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The Savage Detectives

February 21, 2015 / posted in art, images of being-human, lyrical-narratives, reviews / No Comments

The Savage DetectivesThe Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It took me a while to get into this book. Admittedly it’s thick, and while the headers have names, dates and places, the sheer number of outlying characters threatens to dissolve attempts to make a cohesive narrative anything but conclusive. What Roberto Bolano has done is to show how there is no unifying trend in a group identity. That something as erudite and ideal as poetry can create a group is but a sheer coincidence among youths. As time progresses the boundaries of what makes a group dissolve, leaving but a faint trace of what had existed.

This novel is bookended by a character whose entry into the group, the viseral realists, breaks the group apart. He falls in with a prostitute who runs from her pimp. Their fleeing is supported by the leaders of this poetry group, whose absence eventually unravels the group. We see this as the group no longer has contact with one another. We hear of people faintly by hearsay. Eventually a young academic even writes about the group, including a trace of influence. In that sense, the fantastic nature of the subplots, the vignettes is where Bolano is able to give us choice pickings as the larger edifice melts into time. We catch up to the modern era but swiftly, as a coincidence destroys what may have, some day, in another world, amounted to a mainstream group. We don’t even know what happened to break up the two leaders although it becomes clear that their lives become in an instant, inexplicably altered.

In this way, we can read this as a coming of age story of individuals, but also as a coming of age story of nations entering into the globalized market. The heaving of capitalist trends always rearranges people socially, so that they do other things, odd tasks, specific to their own abilities and ambitions. Ultimately we are shuffled like so many decks of cards as the different decades come and go, different fashions changes and different values highlight out collective experience. In our older age we may return to our ideals of when young, having exhausted our sense of market sensibilities, and found greater joy despite the monotony of change. So we then end, individuals of so many potentials, being effaced on the shores of history, some of us, never to achieve our potential, many of us to be minor players who contributed to movements but only as vanishing mediators. Bolano writes about life, and perhaps this un-covering is the savage detective work as what he examines is both viseral and real.

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Dune Messiah

February 8, 2015 / posted in images of being-human, lyrical-narratives, reviews, Theory / No Comments

Dune Messiah (Dune Chronicles, #2)Dune Messiah by Frank Herbert
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

While smaller and equally intense, this is a very different book than its original. In this, the action of life and death is toned down somewhat — but the ideas at play engage at a deeper level. Whereas the first Dune was more about what was at stake for the characters as individuals, in this book, what is at stake is less one’s lives than the fate of this enormous number of people.

I am a little bit fuzzy on who this messiah is supposed to be. Is this Paul? Is it Idaho? Or the children to come?

As always, Herbert’s dialogue is multi-faceted, with tense reflecting of so many different angles at once. I enjoy reading his dialogue as he is able to say much with so little. At the same time though, I think he explains too much. His characters sometimes exclaim or show harsh feelings in a way that seems like they are on edge all the time. But I suppose Alia and Paul (and others) prescience would lead anyone to be jumpy, if your entire future unraveled depending on what happens to you.

In a way though, I doubt that the future works this way; Herbert explains this as a kind of Bergsonian unfolding in which the past and the future have a present beside you. This retroactive ex (ante/post) facto synthesis is in fact how Hegel (and Zizek) explains dialectical synthesis. Depending on your current situation, new information will shift your context such that the future and past become revealed as differences in the present. As the present becomes a different present, so shall the past and future also shift. The past and future then, are little more than extensions of the very relations we embody. As new information forces a shift in relations so their extensions shift — in all dimensions, even temporal ones! As Zizek says, our envisioning of the future is always a utopic vision in terms of the present. We are in this sense, truly unable to comprehend any future whatsoever. And that proves true of prescience in this book. Possible futures are not really prescience futures, they are in this sense, truly analytic processes.

All the same though, I think this book — this series — is well worth the read. How it unravels and what is at stake is always far more weightier than what we may think of. Paul’s awareness in this book is monolithic — I am in awe of Herbert’s imagination, of his ability to tease out all the relations that would embody having an empire of this magnitude.

Having said this, I think some readers may be put off by how little “action” there is in the book. I suppose some may expect tension and plot to be expressed by dramatic effects like people being stabbed or things being blown up. In this sense, much of the book’s tension comes from the characters attempting to figure out who they are and what they are supposed to do. The “bad guys” however, know what they need to do; they lack the vision that the protagonists exhibit. And strangely enough, this is often reversed in standard stories; where good guys know what is at stake and the bad guys are not sure but want to find “it” or “get it”, whatever this absolute power is. Because of this reversal, this book is actually more in line as a spiritual journey than anything else, where the protagonists seek to find illumination. As Herbert states so succinctly,”enlightenment is not separate from its means” (and there is much to be quoted from this book in this manner!) And so, the tension and “journey” in this book is much like the mystical affects found in like books of spiritual awakenings.

