Zoomorphic Couple (1933), Max Ernst

I had a dream last night that my friend had a device in her kitchen that she used to clean things. The device was a huge, made of shiny white metal, bigger than a fridge and a stove combined, with an oblong, pill-shaped compartment in the middle. There were pieces of fruit in the compartment. I was going to clean the fruit using the machine. But then some insects landed on the fruit — a very big mosquito and a fly and a few ants.

I didn’t know how to get the insects off the fruit. In the dream, I didn’t want to touch them, they were commingling with the fruit, under and over it, everywhere. I only had a fly swatter. So I killed the big mosquito. Now there was mosquito all over the fruit. Disgusting.

“Don’t worry, this thing will fix it,” my friend said, closing the clam-shell lid on the compartment. Her cleaning device could differentiate between fruit and bug and remove bug. Her device could sort matter down to the molecule. She didn’t explain this in the dream but I understood. I was skeptical.

She turned the machine on. It hummed and buzzed and vibrated like it was definitely for sure turned on. We stood and watched it hum and buzz for a few minutes.

Finally, the pill-shape compartment opened. There were several hundred pea-sized pellets inside. They were not the color of fruit. They were the color of bugs and fruit together.

I didn’t know what to say. I stood there thinking about the fact that this machine’s job was discernment. Its job was to separate without getting confused about the boundaries between one thing and another. It was meant to sort goop into categories so it could keep one category of goop and discard the other. It was assumed to know which category of goop you wanted and which category you didn’t want.

It didn’t seem to know what my friend assumed it would know. Maybe it didn’t even know the difference between a bug eyeball and a seed, the meaty forearm of a fly and a strand of mango.

The machine pretended to know the difference. In reality, it was a BLENDER. It broke down and rearranged and smoothed and combined. It mistakenly lumped different categories of matter into one sweeping category, and pretended that this was a success. It overgeneralized. It made assumptions and ran with those assumptions.

This machine pissed on your head and told you it was raining.

“Don’t worry,” my friend said, “It can learn from mistakes.”

“Yes, but will we learn from our mistakes?” I asked. “Because only a very stupid person would have something like this in their house.”

“There are tons of stupid people out there who’ll buy anything,” my friend said. She didn’t seem to think she was one of them. “Anyway it’s better with dishes than with fruit.”

***

This is how the world feels to me now. Trying to absorb something real or useful or reassuring through my phone or laptop lands me in the same place: I’m reading an article about some calamity, some tragedy, some sad turn of events, and I’m waiting for a long, low howl of pain to come from the author or from someone else in the story, I’m waiting for some acknowledgment, some hint that someone else knows how terrible it is, but it never comes. I keep waiting. Eventually I feel gaslit. “That’s all?” I think at the end. I want the horror or the despair to be marked and categorized so it can be processed and filed away appropriately. But instead, it’s another shrug.

It all goes into the blender and comes out uniform, smooth pellets of life that feel slippery and strange, we don’t know what it’s made of anymore, we can’t tell the difference between a good beach read and a toddler who died in the backseat of a hot car. I encounter a string of deadly tornadoes the same way I greet movie night on “Love Island”: Here we have screaming and splintered wood, here are waving arms and uprooted trees and accusations and tears. This town has been flattened. This dream is over. Who is acting? How do these words matter? Can words matter anymore?

Everyone out there seems young and forgetful or old and almost erased, there’s nothing in between. Either you are getting married at Madison Square Gardens or the woods behind your grandmother’s home are being chopped down to accommodate a new data center or you are William T. Vollmann, eating cubes of pork belly and waiting to die.

Did you write a masterpiece? I ask William T. Vollmann’s photo. The author of the profile didn’t offer an opinion about Vollmann’s book. Neither he nor Vollmann expressed a feeling or a sensation or a belief or a daydream or a fantasy in the entire piece. I liked the vibe but it ended with a shrug. Do these 3,400 pages include a long, low howl of pain? Are you taking big risks, showing yourself in spite of everything? Or are you just another man describing the facts on the ground, shrugging and mumbling instead of crying salty tears like hot summer rain?

Sort this input carefully. Most vibes are just shrugs in disguise. If you keep your phone too close to your heart, bad weather and bad restaurants and bad men all seem about the same. Does any of this matter? Do we still matter? We wake up from a dream every few days and wonder: Do I look like the hairless aliens on Instagram, smooth and slippery, or do I look human and therefore repulsive?

What about you? Do you still deserve to dance? Are you too ugly to move your body? Do you still deserve to hydrate or use body lotion? Are you too unimportant to hear Jimmy Page sing “I really oughta know” and feel the same way you did decades ago?

