speak in the name of language.
Even the sacred name, always being chanted and evoked in our community, “the people” turns out to be speculative. The calling for, and on behalf of “the people” must mean they are not yet constituted. To call out “the people, united, will never be defeated” is to prefigure (organize) a demos.
For that brief time that I was Mirabella I did not feel unreal. I felt part of a game. LARPing towards Bethlehem. That there is such a bottomless lack of realism in me, for better or for worse, did it begin then? My mother and her disguises, and her secrets. Political clandestinity is a most serious theater.
2.
I am awake, but I want to offer Mary, my psychoanalyst, a dream, so I go back to sleep; she likes it when I have a dream. She interprets the white sunscreen I needlessly (because in the dream it’s darkest, moonless night) rub on my legs: it’s none other than my slippery compliance. In the dream I put on the lather because a dream authority told me to before we were to go waterskiing, and though it is nighttime, I’m afraid to admit my reluctance to set out in the darkest night to try to slide quickly along the surface of the abyssal and heaving ocean, I am doubtful that, at this hour, it will be fun to waterski (which I don’t know, in any case, how to do) nor does it make sense to apply sunscreen when there’s no sun.
So, who is telling you to do it? She asks. I know, but I’d rather not say. Earlier in the dream I had been reprimanded for being too sure of myself, reminded that as a child I used to state falsehoods with confidence, such as when I told my sister that money grows on trees, because I had heard my mother say, money doesn’t grow on trees, and I was still sorting that out, how when someone says something doesn’t or isn’t, what happens if you say it does or is, or how so often when we say something, we mean something else, how if you reverse what is not, and make it what is, if you take what is invisible and make it visible, or take what is obviously there and hide it, or, knowing that seeming is in the vicinity of being, say the opposite of what is true, not to lie, but to make it (seem) true, to venture its possibility.
I woke up this morning and heard a sound and for a moment I couldn’t tell if it was my breathing or the wind in the trees. I couldn’t tell the difference at all. One becomes a sound, or feels the trees overhead are part of one’s own extended sense, shared limbs.
If these kinds of things, the Albuquerque/Kentucky dialectic, had not been woven into one’s formation, would one not have had the right to invite others to take up the following kinds of speculative projects:
make a limbic alembic
create a socialist ghost
live in two times at once
the eleventh dimension visits the seventh dimension, what do they talk about
a child grows old instantly, what’s the instance
someone wakes up with a different set of teeth
introduce new typos into your final draft
hormones against empire curriculum
courting birds, fanning feathers, inadvertently causes a death
a class on agony, what are the learning outcomes
“the moon was full as a bowl of sugar the night they . . .”
you turn your head when you hear the jingle of a dog collar, see a dog trot by, where is she going
a dancer and a game designer write a game called extimacy
everyone loses the capacity to digest meat at the same moment
“staring at the popcorn ceiling, wearing my old prom dress, I remembered . . .”
a person’s past selves assemble to plan the undoing of the current one
diurnal goes in disguise as the night
the freedom to exit
describe the sound you hear as you breathe your last, a shiver of vine maple leaves