The complexity of this primal mysticism with “high” technology of unthinkable means is, I realize, perhaps the most influential factor from the Dune series, that Herbert wasn’t just writing about some other world, but rather, struggling to make sense of the one we live in now. What he finds to be at stake today (or in its first publication in the 1960s) is still relevant, after all, we live in an age of seemingly unlimited technological wonder but struggle personally with our faith in our leaders, our planet and our seeming lack of direction. The jihad of Dune’s universe is the globalization of our planet, where we march as soldiers to wealth and knowledge but lack the prescience to understand how we have changed what we are reterritorializing, even as we seek material abundance and yet continue to find human misery and empty struggle, leaving us at times without even our utopic drive we initially entered the fray with.

In this sense, Dune Messiah is but a transitional text to the next one. But it does such a good job at laying down the lines for what is to come next! Do not read this book unless you like intellectual mysticism and want to be mired in its sequels!

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Where Mathematics Come From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being

January 30, 2015 / posted in images of being-human, lyrical-narratives, reviews, rhizomatic architecture, Theory / No Comments

Where Mathematics Come From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into BeingWhere Mathematics Come From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being by George Lakoff
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Cognitive linguistics has at its underlying aesthetic the very literal understanding that how we think of things is what they are. This follows post-structural rhetoricians like Paul Ricoeur who argue that the connective tissue of language is metaphor — where metaphor is the substantiation of the naked copula form is through content. We forget the form of the copula in metaphors and thus experience the content as a variation of the copula form instead of being the actual connection. In other words we understand our world through representations, never understanding that an ontologically reified point of view is only possible because metaphors position the copula through its latent content so that the form of the copula becomes seen as the “ding as such”. In other words, representations only appear to be representations because one of the formal representations comes to represent nothing but the pure presence of its own linguistic connectivity.

Having said this, I was surprised (but also not surprised) by the comments below. Many people were confused by this book, blaming either the psychologists for not living up to their expectations (of not being neurologists), or blaming the thickness of the mathematical concepts presented. We often think of the pure formalism of math as being objectively isometric (as one reviewer said) to the proposition that reality is always present beneath our representations. One key connection that Lakoff and Nunez being up repeatedly is that many mathematical formalisms (such as zero, negative numbers, complex numbers, limits, and so on) were not accepted even long after their calculatory prowess was proven effectual… what made these concepts acceptable wasn’t their caculatory significance, but rather their introduction to the cannon of mathematical concepts via metaphoric agency. For instance, we take zero for granted as being “real” even though we understand it to not be a true number. It only was after a new metaphoric concept was presented for zero to be sensible (numbers as containers and origin on a path) was then zero incorporated into the cannon of what was acceptable. This understanding proves to be the very “twist” needed for Lakoff and Nunez to write this book. While many of the concepts are perhaps difficult for some of us non-mathematicians to grasp, I found their presentation to be concise and illuminating. Their tabulatory presentation of metaphors side by side allow us to grasp the mapping of logically independent factors from one domain into another. This basic movement is in fact a methodology they may have picked up from analytic geometry as invented by Rene Descartes: the translation of continuums into discrete points.

While it is understandable that they trace the building of conceptual metaphors via simple to the more complex, I did find their delay of speaking of analytic geometric to be confusing. When a topic is presented I want it to be explained, rather than having to wait half a book to read on it again. This is really my only possible complaint.

Overall, this book helped me connect the observation of formalism being prevalent as an organizing feature of pretty much all procedure and knowledge formation today with the root of that formalization, being the atomization of discrete epistemes of knowledge, whether that knowledge is granular or point or vector, or some other kind of rigor. We can also thus understand mathematics as being synthetic, contrary to what most philosophers in the west (excluding the great Immanuel Kant, Alain Badiou and Gilles Deleuze) understood.

Today, through our rockstar mathematicians and physicists we revisit the old Platonic hat that math is somehow natural, only apparent in our minds and yet more real than anything else this world has to offer. This is a troubling and definitely cold and etymologically naive sentiment. It’s mysterious that anything in this world is the way that is, let alone consistent as though following laws, but that isn’t any reason to be hypnotized by our own intellectual conceptions. As Lakoff and Nunez point out, while some math is applicable in the physical world most conceptual math remains beyond application of the physical world, as there is no physical correlation with those domains. Such application may be possible in alternate universes, but such universes remain the sole conception of our mind.

In other words, how we think of something is what we understand it to be, that is true, but it’s also how we experience what we understand to be to be what it is. To get into that deeper thought requires an unpacking of the most erudite philosophical concept of all — that of the number One, arguably the only number there ever has been and in fact the only thing there has ever been. Understandably this is beyond the scope of mathematics itself, or at least beyond the tenants of what most mathematicians are willing to go. I don’t want to belabor the point here, but I will state that the case study at the back of the book is quite compelling. If Euler’s equation may work in formal procedure alone, but as Lakoff and Nunez point out, the construction of that equation is only possible through the discrete projections of layered metaphors to understand equivalence of conception regardless of the different construction domains these metaphors originate from (logarithms vs trigonometry, vs Cartesian rotation vs complex numbers)… ultimately a unity is made possible because such closure is driven by the singular domain of our minds. In our minds, with their ornate metaphors, their clearly trained disciplines and their innate mechanisms of spacial orientation, we are able to combine complex concepts into the most brilliant of abstractions.

