(A Proleptic Phenomenology of Affective Navigation) r. cheatham Everything seemed to be made mostly of voids and gaps, spanned by the thinnest of membranes, things composed of nothings...but iridescent and seductive for all that. Like soap bubbles maybe. and just so it seemed to him as if the skin of the world was getting slipperier and thinner almost day by day. Certainly week by week. The translucency of oil rubbed on paper maybe, the imperceptible made conceivable. It had been almost two years since the breakup but she was still carried inside like a wound, constant, superating, drained one day only to find itself painful and tender the next, throbbing in the night heat. There were no doctors to complain to about thin veneers, slippage, wounds. No amount of fatigue seemed to lessen its grip, ease his slip into sleep. But she just seemed like an excuse now, a demonic tonality that enabled the ringing of changes; the wound seemed to be having a life of its own, its own seasons, its own moods, some of which he didn't seem politely invited to but rather violently abducted, swept along. The only thing he could do then was attempt a temporary exorcism by writing to himself as he walked, composing an illusory story, even if allusively, acting like a bug-zapper of the soul, putting out an eerie purple light to attract the demons enough to momentarily zap them, at least make them talk, give them tongue, even make them visible. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn't. Mostly it didn't. In his nightly walks around the block the infernal zotting of the real insect zappers combined with a gauze-like claustrophobia that threatened to turn him into a homicidal manic any minute he felt. The air had to be forcibly ripped away as he moved through it, creating nothing but tattered remnants of his movements, a momentary parting and then shutting right behind him. The 'burbs were the perfect place for him now, almost completely alienated (such a quaint old word now; and what would it be to be completely alienated? Dead?), moved back into a childhood home (the basement no less) where he first felt the stirrings of a certain world-weariness (like all the other frustrated 14 year olds surrounding him then). And here he was 36 years later. In the same house. Could anyone have a better excuse for going crazy? Maybe it was time for that road trip after all. He needed other realities and he needed it bad. Otherwise the approaching figure with the big knife could spell trouble. Hit the Road Jack... The thick summer air rolling in the window was redolent of pine needles and decay, reminding him of something but he couldn't quite pin it down. 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 whisk whisk went the ordered rows oftrees outside, a noisy counterpoint to the deareningmusic, 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 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, lyng in wait 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 THAT smell again. 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. Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch... 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... After This Horticultural Pause 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. There was a kind of fate and feeling of fatality running in almost all southern families that, like the Kudzu, seemed almost impossible to eradicate. It clung to its members like the scent of mildew and like that smell it only became apparent when it was taken out into the open air and examined. By that time it was too late, the rot had already set in. Illuminated by a black sun, it still fluoresced under certain circumstances even in these latter days, barely into the new millennium. Maybe the exotic flower HAD won out in the south; the flower was obvious but he wondered what the tap root had descended to this time. He grinned to himself: the True Shape of the Cross: the lateral movement of Kudzu with the vertical of the exotic. Out of the blue he thought: evidence needs witnesses, symptoms need victims. --------------------- The night had deepened and a dry sort of cocoon had enveloped the interior of the car, giving him that same muffled feeling, oddly enough, as in the winter, when snow covered the whole car. He supposed it was a combination of sensory deprivation AND sensory overload. He was a deeply unhappy man and he couldn't quite figure out why. Nothing really made any sense anymore. Or maybe it was just the case that the sense that was there seemed profoundly banal, uninteresting, a world made up of almost nothing but strip shopping centers, McDonald's and cookie cutter brick houses. He divorced at the age of fifty after being married for 25 years. And none of that made any sense either, even after two years, either the marriage part or the divorce part. There were times when everything seemed completely blank, void. Was this the heritage of being southern? Maybe melancholia was the only thing the south had to offer any more. The south's contribution to 'being modern' seemed to be the blues, rock and roll, grits, and a kind of rolling heaviness of loss, almost impossible to