POKEMON (A Proleptic Phenomenology of Affective Navigation)
He felt sure that smells were linked to prophecy in some cavernose underground way. There were many times within the past three years that smell had become an all-consuming 'thought' (well, not exactly a thought. more like a mood maybe, a not-fully-filled-out mood; maybe like a nervous system with a direction or vector.) After all, what WAS prophecy? Wasn't it something like divination? He had often felt an uncanny collapse of possibility into actuality but, as it often seemed now with even the idea of a 'future', with disastrous consequences. It was as if his 'antennae' for moving ahead were bent or blunted in some way. He had taken to consulting all manner of ancient 'scrying' devices in an attempt to glimpse past what seemed an immense, flat and opaque yet shimmering screen which began at his temporal nose. He occasionally could seem to make out a pattern in the shimmering (or was it through the flickering constraints?) but it always moved away as he approached it, like trying to touch mercury on a table top. He realized that he had been driving through pine tree farms for the past 20 minutes. He hadn't seen another vehicle, car or pulp-wood truck in at least that long. Rolling along at ninety miles an hour he briefly wondered what would happen if a tire were to pop. Or if he hit a turtle. Certainly a hole in the shimmering. He slowed slightly to fumble in the passenger side for a cassette and stuck 'Music for Eighteen Musicians' by Reich in the dash and then sped up. The classic minimalism began to hum, twist and mutate like a giant engine room of some starship as it hit warp speed, delicate but containing vast energies continually in negotiation with each other. The trees in their regular rows seemed to click clack by with the music, an organic metronome. The sun was down far enough to throw occasional shadows across the roadway, now stretching ahead farther than he could see. With the passing of the hottest part of the day, not even the fata morgana of water on the road ahead appeared where a car's lights would appear to be floating mysteriously above the surface of a flooded roadway. The road just stretched out endlessly flat. The combination of the music and the long stretch ahead made him feel giddy. He sped up to ninety five. He felt like he was in some movie, that he was about to take off. or be abducted by aliens. He had the feeling that something was going to happen soon. Very soon. He pushed the dual controls and rolled down the driver's window and the passenger's window and then turned the stereo up until the sound from the speakers began to break up, then he backed off the volume slightly. It had been above a hundred degrees down here for the last few days. The heat felt like it had been waiting for him, saving up to burst through the windows. The little two door sport coupe felt like a blast furnace. Occasionally there would be a slight gust of cool air, impossible for it to be cold anymore, from the now completely overpowered air conditioner. Whisk whisk went the trees outside, a noisy counterpoint to music, green galaxies and stars rushing past, the sounds of millions of high-pitched demented violinists pouring through one window then the other then both. The trees themselves seemed to be scraping, singing, sighing. He took it on faith that the insane chorale was composed of thousands of insects, frogs and god knows what else in the duskening green. But he had never actually SEEN one of the things make any sounds. And besides it pleased him to think that the trees were communicating in an angelic cacophony, heralding his arrival in their midst, the Thrones, Principalities, Archangels, Seraphim and the rest marveling to the point of hysteria at the shiny projectile moving, actually able to uproot and move, through their divine midst. Hosannas!! Halleleuyah!! It moves!! He imagined they communicated it instantaneously all along the length of the road way, still announcing their joys even as he had passed them and up ahead the vast choruses bursting into praise, awaiting his arrival. And then the thought occurred to him (it wasn't really a thought. maybe a foreboding; the intensity of the moment, the speed--he was not quite at a hundred--precluded any thought, only resolute attention and intention; every sense seemed to be wide open and extended, to the point of a feverish merger with the furthest point visible on the road ahead, a constantly renewing point on the perfectly realized Euclidian roadway, and with the green sound thrusting and parrying with the inside of the car, trying to come to terms with this human thing. Was it trying to communicate? The invisible tree-sound-pseudopodia twisted and writhed inside the compartment, trying to come to terms with its new found particle, spat from one of the great collider cities...): perhaps these were merely the lieutenants of some Greater Green God, far from these loudly inarticulate and marginal observers of passing bits of metal rubber flesh trails of carbon monoxide moving through the cloud chamber heart of