As such this book may be too difficult for most of us to read, because it requires we re-orient our thinking along different parameters, different assumptions about who we are and what we are doing when we study and create math. This probably won’t jive with most people, as it seems for most people, knowledge is less about reworking what they already know into a new arrangement, and more about filling in gaps in the arrangements they already have.

I’m not saying that this cognitive linguistic approach is equivocally true, I’m saying that truth is more than how we arrange something, but the entire range of what we can conceive of to be a relation that brings to light new connections. In the end, I think for most of us, the only legitimatizer of reason remains one’s singular emotions, of what feels to be acceptable. To get around this, requires the most stern of discipline and the most unabashed eagerness to learn something new. This is also a reminder that math is not formal procedure as we learned long division in our elementary grades. Rather, math is the unabashed conceptualization of formal arrangements in their absolute complexity. In this way, even understanding how highly educated mathematicians think of math is illuminating to how you and I can understand something (ourselves and the universe) in new light. That alone is worth reading this book.

So do read this book because it’s beautiful, but also read this book because it’s another way of considering something you already think you know. After all, learning isn’t a matter of facts. Facts are boring; the world is full of facts we can never memorize (such as where your car was on such and such date and time. Kind of useless, except in special cases, such as in the immediate). Learning is the mastery of how to conceptualize, how to arrange information and how to further that arrangement through metaphor of what is.

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Awesome Camera

December 31, 2014 / posted in lyrical-narratives, reviews / No Comments

Awesome CameraAwesome Camera by Laura Goldstein
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Laura Goldstein offers a brief but powerful set of poems to explicate the relational field of subjectivisation through the steady state of the camera. That is, the camera through its awesome nature melds difference within a topography and presents explicit atoms in relation. The camera, in Alain Badiou’s terms, creates the envelope by which existence is determine and presented.

In this, we get a situation created by the subjectivisation that unifies a field as one. The various attendants in that field then are displayed as a unitary set world. In this set, Goldstein presents the figure of the camera as a mode of knowing, one that explicates as much as it leaves out.

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From the Place in the Valley Deep in the Forest

December 30, 2014 / posted in lyrical-narratives, reviews / No Comments

From the Place in the Valley Deep in the ForestFrom the Place in the Valley Deep in the Forest by Mitch Cullin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Pretty good short story collection. I do like Mitch Cullin’s work. In each story Cullin centers around his character’s experience of a void. We get a glimpse of a life, and then, in the face of a larger apparatus, be it an event like Vietnam, or communist totalitarianism, sexual awakening, the devastation and lies surrounding Chernobyl, or a friendship of native american boys who find themselves involved in a senseless beating… we end up facing the meaningless contingency of life. In life we do things, often without understanding consequences, or even understanding it. And then life changes around us in some imperceptible way but we are left holding the bag; our loss, or our missed opportunity… even in the mist of a suburban paradise — where housewives can be left to gossip, get drunk, play with their friends and face a non-lack of abundance — Cullins shows that we are able to reach our limit, and the limit is ourselves and the situation that creates us as we create it.

She wants to stand alive and intact before the splintered creations of men. In the quiet of the cellar, her only deep fear is that nothing will happen–and, truth be known, she is not alone in this regard

In a great way, this is what Cullins is able to show us. What makes his characters ordinary is that we relate to them. Despite being in extraordinarily contingent; specific situations full of history and personal experience most of us may not be able to relate to, Cullins pulls from these situations a larger experience that is out of the characters control, an aspect of being-there that solidifies for us, through these tiny sketches, a brief moment that transcends the larger situation. You know this when he ends the story, for that brief moment, the added weight of social, economic and power relations that trap the characters and define their situation are added together as one unity that exceeds being this or that way, to be, and be free, released beyond the finality of his own writing. Like a magician, Cullin builds us up to show us what something is, and then show us that it’s actually something else he has in his hand, the moment when a white dove flies off.

It is for this reason that Cullins must start from the place in the valley, deep in the forest. Without that added resolution, we wouldn’t have the ability to be set free.

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The Rule of Metaphor

December 14, 2014 / posted in lyrical-narratives, reviews, Theory / No Comments

The Rule of MetaphorThe Rule of Metaphor by Paul Ricoeur
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’ve decided that Ricoeur is more of a meta-rhetorician, a philosopher of rhetoric in the sense that unlike many other rhetoricians and semioticians, he doesn’t do any hard low level analysis himself. He may analyze terms, other’s uses of terms, and with encyclopedic mastery, run the gambit of tearing through collected works of so many others to pull the threads he needs to weave a larger discourse, but he almost never takes you through line by line synthesis and application. Stranger too, he never presents you a diagramatic appraisal of the field. He presents you choice snippets and then at the end provides you his tact conclusion. Ever so polite, his writing generally doesn’t explode off the page either.