combat (this rock and roll combination of fate and Dionysian revel now seemed deeply suspicious to him. At one time it seemed that the exotic bloom could win out, crowd out the suffocating, continual rolling of thunder in the distance, dispel the approaching storm clouds; instead the bloom itself had become the color of a bruise, thunderous, poisonous). He used to wake up with an impending sense of doom, a black sense of hopeless that didn't seem to be tied to any particular facet of anything. It just was. And it seemed to be at complete odds with the energy and efflorescence of the New South, which, let's face it, seemed to have mostly to do with expressways, fast food, and a certain tawdry nostalgia for the melancholia it thought it had lost. Time itself seemed to stretch to an infinity then abruptly snap back, leaving bruises, textured infinity in the here and now, continually throbbing and decaying whatever tried to stand. No, it wasn't pleasant. How could it be? Everything continually fell apart. There were times that was acceptable. And if it could just be accelerated, he once thought, why then, you could dig down to the real stuff. He didn't think he believed that anymore...hell, he wasn't even sure that there WAS any real stuff anymore. He spent endless hours at night in front of the TV, clicking aimless from channel to channel, five seconds of interest here, 3 minutes there, occasionally ten minutes watching an octopus change color, then a car chase, then a bank robbery, then a business report, then an infomercial selling exercise gear another infomercial selling yet another type of exercise gear, the partially decoded signal of a porno station, an occasional breast or abdomen swelling thorough the distorted colors. At those moments, the walls began to writhe and close in and he wished deeply for an apocalypse to blow it all up, for something, ANYTHING, real to happen. But it never seemed to. And when it did it was never quite as real in retrospect as it had first seemed, but rather always someone else's imaginary byproduct, stuffed with more ersatz products, just like a hot dog. Not even death seemed particularly real anymore, just a blip on the screen. Time to switch the channel. -------- 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. ----- "The Institution of Rot" He slowly pulled into the driveway of the old home place. No lights on, just the street light on the other side of side of the road. He turned the engine off and sat listening to the abrupt silence and the ticking of the engine as it cooled. Some memories seem supersaturated -- perhaps the further back they are, the more sodden. They come unbidden, heavy, dripping with a context and circumstance that seem entirely other, even alien at times. And yet -- one knows, somehow, that what is being remembered ... literally arms, legs, head being put back on a torso, stitched together with the sheerest of threads, a length formed of nothing BUT length, delay: the time between Now and Then--somehow the realization: I MUST have been there, given the impact of this sudden bloody tissue of recollection. The people are gone. The landscape has shifted, grown up (and over), an archaic, tangled, skeined palimpsest, laying bare yet covering over at the same time a curving weave of faces, gestures, events, circumstances. Almost like the memories and the landscape are hooked together in some inexorable backward pull, a confusion of causalities, a tug always from a faceless (or perhaps the potential uncanniness of a 'face' under a mask), enfeebled present, back toward something darker, more primeval, something always lurking just beyond the bright threshold of Now, threatening an alien whirlpool of etheric (because remembered) arc of flesh, a jigsaw of pieces that have apparently been put together--always just now--and yet a step back and it dissolves into oddly shaped lumps. Two weeks 'ago' and they still have a reassuring familiarity; thirty years back and a disorienting disequilibrium sets in. This landscape is continually trying to reclaim this inchoate, dimly-lit interior space of remembrance--in stark contrast to technology which is continually trying to efface memory --in the guise of enhancing it-- to not only dis-remember but to dismember generally (and here tech's affective convergence with capitalism: capital's only use for memory is in a 'weak' sense as nostalgia which can be formalized and looped in the repetitive structures of advertising and marketing. Strong memory most often forms up either trauma or an otherness so strong (in its uncanny familiarity) and distant (and close--pace Walter Benjamin's aura definition) that it functions as a form of group memory or allegorical narrative ( Egypt, Mayan, Aztec, Amerindian, even 'godless'--because 'landscapeless'--robotic aliens from some group home around Alpha Centaurae for god's sake, always a foreign enticingly inaccessable tribal otherness). The landscape of technology is dominated by the bulldozer. ---everyone stays indoors here now, after the widespread acceptance and use of domestic air conditioning. Even when its nice weather outside, very few open windows. Always air