POKEMON

(A Proleptic Phenomenology of Affective Navigation)

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 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.

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.
-----

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.