Daily, I remind myself: the future is not dependent on your inability to describe your undoing.
〇
In the red notebook I carry always: a blank twenty-five-cent postcard of Silver Rock, Cannon Beach, Oregon; a small black-and-white photograph of a cattle crossing taken from behind the dashboard of a car facing the oncoming cattle caravan; and another postcard, featuring an image of the seaside city of Atami, part of Asako Narahashi’s series half awake and half asleep in the water. The barren coastal scene captured in the postcard of Silver Rock resembles the beaches of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal and suggests despair of a spiritual origin, while the others, oncoming catastrophe by way of some fatal accident, such as death by stampede or drowning.
〇
I have never, to the best of my recollection, been subject to a Rorschach test, not as a child, nor as an adult, but trust that if there is a life for me to be lived between these images, then these words would be my attempt to describe it.
〇
That which fails to coalesce (a form)
〇
And the chalk that outlines the holes
〇
In Jack Garfein’s Bronx noir, Something Wild, Mary Ann experiences a sexual assault at St. James Park, 2550 Jerome Avenue, Bronx, NY 10468 upon leaving the Kingsbridge Road subway station. The film is based on the 1958 novel Mary Ann, by Alex Karmel, whose first sentence begins: “One night in March, on her way home from chorus practice, Mary Ann Robinson was raped by an assailant whose features she could not make out in the darkness.” The novel revolves around this trauma that Mary Ann cannot in language own. Back in the Bronx, bedridden, I think about the conditions that led me here, to this moment. Why am I now so tired? It’s mid-October, but I refuse to believe I am suffering from what is probably “just a cold.” I consider the day before. In passing, I mention to an acquaintance whose mother lives in the Bronx that I am staying at a place off of the 4 train, near Kingsbridge Road. I assume he is as unfamiliar as I am with the area, but he catches me off guard. “Have you been to the park nearby? If not, go.”
〇
There where the violence is
〇
Inside the soft tissue holding
〇
Wildflowers like wild parts of me, always desiring
〇
An unfolding: to speak of you beyond the rewriting
〇
But how without a body
〇
Upon walking through St. James Park, I noted a sudden internal rearranging of the parts. But this is not at all cinematic, I thought. Aside from the film, I had no memory of this place that was once a low marshland before it was graded with ash and soil, and then transformed into a park.
〇
Now an accumulation of garbage, litter, and glass;
〇
Or that which you cannot expel (these, the shards)
〇
As if by sorting through it, I could finally say
“This” is why “that” happened
“This” is how “I” got here; that ligament, torn
〇
It was not an address to which I wished to return
〇
〇
〇
The day I first met H., I ordered over thirty dollars’ worth of food at a nearby café. What I ate is unmemorable save for what I drank: a soda of rosemary, spruce, juniper, and sage. Can I trust H. to help me, or am I too far gone? I took another sip of my drink and thought of @On_Kawara.
I AM STILL ALIVE.
But feeling alive was causing me problems. The past few months, I had become increasingly disturbed by the idea that I did not deserve to live, not because I didn’t want to try, but because I imagined I wasn’t very good at it (to which H. would respond, “Say more about that”).
I had never been a “happy” person. I had just been. And for whatever reason, just being felt inadequate. Then R. died; R. with whom I danced. R. with whom I once lived. He was the same R. who continued to seek me out even as I acted towards him somewhat distant and uncertain.
After R. died, away went my focus. I didn’t lack the words so much as feel overwhelmed by their direction. Where were they carrying me, and what if I was not ready to follow? You are where your ghost lives. Sometimes living in two places at once (Minnesota and New York) caused me to feel as though I did not live anywhere because no one ever knew where I was.
As I finished my soda, I began to read on my iPhone an essay published earlier that morning by an author of notable repute. I held my breath and saw a stranger pass. That violación. Que casi me destruyó. Some people felt that to say so, in print, was an anticipatory gesture—a smoke screen for something worse. I thought of my friend A., the novelist. “And if it is?”
〇
I followed you into the nothing, and then, was.
〇
Having failed to arrive
at a recognizable point
in space, lacking direction,
“I” was therefore lost.
〇
Why did I feel inside the wreckage that even if I was with you I was also so alone? At the corner of 193rd and Jerome, I worried as to whether or not it was at all possible to know myself outside of that photo of the young girl surrounded by concrete, brick, wire, and stone. “Because as you touch, you are being touched,” reflected the choreographer Morgan Thorson in an interview about her latest collaborative dance work with sound artist Alan Sparhawk, titled Public Love.