In this book, he tackles metaphor. Tries to find a place for it, and in the end results in universalizing it. While he goes through the figure of metaphor across many discourses relating to metaphor (poetics, tropes, semantics of word and discourse, and finally reference and philosophy) Ricoeur is able to construct a place for metaphor such that metaphor is a kind of column, a null point from which each of these fields can be organized and made coherent. His conclusions is that the zero sum signifier of the copula (to be) is only a nullified designator of which metaphor is the rule — not the exception. Copula’s nullification is only made possible because of the height of its position within semantic conception — metaphors serve more as the general binder for various arrangements. In this way, Ricoeur flips the relation of metaphor and positivist discourse on its head; metaphor is the general mode of presentation.

While this seems to presents a kind of detachment of language from the field of designation (or reality is composed only of language) it would be a mistake to jump to this relativist position, as Ricoeur makes clear, words need to be of something in order for there to be the stability of difference, even if expression can always be overcoded through metaphorization.

What Ricoeur wants to talk about rather, is the possibility of discourse. Rhetoric doesn’t decide what is said it only describes what it is possible to say, and how we can connect one part to another, to get to One or many ones, although for Ricoer there is no One, although as he notes Heidigger and many others are looking still for the magical word, the One that will designate One upon which justification is self-justified without appeal to semantic slippage.

All in all, I found this book to be a good read, although I was less interested in what others have said than what he says. Ricoeur still remains worth while to read, though he is less flashy and in that way more down to earth as one who goes through the widely ignored field of rhetoric to find the stabilizing struts of discourse itself, at a tactical level, rather than the starry-eyed strategies of ones like Deleuze, Foucault or Zizek.

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Wise Children

November 10, 2014 / posted in images of being-human, love, lyrical-narratives, reviews / No Comments

Wise ChildrenWise Children by Angela Carter
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In the guise of a vaudeville carnival, Carter tells a story of twin sisters who reduplicates their actions. Like their twin dads, the double aspect of the characters echo the reality of their situation by emphasizing not just the contingent singularity of each individual actor but also the collective milieu of how their family history doubly marks reality. Out of Shakespearean tragedy Carter takes the figure of the carnivalesque in its outlandish reality. Being actors, children of the theater, our narrator Dora comes to an appreciation of her role (and her uncle’s or father’s role) in life, an acceptance at old age that places them at the center of their story. The story of their father becomes the story of the daughters, as the father inscribes the limit upon which daughters can understand themselves

“D’you know, I sometimes wonder if we haven’t been making him up all along,” she said. “If he isn’t just a collection of our hopes and dream wishful thinking in the afternoons. Something to set our lives by, like the old clock in the hall, which is real enough, in itself, but which we’ve got to wind up to make it go.”

And like roles in a theater, the melodrama of a character is a willful desire for validation — their famous father pursues it–their capitalist uncle pursues it–the different aspects of Hollywood, the characters in their different roles as they try to negotiate their way to being recognized by the closest among them.

So while family is precariously anxious because absent father, absent mother, the daughters find their way through the various roles they play (burlesque dancers and singers) who are able to come of age, as wise children, always children even in their 70s, knowing more about their elders, and their role among them to an apex at which Dora can begin to see all that she is reflected in her lover-uncle at the end, where players and actors lose their roles and retain a distilled subjectivity. He “wasn’t only the one dear man, tonight, but a kaleidoscope of faces, gestures, caresses. He was not only the love of my life but all the loves of my life at once, the curtain call of my career as a lover.”

Carter teases out one of the truths of personal history. Through the filter of Shakespheare and drama entering the high capitalism of the mid to late 20th century, she shows us how we learn from our closest relations, parents, our place in the world as how we are to relate to others, how we are to relate at all even if the continuity is next to or even less than nothing.

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Neuter

October 28, 2014 / posted in images of being-human, life as we know it, lyrical-narratives, manifesto, reviews, Theory, Universal non-all, universal nothing / No Comments

NeuterNeuter by Hélène Cixous
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Neuter is a difficult book to read, because Cixous starts where she starts, slightly outside the context of your storied-expectations. Through a series of opening ephigraphs, and outlines of meditations on readings and texts, Cixous draws you deeper into the cramp inner space of story, subjectivity and analyst. Both psychoanalytical and philosophical, Cixous draws the thin null space, the non-existent middle, by which we see the internal dynamic structures that sustain the situation of subjectivity.

This is another way of saying that Cixous desexualizes subjectivity, by further castrating the subject. Rather than posing the master discourse of the universal All-Father, Cixous chooses instead the mother-son relationship, in order to show how a desexualized subject, one that is reversed in their “phallic-essence” is in fact one that is null. From there, she highlights the stakes of the story itself, and the relative positions of analyst and subject.

It all seems pretty mystical though (or musical, if you like), because Cixous walks the line using metaphors and literal meanings of words. Of course words are both literal and figurative at the same time, so she plays heavily with that ambiguity. As part of the writing, the text approaches self awareness, describing its own audience as it creates its own bridges and metaphors. It questions its own page turning, layering for us an introduction that takes us out of the context and turns us back around so that we can leave behind what we are supposed to experience and begin to experience what is there, outside the context of familiarity. This heavy introduction is the chanting part of the text: dive deeper-deeper! as she drops into the very inner void, and places us in the place for a master-text within the master-text, showing us bare subjectivity and bare story as the elements of the narrative are actors in the narrative itself.