conditioning inside and constant (constancy, contrary to expectations, is a bulldozer of memory). But the more we isolate ourselves, the less prepared we are for the shock of 'landscape memory,' tirelessly waiting outside the entrance way, the door, the exit lies another exit and entrance becoming invisible by the day it seemed. There, itself, waits a trauma, a lag, a wound so fresh that scar tissue has not yet formed historically. A 'thing' not yet named, perhaps not even nameable. --- Sitting in dark in the yard 'out back'. No one home, lights out, door locked. Still stiff from driving. There, etched by moonlight, edge of woods, beyond which the 'ancestral shack' as he had always affectionately called it, of his grandparents--a small white asbestos sided 2-story house with two small gables in front and back, stairs. A bannister. At the top of which as a kid he watched, uncomprehending, family dramas and squabbles unfolding... Cousins, aunts, uncles, moved on, died. And now it was filled with an unspeakable event, Something which made its presence known even through the copse of trees, vague glimmer shifting past the window he could barely make out. And that smell again. But now, a strident, stritchy thing in the oak tree to his right pulling regularly on some demented violin, rising to a crescendo then sawing down to a rasping stop. Then the response from things in the other trees...silence...then sawing in the far distance, then building again nearby. Some crazy sonata by Xenakis maybe, called 'Chorae'. But contained in that seasonal, rasping echoing call-and-response spoke the whole history of a world, constant and consistent in its choral inevitability and commentary on the doings down below, the tablature of the trees providing the appropriate genealogy: a few pin oaks but mostly pines. pine trees. The other signature effect (and affect is the landscaped truth if it could be told which it can't only alluded to) vertical lines for the cleft and treble, wind soughing, giving way to stritching bugs. A life lived--did everyone here not see it, hear it??! --in an electric soup of communicating trees, insects, and wind. (and god knows what else. Maybe it wasn't all a one-way street, nothing but bulldozers, pulpwood trucks, mowers at dusk. Maybe these things, this landscape, was orchestrating it, flowing, seeping into the unconscious, pullulating thoughts, like those large white eyeless grubs hidden in the old rotten tree he saw yesterday, blindly pawing through the soft fibrous wood till the Energies overcame them and they began to stiffen, harden, darken, becoming other than what they now were, becoming another life connected by only the slenderest thread of DNA to life in the dark. A new creature. Maybe there was such a beckoning here (and not only here): human grub embedded in a giant fallen log, etheric signals passing wraith-like through the great Body of the world, into the flesh, time spans measured in millennia condensing in the DNA, precipitate of falls and pupae of catastrophes, signals passing though the amber of flesh, dammed (maybe even damned) at the flesh for a spell in the wood, then gushing forth--O great glamour of spells cast! Cast in resin, bug spit long since hardened (stritching passing over how many millions of years?) then bursting free, frothy expirations condensing yet again for another ride through time: worlds composed of nothing but condensations and explosions falling as debris on the great Plain of the Now and suckered through with runners --kudzu like--penetrating it with this cosmic collapse, this darkness at noon, unceasing, against which the Machine toils endlessly, itself not capable of being so penetrated being rather nothing BUT this penetration, the pure form of the wood grub, the grubbing of the grub minus the grub. Nothing but burrowing through the debris, grub turned to angel flapping furiously, backward ... ------------ Most mornings he woke up as a twisted bramble of wreckage, a crumpled mesh tailor's dummy which had to be patiently straightened, every kink disentangled, each streak of pain surrounded with pills and nostrums and ritual and made to submit to the greater good. One day there would be a Gordian knot that couldn't be undone. And there would only be one way to cut through the red haze of ache, a final dehiscence. It didn't help that he also woke up haunted, in a fog of remembrance that oscillated with remonstrance, the two cycling so rapidly sometimes that the pains of the psyche merged with the aches of the flesh leaving him swimming in a vertiginous gray mass of the half-light of morning, waiting, waiting as the gradual monstrous landscapes of sleep gave way to the barely manageable terrain of the real. Gradually, oh so gradually, he was granted absolution for the flesh and given pardon by the demons...at least for eighteen hours. At these moments he wasn't sure whether to take heart from the ancient Hasidic notion of life after redemption / apocalypse / salvation: everything is exactly the same except for a small difference, an almost imperceptible displacement that yet makes all the difference. Perhaps the same could be said of hell.

Hut Project