(And if touch is a stand-in for something it is not?)
Back in Minneapolis, three billboards downtown feature an abstract cluster of hand, body, and garment, and in plain white text read the words public love. Somewhere between advertisement and public art, the gesture is reminiscent of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, who said to me in a dream the April before you died, “This is not about representation.” It’s not even about touch.
〇
Give me a body I can in language throw
〇
Around the waiting but before the alarm
〇
〇
〇
Upon rewatching Something Wild, I hit PAUSE to consider the image of Mary Ann’s cross (and the crisis of loss). How a violation can sever the soul from the body and make ruin where there was once a sense of belief, beauty. In an interview, the director, Jack Garfein, says his ambition is to depict through his film the experience of a person who has undergone a trauma. Unable to recall Garfein’s exact words, I oscillate between verbs: Undergone. Underwent. Suffered. I am not confident in the ways I want to describe, or in the ways I try to remember. I hesitate over my desire to connect with others, particularly Mary Ann, a fictional character with actual feelings.
〇
I stuttered at the thought
〇
And abridged the text—
〇
What if we are part of the black and
Blue, the changing angle of the sun?
〇
〇
〇
I began to feel a persistent misalignment in my face.
Stop eating so many raw almonds. Sit up straight. Buy a bite guard. Meditate. When I tried to describe this sensation to others, I felt very inept. I used words like broken and asymmetrical. “But my jaw feels out of place,” I complained. In the mirror, it appeared deviated, so on the recommendation of an acupuncturist, I made an appointment with S., who specializes in intraoral neuromuscular massage therapy. We met a few weeks later in an exam room at a clinic I sometimes visited. “Have you ever experienced a trauma?” she asked. It was such a direct question, I had to recalibrate. Did she mean specifically in regard to my face? “Like a car accident? No.” She then stepped out so I could have a few moments alone to undress. I lay faceup on the heated table and pulled the sheet up as far as it would go. Naked from the waist up, I felt embarrassed and also tense. Her question gave me pause. Had something happened to me once? S. entered the room again. “Do you mind the music?” A binaural tone, then a swerve.
〇
Like cymbals, the touching was percussive. I registered its movement, a bilateral progression.
〇
“Why is this like drugs?” I could hardly hear myself speak, the words were so slurred.
Faceup, once again, I felt certain parts of me fall back, allowing others to reveal themselves. S. continued to work the muscles surrounding the temporomandibular joints in and around the mouth. It was as though, through touch, S. had activated some deep prehistoric reflex in my cells that, many lifetimes ago and in another form, may have once been employed via venom-producing-like glands whose presence I suspected based on the profound chemical changes they precipitated.
When I attempted to describe this experience to H., he said, “It sounds like you were relaxed.” I laughed. “I guess?” But it was so much more dynamic than that. My body was like the meeting point between two screens made of mesh. The point at which they connect. It never felt like writing, and it never felt like sex, the sensation of the parts falling away and peeling back. It was as if I were immobilized by a spontaneous flood of snake blood, saliva, proteins, and polypeptides.
〇
And upon the lee, the morning after, I was thrown.
〇
S. had this manner of bringing me to the edge of my pain so that no matter what I had experienced the session before, I was still able to return and continue in the work, even when certain sensations were, upon the lightest palpation, unbearable. I was motivated by curiosity more than anything: How would “I” change if I allowed myself to turn towards the pain, rather than live in constant aversion of it? What followed felt like the fulfillment of some necessary spiritual obligation; by doing the work, I am learning that in order to live, I have to learn how to transition from one state to the next—how to become nerve gas, hemotoxin, and snake again.
〇
To be without clarity;
To write out of focus.
〇
The summer before you died, I saw Ivy Baldwin’s Keen [No.2] at the Abrons Arts Center Playhouse, and while you have been dead almost a year, and the space of grief is so long, it feels strange to admit that I have been thinking about this one particular dance work for longer than you have not been on this earth. How can I go back to before this time? (I imagine H. answers, “You can’t.”)
