What is a house unelectrified, situated on a continent-wide grid of electrical possibilities? Failure in the interiors of modernity— keystone limber in the going logics of domestic illumination? Is it even legible by the tools we have of reading houses, grids— of reading settlement?
Does it even exist in the eye of utility?
Asemia: a failure to express symbols and semantic logics.
A blacked-out house on a street of electricity: a blur in the fabrics of light.
Therefore: the house fails in its logics, as its wiring betrays an orientation towards power
grid semantics.
Therefore, I am living in a kind of asemia. A failure in utility, that only my good neighbor half-saves me from with the kindness of an extension cord, running off the back of her house and through a window crack into mine.
Only neighbors make a home finally legible. In the eye of: stormed failures of the grid, or the unfailing mechanisms of gridded-out poverty, or the owner class’s steeled indifference— neighbors invent legibility, in synaptic congress. In their dilating extensions they form apertures to let the light in. My neighbor’s electricity is extended from the grid, into what? A blurry edge it was wired for.
Those who fail their neighbors will fail with the grid.
A non-powered grid-like
Thing, atop a grid like thing—
A gridwidth beingwith
Citywide widths of aperture.
I wake up in the unelectrified house, thinking about how color palettes of our environments must have changed so drastically with the advent of electricity—the colors of especially urban ecologies suddenly kneading into themselves intensities only possible by electric productions. The luminous logic of those hues and what leapt loud in the visual semantic.
The semantic intensity piercing our aqueous humor and the change in our brain that followed. The change in our dreams that followed. Then again, where is the logic of color made—in the sockets, in the skull, or in the electric veins of the age? Has every conceivable color always been available to our minds?—notes towards a study of historical perception in dreams—notes towards the color spectrum of dreams throughout the history of humankind—etc., studies only possible to mount on the dream-plane, which is more accessible anyway, perhaps, sans electricity.
(Notes towards a study of mhz levels in sleep, during different intervals of the night.)
Whereas utility is necessary and monitored. Not by the state exactly, but by contracts of the state exactly. When the man comes out to turn on the gas lines, he is kind, asks about the electricity, so I tell him my new landlord is scum and has been lying to me about various hold-ups while I wait and wait to be permitted for power. The man is sympathetic, very mildly indignant on my behalf, and says, “Y’know, it’s more common than you’d think.”
We are wired for utility. We live in nests of utility, in tact. Walls, comfortable temperatures, vital hydrations, a space to accumulate our wage-trades, all the interior facets of a space that might incubate decent workers.
In affect, we live in little grids nested inside the larger grid.
To lie in the crumbling
semantics of the mis-
taken routes of electricity:
A mosquito floats in and lands on a seam of the grid. Now, the currents vary room to room, and shift overnight, according to the breezes. A mosquito in a high corner can alter the routes. Its blood-filled thorax lighting up imperceptibly.
I wake up and say to myself, “Don’t think.” This is little use— because the thoughts, the anxieties, still come. The exhortation is just a gentle, porous roadblock.
And blunt-tipped
leaves in the
bugged out skies
The moon is
rusting and everyone is
stunned
If at some point I began to mourn the loss of my dark house. And the wired tether between me and my neighbors made visible. What am I mourning but the seams. Or asemia, and the freedom from semantic meanings. From utility.
Thick scent of a grape-blunt
leaf wrapping into
the window pores, too
I’m on a slow, meandering walk in my neighborhood, when I look down and realize I’m walking upon a section of map that traces the same grid that it’s situated over. I bend down, peel up a fistful and tear a fray across the surface. Underneath, it opens to a larger map of a larger grid underneath, intact. A vertigo breezes through me.
When I can stand, I rise and see a neighbor nearby on their porch, and with my hand still clutching the torn map of the grid, I wave slowly.
“Alright,” they say.
Language is breaking apart in my hands. In the darkness, I can only make out the shapes of the letters on the pages. I’ve been reading like this for hours, but now the sun fades out my windows and particles of darkness block the white bays the letters gather in their limbs— the blank spaces that make them legible, where the illuminate of the pale page makes shape.
Each word, suddenly the shape of a small animal. Lines of small animals creating a blurred grid on the page.
A moment longer and the darkening brings out the beady eyes, glowing, reflecting the light from the headlight of my eyes.
(An inherent light inside the eye— who had that idea, that I feel now in my sockets?)
In the neighboring darkyards
not a cherryglow but
a single candle left flickering out
The matter of electricity is unverifiable in this house. Next door you might find another way in. One takes tweezers to the outlets and tries to pluck it out. One wraps it around a stick like a caduceus and the long snake of modernity. This health. This electricity, this health.
How often we are healed with electricity. How often we are damaged with it.
To slowly pull the strings of electricity from the house over a period of weeks, wrapping it around a stick in the yard. Notes towards an incision—
But the electricity verifies me. The most southern routes to wire exposure leave my body a bit frayed, but no matter. When you hold a pre-dated mourning—the mourning of something to come— inside yourself awhile, it becomes a part of you that settles, that kneads in, that lights up, imperceptibly in your eye. You begin mourning the loss of the pre-dated mourning, and then you mourn losing that new mourning too. In this way, pre-dated mourning will always sprout and proliferate. Because the object of mourning is still live in you. And the mourning for it will animate and mate with it, and its offspring will mate with that. It’s a terrible incestuous thing in your head. And if it gets into your heart—
it was always there.
To arrive at the candle left
flickering the width
of a season
Asemia and darkness mated and proliferated through me. Electricity sprouts in my sockets anyway. Darkness whips my palms and it doesn’t hurt a bit. Under the candle flame, atmospheric pressure effervesces in the wax. The lit wick makes an iris in the almond deadbolt.
I made a small incision in the back of the house. Over a period of weeks, through the blister that formed in the wall, I pulled the wiry snakes of electricity out of the house they wound through. It had to be slow and steady, a secret, minor pull, so as not to the snap the lines, so as not to agitate the electricity into a drive for reclamation—sudden spouts of sparking larvae into the walls and calls to the electric company and electronic bills for services.
Slowly, slowly, I wrapped the lines around a stick, and when it got to be too much, around a tree at the back of the yard. Weeks, though, then stretched on to months, and I wondered if it was possible. Or if these lines through the house ran into a bottomless subterranean store of electrical lines below. Grids all the way through the earth. If I was just tugging foolishly at the outer seam of a massive skein that would never unravel, never be touched at its core. I kept pulling. You could see now, the porous walls of the house buckling at the slow tug.
Recommended Reading:
Lisa Robertson Nilling, Carlos Cociña La casa devastada, "Ideograms in China” by Henri Michaux, trans. Gustaf Sobin, “Abalone” by fahima ife, "A Wave of Dreams" by Louis Aragon, trans. Carlos Lara, As Iz by Tyrone Williams, Approaching the Magic Hour by Agnes Grinstead Anderson