Neuter then, is Cixous’s way of castrating the story, taking out the contingencies of names, place and time, by which we read universal “common” experience through each sideline of particularity. Cixous allows us to experience the arbitrary relationships of a story, and she does this masterfully, by turning all its elements inside-out, defamiliarizing the story itself by castrating it of its essential contingencies. In a sense, she makes the story a pataphysical experience of what was previously universal. Neuter is the smallest null space one can get. Neuter is the barest outline of the essential arc. Neuter is the null subjectivity, the zero degree point of view. Truly a difficult and masterful piece of writing, controlled, deliberate and evocative.

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Hélène Cixous, Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing

September 9, 2014 / posted in art, images of being-human, lyrical-narratives, reviews, Theory / No Comments

Hélène Cixous, Rootprints: Memory and Life WritingHélène Cixous, Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing by Hélène Cixous
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Perhaps it was a mistake for me to read this book first, without reading much of Cixous first. The interview, while long, provided for me much interest as to what Cixous was trying to do. I didn’t much appreciate the sectioning of the conversation, but I did like the free flow. In a way, it was about what writing is for her, what she does with it and how she exceeds herself through writing.

The interview revolves around what writing is, what it does, where it arises and ultimately what it means for others, for the self, what we find in it, and how we come to be… for Cixous, writing seems to be about touching herself and others in ways that were perhaps unsaid by language… for there is much language can say but does not find voice in social reality, or reality at all… and that exploration makes writing a kind of love, to love the other in the self too. If anything, the interview’s length attests to the ground it uncovers as it runs through all the gambit of the traditional meanings and attitudes surrounding writing to uncover at its root, love and the other.

As Cixous notes, we often cannot be tempted to love, running from it more often than pursuing it…

Perhaps I should return to this after reading more of Cixous’s work, instead of just snippets, for much of this read a little too abstractly for me. I guess at my basic nature, I’m a structuralist in many ways, which is why this was so hard for me to read.

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the soft amplification of a lever along a fundamental force

March 17, 2012 / posted in art, images of being-human, lyrical-narratives / No Comments

one of the simplest motions is the lever.

levers work by translating a small force into a larger motion — called leverage. mathematically the work remains the same, sum total, but through the use of levers through time, a smaller force applied over a longer period of time is easier for human beings to achieve motions which would be more difficult to apply directly. one of the key facets of levers involve the prime fundamental force, which helps structure the entire universe — namely gravity. levers could still work even if gravity did in fact not exist, as the force needs to be applied throughout the beam which acts as an amplifier. an interesting application of this happens in snowboarding, when the snowboarder stands at the fulcrum and adjusts her weight to and fro, in order to direct the force down the mountain. what’s tricky about the application is that part of the direction relies heavily on the traction between the board and the mountain. the snowboarder isn’t just deploying her own body as an amplification through the board but the constant change in the packed-ness of the mountain and the slope of the mountain also increases or decreases the amplification. if you hold the board and the mountain as two stable variables, you can see the little shadow grow bigger on one side or the other. this isn’t true to life though, since we are talking about a single axis with a stick — the human body is a more complex shape.

susan would write all these equations on the blackboard, working through variables in her math class. what’s absolutely astounding, she said, is that after a few trials of falling down, you intuitively grasp the physics. these equations become second nature to you, she said. for all our deliberate graspings of these complex equations, there isn’t anything for what happens in muscle memory. you learn quickly, or at least i did, she said, that tightening one muscle in your calf, or in your thigh can be enough to change direction

all these flew through her head, and out the proverbial window, though, when one winter day she tried to carve over a rather large ice patch and her board slipped out from under her. she over compensated and flipped over, flying in the wrong direction. she saw for a brief second a tree in her near future. she planted her feet down, forcing her board into the side of the mountain, wanting to cut deep into the ice and force a radical turn left, back onto the path. conditions that day were dire for her already — it had stopped snowing for a week already, and the constant sunshine had melted the snow which re-iced in the cold night that followed. this happened for 8 days already.

so the snow she cut into was hard, and she forced her board in too deeply, causing her board to lock. she didn’t have room to complete her fall though — the tree was right there.

when she came to, she was heavily bandaged and there were restraints on her body. she was groggy already. where? what? who? her left arm was somewhat unrestrained so she groaned and reached up, only so far before sharp pain forced her to relax. her boyfriend was there. yes, she had slammed into the tree. yes, she was in the hospital. she wanted to talk but her mouth was locked. don’t move, he said. i’m here. you were out for two days — your parents are flying in tomorrow. just relax. i’ll be here.