〇
To keen is to cry in mourning or lamentation, to weep without words. The custom ritualizes a grief that is multiple, choral, and feminine in form. As someone who cries more often than she would like, and deeper than those around me know what to do with, I take comfort in the fact that keening is an Irish mourning tradition, rather than, or not exclusively, a symptom of an emotional or feminine-adjacent defect (childishness, hysteria, excess estrogen, and so on).
〇
In Keen [No. 2], a dance that comprises various solos, duets, and structured improvisations, the space of mourning is suffused with light, tantric and expansive. It is a beautiful tribute to Lawrence Cassella, Baldwin’s longtime friend and dance-company member who died of HLH, a rare autoimmune disease, in 2015. When asked about the grief that accompanies the obvious shifts in her creative process, Baldwin recalls, “It was the only thing I could make anything about . . . What if you don’t replace this person? What if you live there and embrace that hole?”
〇
What if inside the black and blue is us
〇
The moment I saw the sea, not the land
〇
When I met up with Justin Jones in Minneapolis to talk about the score he wrote for Keen [No.2], he described the collaboration with Baldwin as one guided by intuition and a shared interest in “digging through movement to find resonance.” I consider that resonance alongside the sonic elements of the work, which range from the minimal to the otherworldly; the aural intensities, dilations, and sense of wonder that emerge alongside the choreography, and maybe even coproduce it, are part of the ritual of keening, rather than an amplification of it. In other words, the movement is part of the sound, and the sound, part of the movement, “its pulse,” to use Jones’s words. Together they form the language of the elegy, an ecstatic coursing through.
〇
And then we rotated in the blue light of April.
〇
On the phone I speak with A., whom I met years ago in New York but who now lives in Vermont, somewhere remote. She tells me about her house and her new cat, Gloria, and a party on July 4. We also speculate about perception, how we discover a person, their mannerisms, and come to know what governs them.
We are not talking about actual people. A. is a novelist, so we’re really talking about characters, which are knowable in ways that real people are not. She asks me if I’ve ever considered the possibility that a person acts the way they do because they have experienced at a young age “a knowledge-producing event.” I laugh because it is very A. of her to ask this kind of question.
“That’s elegant,” I say. “No, it’s never occurred to me to describe a knowledge-producing event as anything other than a trauma.”
In the space between question and answer, I wondered what series of knowledge-producing events might have structured my friend’s query, so unique, and considerate of the unknowable experiences of others. It’s O.K. not to know everything. I conclude that the nature of our friendship is such that were I ever to inquire about these events, the confirmation of their having happened would never be as interesting as the person I may or may not know as A.
〇
Felt the fracture widen;
the blue intervals, open
〇
So I ran towards the sex; I threw myself at the stars.
〇
Among those highly stylized ruins, I felt my legs go numb. Walk it off, I thought. I ended up at an exhibition of the painter Mary Weatherford the day before it closed. Initially, after a few minutes in the gallery, I felt disappointed. The paintings were large, formally interesting, and abstract. At their most beautiful, they reminded me of graffiti: irresponsible and committed. Unexpected. And yet for the most part, these paintings, despite the fact that they were illuminated by their neon parts, did not emanate light. Not from within, anyway. Except for one, GLORIA. It was soft, haphazard, glowing. I immediately recalled 1980 Gena Rowlands, the various mauves, pinks, and satins she wears throughout the film. A beautiful character study, I thought, and left the show satisfied. I later confirmed that it was actually the painting next to this painting that was GLORIA; the one I so admired was Soft Pink Copper Eagle.
〇
I lick the brine that clouds my looking
〇
When I ask S. during a session what drew her to the work, she replies, “The layers.” Body as geological record: strata, rock, action. These, the shards. Tissue lets you discover it, and when it can, it gives way, yielding new impressions. In orienting my attention towards my body, its histories as well as its cellular capacities, S. is teaching me how to reconsider my own formlessness, the ways my person has been bound, unleashed, divided, and reborn. What it knows is older than I am; what it holds and gives of itself is more than I could ever recount.
〇
It was as if I had been scored
somewhere below the surface.
〇
Months had passed. I could think of nothing but love.
〇
Months had passed. I could think of nothing but loss.
〇
These are the sensations I wanted to chase. They are not always recognizable to me, the forms they take, or what, if anything, is meaningful about their particular expression apart from the fact that our acknowledgment of them—through touch—often leaves me mangled and estranged.
〇
We fled into what had not yet been written.