the sweltering summer gloom, visible only from some higher plane, some other vantage point.... His skin began to crawl as he scared himself, deliciously, of some monstrous green Baphomet deep in the forest, far from the roadway hosannas, watching, brooding on his passing, indeed not singing his arrival at all. Perhaps even plotting his downfall, his eventual embedding in a thick sheet of saturnine lead. He slowed down to seventy five as lights appeared in the now almost complete dark, the crack between the worlds beginning to close. The music still twitched and thrummed, moving to a different key. He flicked the lights on and reached into the ashtray for the butt of a joint. He lit it, took a few puffs until his fingers began to burn then threw it out the window. Like some version of Xeno's Paradox, the lights far ahead kept approaching. It seemed impossible to guess their distance. And then there was the smell. It seemed to whip in one window and out the other. But he never knew if it was really outside him or somehow HE was generating the scent. At times it seemed like an admonition, other times like a premonition, a reptilian, hind brain foreboding that 'knew' far more than he did but that was also slightly insane. The tree farms had disappeared and hulking kudzu monsters now whicked by on the margins of his headlights, a vast green slosh poured out from the darkness, punctuated occasionally by a small wood frame building surrounded by a small neat yard always on the verge of being overwhelmed by the surf of green searching tendrils. The legacy of the New Consciousness of the sixties and the seventies didn't mingle well with the transams and pickups of what was to become the New South. The twisted brambles of the unconscious southern undergrowth seemed to either thicken the quagmire at the bottom or lead to the new boomer consumer consciousness of places like Atlanta. Basically gnostic he thought, this consciousness shone like some radiant tropical flower here in the deep south and yet never quite seemed to blend into the rest of the southern garden, becoming instead a thing of some deep fear. Maybe the true denizens of the south had an almost primal knowledge of the introduction of Kudzu in the thirties, a foreigner which had basically taken over the landscape of the south, helping, it seemed to him, to give overt shape to the gothic draconian southern undercurrent. An externalization of some smothering dread lay in almost every southerner he knew, a dread of biblical proportions. Of course. Great hulking masses of greenery, almost like a single organic machine covering every conceivable surface if it stands still look enough. Not that that could ever be the case with Jesse. He almost involuntarily powered down the window, took a deep breath, then rolled it back up. There were places he just couldn't go, his sense making ability just ... gone. ................................. I liked to garden, a fixation I suppose I acquired from my grandparents, poor dirt farmers who raised their own food for the most part and sold a little grain in town. I remembered seeing my first truly exotic plant, an Erythrina crista-galli, with bright red drooping parrot-beak looking flowers. I stopped and asked the old couple on the front porch of the tiny asphalt sided house what it was. They recollected that they didn't know but reckoned that 'hippies used it'. I knew they meant made some kind of drug potion out of it. After all, of what other possible use could such exotic-ness be for? And I gathered that they had been approached often by good-old boy hippies at one time, maybe even in the dead of night, stripping its flowers. I asked them if I could dig up a portion of it and they reckoned that I could have all of it since they wanted to get rid of it, the coveralled old man said turning to his wife with a slight grin. I came back later that afternoon with a pick and shovel to pull off a sprig. The root itself seemed to be like a giant carrot, shooting downward with no taper. After almost an hour of digging in the sweltering late afternoon sun, with the old man, his wife and two neighbors from next door sitting and watching me and appreciating my work, I finally took the pick axe and whacked off a chunk. I apologized to the old man for not being able to clear it out for him and he just chuckled and said that was all right, it wasn't the first time they had tried to get rid of it. I found out later that it was a native Australian plant and was extremely drought resistant, hence its root system. I remembered much later also seeing a beautiful tree variety of Erythrina outside a hippie house in California in the Oliver Stone film on The Doors, signifying an hallucinatory otherness (and thinking briefly of how I had secretly made fun of the old paranoid couple. Perhaps they really DID know something in some obscure allegorical way). To no avail I fantasized THIS plant colonizing the south wholesale, its daemonic psychedelia colliding with the the old testament wrath of the Kudzu. Not possible, I thought...but if it COULD happen I knew which would win.