lucky the school had great insurance for their professors. and she had recently become tenured. so the months that followed were a slow progression for doctors in the dark. at first, she was worried she would not walk again. they said, no that wasn’t it — her spine was fine. she had changed her fall to the right in the last second and avoided the trunk, which would have probably snapped her spine should she had hit it full on… but in her change she hit a low hanging branch and that knocked her out. she could see herself drawing our her accident on a chalkboard, explaining the entire thing to a class of disinterested students. yes, she would have to revisit the spot, first chance she got, to take measurements and figure out exactly what the slope was and which direction she was going. in fact, susan? susan? hm, she asked. sorry, i wasn’t listening. there was a long silence, and she sensed something was wrong.

the point? she may not see again.

her chalkboard dreams disintegrated back into darkness.

but they will have to run some tests and wait, let her body heal some more.

there wasn’t much else to it. some glimmer of hope evaporated slowly in the ensuing weeks. when she was released, she could not believe it; she had to use a cane, sweeping it to find her way around.

with that, her remarkable future as a math teacher seemed another world. her upcoming vacation to morocco next year? the last thing on her mind. her devoted bf would go to the other way, in the hallway and whisper with doctors. tell her, we’ll get through this, somehow. her parents, her mother’s hand on her forehead, her father holding her hand. she was an only child, and they stayed way too long. what’s all this whispering business? what’s all this poor susan business? what’s all this darkness?

there’s not much to a blackboard without chalk. so her math musings were like so many fingernails trying to scratch an x on what was blackness. only a blackboard isn’t truly black. it’s kind of a green-black, so she always thought, but now, there’s not even that. this blackboard has no equation. she couldn’t carve an x into this darkness for anyone, let alone carve a sharp turn in some fucking ice patch. she had stayed an extra few days too, extended her trip since the hotel offered a deal since ppl were leaving. the slope was bad, so froze and packed, only the experienced daredoers stayed. and those years and years of practice, fun, and all the bruises and the few broken bones here and there — for this?

she would never drive again.

she would have to take the crappy almost non-existent public transit. one of her first trips was to the beach.

from here, her bf told her how beautiful coronado island was, how she could see it. hear the seagulls, hear the ocean, small the salt. hear the children and the far off sandrake the city of san diego dragged across the beach to keep the sand loose and smooth, cool under her feet, freshly raked sand.

she wouldn’t go into the water, except with a heldhand. she could only see the beach in her head. sometimes she saw things at night, or saw her bfs or someone’s expression, filled in, and she would unconsciously mistake her imagination for vision, smiling when she heard the street vendor’s voice, imagining him like mario from mario brothers, with a thick bushy mustache. she asked her bf if he looked like that, and he sounded funny when he said that the man did look like that. she played this game for a while, hearing a woman talk sternly to her child, and seeing a thick redheaded woman until she walked into the one too many chairs, thinking the pond smaller than it was, and she fell over spraining her ankle in the fountain, pennies sliding under her fingers like so many bumpy equations hidden in the thick darkness like a gigantic patch of ice over everything again.

they had been an outdoorsy couple, despite her nerdy inclination to make everything into an equation. they loved to go surfing, or golfing, snowboarding, hiking in the hills, or out in the desert. she would map out the arc of balls, draw fourier transformations on napkins so she could rape him at pool. (he would complain but if she used the math she would always win.) how like a dream now! they used to camp overnight, make love under the stars. and came back covered in dust to sit naked together, after a hot shower, to watch the tv. all of that paradise was so far away now. they couldn’t do the tv thing.

at first he was more than attentive, but then as she dispassionately predicted, he came by less and less after work. she still taught, but could not grade papers. she had to work doing something else, with a TA. she went on disability. she stayed at home, sleeping odd hours. her phone would ring, if she remembered to plug it in, and she learned her apartment by the shape of her body, the space she fit herself into between the toilet and the shower, between the kitchen and the oven was three susans. her couch was two susans from the sliding glass door.

she burned her fingers trying to cook. so she left the radio on, softly and held the handle. the radio sound did not matter. they could talk of the presidential election, the serial rapist, or some celebrity bullcrap it was the same drone to her as she stir a curry mix until it smelled a certain way, careful not to burn herself… her pots must look terrible, full of burn marks, and other odd grossnesses…

the microwave was touch pad, and her bf glued dots to the buttons, so she could cook her food properly. after an undercooked this, a burnt that…

she felt him as a smell, an obelisque on the horizon, dark and small and then smaller and darker until it was only night. she wasn’t sure what time anything was, without feeling the sun on her skin. she left the curtains open a crack so she could feel the heat.

until she realized was it a day ? a week? two weeks? he did not come by. she called him and there was no answer. a message, and… no return call. nothing.

a small nothing, in a big gigantic void of nothing.

suicide was a small thought somewhere. her parents said she should come back to them, but she loved that apartment. she couldn’t afford it. the disability services ppl wanted to teach her how to subsist on routine and fixed dimensions. the entire globe became the shape of her street block, like the back of her head, or the small between the toilet and the sink.

if she dropped her toothbrush in the bowl, she knew where it would lie, and she knew how far her hand was from the rim. her parents bowl? how big was that? how smooth was that?

