Undisciplined visions
/ jarring imagery with minimal context
Water comes out of a dropped balloon differently than out of a tipped glass doesn’t it? Thwack it hits the hot pavement and disgorges violently in all directions. Satisfying in a way that spilled water isn’t. Like grapes or eyeballs pinched between thumb and forefinger - skins split and fluids eject with gleeful kinetic force. It was Buñuel who taught me just how effective a ruptured eyeball is at making a person squirm (I feel the offense—I’m more affected by body horror than anyone) and the Pixies who showed that slicing up eyeballs can be made a little more lighthearted if accompanied by a sing-song melody. Splatter go the pent-up vitreous humors and the water balloon contents. Jackson Pollocking all over the canvas of things. Chaos and violence make art with playful strokes.
This dispatch was originally taking shape around a meditation on a line of dominoes. I don’t recollect now how the original seed of the idea blossomed into exploding liquid orbiculars. I’m not trying to care too much though. I decided from the outset that today’s exercise is first- and only-draft stuff. A one-hitter. Incongruous, alinear, of questionable utility. Utterly disrespectful to the reader in other words. Apologies then; feel free to duck out now, though I promise talk of eyeballs is over. The composition method I’m preferencing here is a basic act of resistance, a refutation of all the grating (but useful) writing advice that the Substack algorithm is heaping on me (edit more! first drafts are trash!), having (falsely?) identified me as harboring some kind of greater ambition and therefore needing to take my project more seriously.1 I’m good, ‘Stacks; thanks though!
The dominoes image that was resolving in my mind was something blandly symbolic of the deterministic nature of lives in relation to one another. Banal stuff really. The needle slips too easily into the grooves of worn metaphors… oops that itself being another worn metaphor. Anyway the vision was objects arranged by the creator and set in motion with a big ol’ Sistine Chapel index finger poking at the first tile. Big. Bang. Weeeee. Weee. We fall, one onto another, and onto the next and the next. The succession of a life traced by a domino’s arcing path, toppling with that strange effect of radial velocity where the center of rotation barely budges while the extremity races with dizzying speed. Are we powerless in the face of fate’s cascading momentum? Are we redundant? Not totally. Our hyperspecific charge and spin, manner of falling forward, and the very texture of ourselves is imparted on impact to those next tiles, rippling uniquely on through all the rest, clear to the end of the game.
I imagine myself a beast in the wild, seasons tormented, roving so much inhospitable terrain. No matter how expansive, the boundaries seem only to close in day after day. Thick sucking mud around my ankles. Unyielding sharp grasses saw at my hide. Relentless exposure. Cold rain pelts at night, and searing sunlight flogs mid-day, when even the tallest grass casts hardly a shadow. Welts and scabs have formed along my flanks. My wide vacant pupils - no irises, no whites - loll under leaky crusting eyelids.2 Through insensate eyes I look up to an inattentive sky. I find no explanation or direction above though even my simple beastly mind wishes to know where I am and how long I'll be here, and where I must go and how I will get there. I find no answers to these questions anywhere in this foul place that engulfs me and would swallow me. This place will not relent because there's nothing to relent. It holds no will toward me, tender or ill. It holds nothing.3
there is no continuity to these thoughts. they come and go in flashes. starting up, ebbing away, and without warning wrapping back around to the beginning. memories recorded in brief spells, left like bread crumbs to trace a fleeting path. I was there then here then here. this I observed then. that I thought once. from crumb to crumb I might follow steps backward, but the spaces in between are quickly lost to time, and then the bread crumbs too. the islands I hopped between on the voyage that led me to this nameless place unstable, eroding, shaking and calving apart. no waypoints remain, crumbs or islands, for a return home. then, where I sit presently is a little raft adrift on a lightless sea. maybe the sea isn't exactly lightless. was it Prince Caspian that set out for the edge of the earth aboard a great ship, to find what lay at the farthest reach of the ocean? where mists gathered all around, thick oily and uniform like carded wool. all gray but glowing bright, and endless in all directions.
No raft actually; just a body. I lie buoyant in this thick miasma disconnected from distance and the passage of time. Raising my hands in front of me I find them entirely transparent. My body is boundary-less and numb, feeling neither cold nor warm, dry nor wet. Am I essentially just describing the insides of a sensory deprivation tank? Soupy saline water held right around body temperature. Generic new-age muzak piped in through hidden speakers. Caspian’s Sea is cheapened considerably when I realize it's only a few inches deep and held in a molded plastic basin through which paying customers in downtown Oakland cycle their naked bodies one at a time, a dozen or more a day. Films of oil, and drains and filters rimed over with hair and flakes of skin. Here come the lights, pulsing slowly brighter, interrupting the floating timeless trance, abrupt even in their engineered subtlety. Awake. Rinse off. Move on. Back to the overexposed outside world. Noisy and disorienting. Fulvid bloated faces on the slouched heads of shuffling eyeless strangers processing along grimy sidewalks through an undistinguished afternoon.
I picked this platform mostly because its free, easy to edit in, and lets me direct my ridiculous domain to it, not recognizing that its essentially another social media dopamine dispenser/withholder + ponzi scheme where I am meant to earnestly go about 1) amassing followers (“follow me and I’ll follow you… let’s build this thing!”), 2) uplifting other aspiring writers writing about writing (instead of about stuff), and ultimately 3) getting published and paid so I can then proffer how-to advice to others desperate to do the same.
No shit, here are a few samples taken from my feed (who knew Substack was to have feeds too!) this very moment:
Got a story idea that won’t let go but need support developing it into something substantial enough to support an entire novel? My upcoming workshop may be ideal for you.
Do you like writing? Do you like having $10,000?
Dearest algorithm,
Please connect me with people who love:
📖 Reading
✍🏼 Writing
👩🏻💻 Publishing
💡 Creativity
I’m currently working on my debut novel and am documenting my journey here on Substack. I’ll be sharing everything about my writing process, how I’m feeling as I navigate the ups and downs, and the progress I’m making on my book. I would love to meet other writers who are on the same journey!
A promise broken. Eyes are on my mind. At least these didn’t pop!
VanderMeer gives me these sorts of scenes in which to wrap myself. They are painted in my mind like one of the Flemish landscapes, those highbrow Kinkades, real-deal light-painters. I hang my VanderMeers on the walls of my imagination, and jump into them from time to time to inhabit that place where my body understands itself. For the beast that it is, blessed with mass and sensitivity and cursed with self-knowledge and memory. Nature corrupted, or restored? That’s the uncanniness of Area X in VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy. It might be a place where you understand yourself better too, or get totally lost. If you are up for enduring some tedium and dead-ends along the way, dive into this unsettling art gallery and pay whatever price to collect VanderMeers for hanging on your own walls. Annihilation, Authority, Acceptance… you can absorb the book titles alone and be nearly equally affected. Who among us doesn’t seek annihilation? Many probably, but for me oblivion sings relentlessly a siren song. And who doesn’t long for authority? Well, me for one… But then, I understand the impulse better through the eyes of the protagonist in the series going by the name Control. Like him, even lacking appetite for authority over others, I do grasp for and find elusive that control / authority over my self. And acceptance? Well there the wheel is complete and maybe stops turning even. There can I take hold if I find it in me to free my hands, letting the others go. I haven’t picked up Absolution, his newest installment, yet. I’m still rather enjoying the memory of the scummy organic surface on the fetid pond outside Southern Reach HQ and I’m reluctant to jump back in and disturb the waters (and nothing fucks up the concept of a trilogy better than a fourth book).
A bit reminiscent of reading Nabokov's memoir, Speak, Memory: poetic imagery riding on a stream of consciousness.