〇
In search of a dead bolt, a grammar, a thought, a door—
〇
What if all that’s left of me are the holes?
〇
When I say I had this sensation of S. welding the parts, I am trying to communicate that in me, and in us, something was becoming fused where it had once been torn. When heat was applied along the body’s fault lines, plates that were broken began to realign and the beautiful blueness of the world broke through. And S. would remark, “We went somewhere we never went before.”
〇
In memory of that knowing whose presence was.
〇
What if the only face of desire I recognize is loss?
〇
〇
〇
I woke up a little after 4 a.m. frustrated by the sensation in my left arm. It wasn’t asleep exactly—that feeling was familiar enough—but it did feel less available, less present than the other parts. What is happening to me? It was as if I were a snake and I had two skins. My old skin was stretching to make room for the new one, and as the new one grew, learned to flex and take shape, it rubbed up against the dead tissue, the slough (also known as “the exuviae”).
〇
Scientists call this process “ecdysis.” It can take anywhere from seven to fourteen days.
〇
Never handle a snake that shows signs of an impending shed or is actively shedding, the internet warns. First, I was filled with dread (“I’m dying”). Then, paranoia: When are metaphors useful, and when are they not? Maybe I had not taken enough B12, or maybe I had overzealously taken too much, and what I was experiencing was not some deep metaphysical change, but actually nerve damage. Or were these one and the same? Then I recalled something choreographer Michelle Boulé had said to me once: “We can’t predict what forms healing will take.” I rubbed my forearm, afraid of this process, its waywardness.
〇
The temporary experience of feeling cognitively rearranged was not always terrible. Sometimes, rather than ask S. too many questions, I would silently observe and appreciate the ways my suffering would change, particularly the moments when I didn’t feel numb so much as disinterested in my own pain, the drama that it wrought. Could I be this accepting always?
〇
We gathered so many marigolds like
〇
Belief like light foraging into the word
〇
When I tried to do away with language and long periods without writing commenced, I began to feel sick. Imagine trying to unburden yourself daily of a secret that is not really yours to know or to give away. I struggled to write about the holes and their capacity to produce in me a shift.
〇
Near the end, I visited R. in the hospital. One minute I was in the wrong elevator, the next minute, the wrong floor. What is he doing here? When we had last spoken on the phone maybe a week or so earlier, the boundaries separating this word from that one began to erode, and several minutes would pass when I could not understand him because wherever this new astral-shaped tumor was, it was pressing upon a place of importance—thankfully, not the place where a person’s intent lives, but near the body’s willful expression of it. In other words, R. was still R., but as he spoke, the words were like a language made out of melted parts. Who do we have to be in each moment to be what the other wants when being one’s self can never feel good enough?
〇
Now go ahead and tilt your head back
〇
Imagine the line as a load-bearing wall
〇
According to Judith Butler, to force someone to speak in a manner that does not honor improvisation, or the unconscious, is to do a violence to that person. In these instances, we may also unknowingly perpetuate a violence we have already committed against ourselves. In John Cassavetes’s 1977 film, Opening Night, an actress named Myrtle Gordon (performed by the inimitable Gena Rowlands), is preparing for the Broadway premier of the play-within-the-play, The Second Woman, but struggles to act her part as everyone else in the film insists she must. As her behavior becomes increasingly erratic, it becomes difficult to distinguish whether Myrtle’s gradual undoing is an effect of her circumstances, or an inevitable byproduct of the actress’s process. Depending on my mood, I sometimes envy not so much Myrtle’s stardom as her ability to improvise and, as a “professional,” to embrace what is unpredictable and not knowable in advance: what falls outside narrative, as well as that which cannot be subdued to narrative ends.
〇
What I hold moves me so that I am breathless
〇
Agitating
the fibers where the smooth muscle contracted
〇
“I” cannot yet say if all this doing was enough. So how can you know me without my being threatened by that knowing? I never lacked the words so much as the ability to make meaningful the sensations. Their hands plastering me with substrate. Colostrum; milk; earthquake; magnet.
Lara Mimosa Montes is the author of THRESHOLES (Coffee House Press, 2020). She holds a PhD in English from The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her writing has appeared in Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day series, BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, The Felt, and elsewhere. She is a 2018 McKnight Writing Fellow and CantoMundo fellow. Currently, she works as a senior editor of Triple Canopy. She divides her time between Minneapolis and New York.