It was the middle of January in 1994 on
the Yucatan peninsula when I first noticed the smell.. Wandering through
the vendors booths, mingling with the tourists, picking up pseudo-Mayan
junk with my then-wife, I attributed it to the peculiar exotic atmosphere.
It seemed like a peculiar combination of curdled milk and cooking oil.
It became an ever present accompaniment. I remembered that an early psychoanalyst
Wilhelm Fliess was convinced that the cause of sexual dysfunction
was located in the noise and even managed to convince his friend Freud
of nasal operations to correct the problems. Fliess was a kook but ...
this smell thing really bothered me and I made a mental note to look up
Fliess when I got back home. He began terraforming the backyard with a passion, trying to escape from the box-like nature of his surroundings. He borrowed his brother's pickup truck and brought in loads of rock unearthed from a nearby construction project, trying to recreate also his previous house that he had built himself but had to sell because of the divorce. He was in the midst of building a five foot high set of concentric walls to separate himself from the next door neighbors.
Barbara from next door couldn't stand it any longer and had to investigate. She was short and pudgy but with the pleasant neighbor demeanor which he supposed was a necessity in the suburbs. He was stripped to the waist, lifting twenty pound rocks into place. She also brought a friend who had moved out of the neighborhood. Barbara looked to be in her late thirties and Sarah in her late forties..
"Wow, this is great! I keep telling Jim I wish he would get off his butt and do something like this!" Barbara looked slyly around at the stacks of one inch rebar, concrete, and rock. (How to possibly tell them that the rocks, the walls were both a discipline and a meditation, both an escape from and to a void, escape from failures of all kinds, none of which seemed capable of being rectified, that the walls couldn't possibly be high enough or thick enough; that, yes, they were to keep them and their manicured lawns out, the stultifying sameness but also to contain a ravenous and raging thing, a thing harder than the rocks, a thing that was nothing but teeth and hunger and that paced, paced, paced behind the eyes, a thing that stood on the edge of a void, finely balanced, quivering, but joyless, dark, a thing that didn't even feel human, rather crystalline, all jagged edged, a thing never satisfied, never finished. A thing that could only glare at them from behind the eye.)
"and would you look at all these plants! Why, this is great!" She was looking at a Japanese anemone. I told her what it was and the plant next to it. "Why, I don't think I could ever remember all these plant names...you know the names of all of them?" "Well, I try to know them...part of the fun you know.... "And what's THIS! " She was pointing to a cleome. But I know she thought it looked like a marijuana leaf, which it in fact did. I told her the name just to be safe. and even though it was blooming. "And you should see this little house he built!" I had built a studio in the woods with a connecting bridge to the garden. They went down and looked inside at the sculpture sitting there on bicycle wheels. It would have been impossible to try to talk to them about it so I just told them what kind of wood it was made of. They didn't act at all perplexed. and for all that matter not entirely curious. It was just another thing to be politely examined and admired. Back in the garden: "How can you think of all these things?" "Well, obsession can be like that." Silence as they looked around. I quickly added my standard hook, "You'll have to come back when I get the UFO landing pad in." At that they began to get excited. Sarah related her UFO experience back in 1973...talk of X-Files which seemed to be their bench mark for such things. Nobody really believed in anything anymore.
Not art. Not government. Not God. Not UFOs really. But I realized then that
the suburbs were where a certain developing embryo was germinating. Out
of the blankness of missing time, that infinity-hunger that seems scooped
into everything now, was slowly invading again. and not so slowly sometimes
since television was filled with visions of the uncanny as were the movies.
It seemed to be an escape clause for a lot of folks, a door left slightly,
hopefully, ajar. The garden and the rocks weren't important, it was the
vision they inspired of an idea that things could be different.
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