she was wasting away, with her cell phone dead somewhere. she tossed it into some obscure corner. she was sure it broke, it sounded like it. and something weird and crunchy lay under her feet by the front door.

she wasn’t sure where her duvet lay, she slept under a sheet, with a towel and her jacket. what color was this towel? was it the blue one or one of the ones with animal prints?

then one day it happened.

she thought it a dream, a face like mario from mario brothers, the street vendor but with a yellow hat staring down at her. so startling she forgot she was blind and screamed, turning her head to the side, what was this man doing so close to her face?

but she could not get away. she screamed and bolted to her side until she realized that she was face planted in a mysterious pillow on the floor beside her bed and this face still filled her field of vision.

still this vaguely terrified her, after seeing nothing for so long and she wept a little into the pillow, feeling the chilly floor sweep into her back and sides. she recalled this was winter, heard somewhere on the radio, and it was about a year since that fateful accident.

she stretched out, banging her elbow on her bed and the face spin slightly and winked at her.

she tried, experimented with turning her head, reaching her hands out and this face, too close for comfort was still there. her hands, she did not see her hands. was there sunlight? she found and hit her clock and it told her it was 3:45pm on tuesday, january 3rd.

it was the beginning of the FACE the era of its eyes, two black holes, a blackhole mouth with blackhole nostrils, dark hair, busy mustache, yellow cap like one of those taxi drivers from movies in the 60s.

this was so odd and terrifying at once, she could not ignore it. when she turned on her favorite radio station, this face danced around a little, wriggling though it lacked body and neck. she thought she could see every little pore in its sink, see every eyelash on its eyes. it could be more handsome. who are you, she asked, her voice crackling from lack of use. the face winked at her again.

she thought she could see her reflection in its eyes, but she could not peer closer into to see, as FACE existed as contact lenses do, independent of where she moved her head or her body.

whatever. add to my misery.

as though she lost a tooth. it used to be there, her mouth was the same and now it’s not. she’s toothless and must continue to eat and live life this way.

or like blindness.

after a day though, she was screaming at it, throwing things around, the FACE grinning and winking at her as though it understood her. but then it did not. it danced around, random. it made a kissy face as if mocking her. then she heard knocking noises. is that you she screamed stop a very muffled voice answered back and the FACE made a gesture with its eyes and tilted the chin. who are you she asked again.

this is the police. police? yes open up. are you okay, miss …. she had a strange revelation she almost fell over, someone was at the door. the police were at the door! yes yes sorry officer, everything is fine she said hoarsely, cracking the door open. she thought they were shining a flashlight in her eyes, she was sure of it, but she is blind and had no idea if they were. we heard screaming is everything okay? we had a complaint of noise. it’s 5am, miss. yes, sorry, everything is okay, i just thought someone was in here. do you mind we look around? no i’d rather you didn’t (you might take something from me, or move something and i would never find it again, probably trip over it.) well this is your first warning. we can walk around the perimeter if you like.

she got them to go away. and decided to keep her illness to herself. she laughed a little, cried a little and the FACE winked at her its grin both toothy and toothless. okay okay, so you need a name after all. lets call you… mac. you look like a mac. as if in agreement, so the mustache wriggled.

mac did not disappoint. a week later, she noticed he tilted a certain way when she was in the bathtub. she could not play with herself anymore, she found too, with this FACE always looking and jiggling.

what a turn off.

and when wanting to drink milk, mac seemed annoyed. she sniffed it. called on her neighbor and asked when does this expire? it’s been expired a week…

she went to the store, and found that when going down the milk aisle, mac bristled. where is the milk? there is no milk. the store is remodeling. how could she get milk? could you help me, she said, i need these items, and i can’t see…

it was odd talking to the employee, as she felt she was talking to mac. and mac seemed to dance quite a bit, in conversation.

she decided to move in with her parents.

she had to. she had no income. she did not tell them about mac, but one by one she learned is movements. if she moved slowly enough, he was consistent. when she was going to run into something he did a look. when she was reaching for her drink and it was not there, he made a face. she talked to a man, and mac seemed alarmed, disturbed. she tried to excuse herself even though he seemed nice enough, and he protested, started to get rough with her, mac made a face and she knew he was going to put his hand over her mouth so she kicked at him, or at least mac gestured in such a way so as to suggest kicking at him… there

he ran away when someone came running by, and the police were called, he matched the serial rapist description. are you okay miss? yes, i am, sorry, no its okay i don’t need to go to the police my parents number is xxx.xxx.xxxx please call them,

and so she learned to read mac, or rather he taught her. mysterious teaching, but she had nothing else to do. mysterious looking, yes there seemed to be mysterious packages in the living room. her parents looked at each other. can you… see, susan? no no, i just… it’s my birthday and you were acting strange, she lied. yes, they are for her, and her dad laughed, she was adjusting okay.

when opening, she noticed dispassionately that they had still gift-wrapped the packages. no, it didnt feel like newspaper… she was sure the wrapping paper had a blue ribbon pattern so said mac… but she said nothing, asked, what does this gift paper look like…

blue ribbon…

maybe she should get off disability?

she took a trip on the bus to downtown one day, and knew how far the bus stop was, and mac’s tiny face seemed the entire expanse of the world, the colors in his skin telling her where to put her foot, and she marched up stairs and did not trip, knowing where everything was, how far the railing went, and that she was in front of a large building and that building was a grocery store.

so this discrimination went, and she could find her jacket where it was moved, whether it was night or day until one day her parents said, it’s just like you got your vision back!

i guess so, susan admitted. i should go back to work. she had a hard time reading, but it came slowly until one day she was walking down the campus to her class when a former student ran into her and said wow, ms kirkpatrick, i haven’t seen you in a long time.

yes — i … had an accident. i was blind for a while… they talked for a bit and she marveled at the marble whiteness, the faded dust along the edge of the wall. that was 6 years ago… and… where’s mac?

she didn’t see a face anymore, she saw the birds flying over head, the color of the trees as they swayed like so in the invisible but felt wind. she thought maybe his mustache extended the sidewalk, and maybe she was under his left eye? but then it was gone and she only saw the world, as placid as his winking eye.

wherever she went, she strained to see him, no longer drawing equations to describe the flight of birds, or how a skateboard can jib on a railing, how the skate bumps can decrease speed given how far apart spaced they are… she thought she saw his face in a student’s face, and she stared too long at the student that the student looked away embarrassed.

she felt like carmen electra in the movie the box, a professor with a secret club foot. she thought she walked with a strange internal limp, thought for a minute that the sky was a lip, a twisting of the nose in a sneer for a minute, and that familiar winking she thought she remembered but she could not picture at all; the pores on her skin lighting up in the setting sun, an iron chimney over the student union with the faint smell of korean bbq they are cooking something for the student event.

she could not shake how spaces in rooms felt like a skin, how her vision and how she touched everything as if through the filter of a tv screen that remained the same so that we forgot it was there, and then we were in the tv. and having slipped through that looking glass, unable to see the screen again, unless someone were to blind herself again, as if shining a light on the tv from behind the viewer, so one could see the shadow, the outline of his face.

there were days she could not see him at all, seeing only a field of things like tron, like the wireframe of a renaissance painting shocking through everything in those measured lines. she hurried along towards the horizon at breakneck speed, thinking perhaps, i can find the vendor who sounded like him, the street vendor whose voice i might recognize a mac…

was mac, was mac god?

did she see her in blindness the skin of his face, winking at us, supplementing for us as newborn infants the rest of the world, when in mother’s womb dad shines a flashlight through the naval so that our dark wet world becomes a crowded web of veins and arteries through which we might poke at small intenstinal lining as a series of tubes that wrap us when we sleep, piping that we will never remember again, and the smell of the amniotic fluid, both the taste of mother’s saltine p.h. and mixed with our own nose and mouth.

she drove her car to the beach and then walked around, looking at the island. drove to ski park and rented a snowboard since she did not bring one.

they looked at her funny people did, i don’t have a ski jacket she said. in her trousers and blouse, shivering she sat in ski lift 2 in chair 75 on her way to the top, behind her big bear lake, blue like the sky, with evergreens lining its outskirts. the lake big bear, like the big bear in the sky she knew was there, she watched stars with her x so often but a constellation could not see as the sun was too bright, burning out her memory.

she slid off the lift, angled it clumsily and fell, her naked arm burning against the soft snow, from shock and cold. she got back up, brushed the snow from her. people stared at this woman without snow pants, without a snow jacket. so out of practice. if she fell too many times, her blouse would get wet, turn transparent, maybe? she went down the same fated slope, carving around a tree. she never did revisit the spot like she had imagined in bed.

there was a turn. she thought this was the tree but something was not right.

she went all the way down, rode back up and down a different direction.

she fell a few times, and shivering got back in the lift. someone commented that she should go get a jacket, or you’ll freeze. teeth chattering she said i am alright.

she went back another way, and this was different too. she thought for a minute she saw the outline of an eye slipped down a loose patch and tumbled off the path into the snow that was not boarded on, that was not packed that was soft and filled her, she sunk up to her butt and she was so cold she unlocked her boots and hobbled out, her legs numb and stinging.

just then someone flew by, at a tangent to the general curve line, how the steepness of the curve could increase speed. the variables flew by her in a second and she was stunned with a cartesian map of the slope this was the direction! this was the way!

she climbed out of the bank and strapped her boots in bindings again, slid down and then she found a tree, sure this was the one. it had a fence around it. she wanted to touch it. she climbed around the fence, and hugged the tree, feeling its rough bark against her torso. she closed her eyes and saw the inside of her eyelids when she turned her face towards the sun, blinded in red, she thought she could see the inside, red like her blood, with some sharp relief of veins that blurred once her imagination faded, and warm, against the tree, intuitive, without graphing it she knew it well, mac, the face, the mountain with its matching stars. without mapping it, or measuring the slope she knew it, knew it without conscious deliberation, equations that melted in the sun like icing, so she no longer shivered, a uterine hug.

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