Put your phone in a paper bag and hide it in your sock drawer like a handgun. Don’t think about it, don’t look at it. Forget it. Let them come for your jewels, your livelihood, your dignity, your beauty, your secrets. Tell them to take everything, you just want to live.

***

Discernment isn’t simple or easy. I’ve been confusing very different forms of matter and misreading categories for decades now, mistaking friends for lovers, mixing up allies and enemies, confusing strangers for soulmates. I trusted myself too much and then not enough, back and forth, formed sweeping theses and wrote one-size-fits-all treatises, overgeneralized and undertested, underperformed and overinvested.

Instead of separating the good from the bad, the wanted from the unwanted, the wise from the foolish, the loyal from the traitorous, I blended and mixed and pureed disparate resources into a smooth and disgusting amalgamation.

Everything together adds up to nothing. You can’t connect meaningfully with a mob. A crowd that includes dear friends and anxious strangers and aggressive creepers and equally confused randoms can’t be processed by one oversized, underdeveloped machine. You end up with a mess on your hands.

Discernment is earned. You watch and listen and sigh. Take a breath and see how things settle. Wait for the ants to crawl away from the mango slices, or consider eating something else entirely.

***

I can’t breeze over the details like so many other people can. I can’t make my eyes go fuzzy. I am always focusing somewhere. I need to see the fine details, I require texture: the divots in the sand, the crab that looks lost, the horsefly supervising the breeze, the sea birds gliding low over a mirrored morning sea, flat and sparkling. Don’t look up the name of the birds, don’t check the temperature, don’t wonder about your heart rate, don’t open Find My Phone, don’t track them on the freeway, don’t recheck the weather, don’t dip into that fucked up Next Door post about a dangerous dog, never ever ever ever ask anyone what heart rate variability is.

Those aren’t the fine details I need. I need the granular universe that surges up around me when I admit my limits: the edges between my glorious story and my compromised reality. For years I’ve been slow to acknowledge what I can and can’t do. I wanted to stay inside the fantasy that I’m capable of anything at any time.

Grip that notion tightly and despair rushes in. Force it and exhaustion sinks you.

Surrender is the only way forward. Admire your limits. Limits are a form of discernment. Honor what you can’t do and meaning rushes in. Vulnerability is letting your pores open again, to welcome these molecules of sadness and hope into your system.

Remember what’s true: You’re trash and you’re the next in line for the throne. You’re an old clown and no one is listening. The world is ending and it’s summertime. Put on a bikini and marvel at how stupid you look, ridiculous. Now dance, you absolute clown, you sexy fucking beast. This is discernment.

Like sea birds gliding low over liquid glass, we aren’t here to be perceived. We’re here to focus. Perfect focus brings grace, warm air ruffling our tiniest feathers, gentle ripples of saltwater kissing our toes, don’t look up the right word for a sea bird’s claws, don’t look it up, you don’t need it, stay here, sliding over the sea, low over liquid glass, shadows and sparkles and tiny fish, this moment, this sweet morning.

Swallow it whole. We won’t learn from our mistakes. Clouds gather every single afternoon, my knees sound like crinkled plastic coming up the stairs, my aunts don’t come to the beach anymore, it isn’t even discussed, we’ll never learn, the kids walk on the beach without us now, sipping beer from green bottles, long limbs and laughter, I feel left out, I feel forgotten, alone in the backseat, do you remember me? Swallow it all, loneliness and grief and desire, a highway back to you, at least I’m dreaming again, restless and disgusting, at least I’m dancing again, overripe and repulsive and perfect. We miss you, I wrote to my favorite aunt, then clarified: I miss you. Shadows and tiny fish. You know the difference. Use your words.

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Reply to Red (1943), Yves Tanguy

The trees are still today, still under still white clouds, and the cicadas have returned. And when they rub their wings together in a swampy chorus, I see that I’ve been guided by discernment and control, withdrawing and reconnoitering, waiting for reinforcements, waiting for clarity, waiting for divine intervention.

But this savage, perfect world waits for no one. Our organs are changing costumes in the dark theater of our bodies, slipping into something outrageous and deadly, trying on a new role that’s sure to get someone’s attention, the performance of a lifetime, go see it before it’s gone. With luck, someone catches a rehearsal and understands exactly what they’ve got planned.

We’re lucky for now. But there’s no time for retrenchment, no time for hesitation, no time to get everything right. When the cicadas crawl out of the soil, they don’t fuck around. Their wings are beating furiously together within four days. Would you hesitate if you spent 17 years as a wingless nymph, sightless, in the dark, underground?

I’ve been underground for too long now, nibbling on whatever I can find, making no sound at all. I’ve been waiting for clearance, waiting for transcendence, waiting to feel less afraid, waiting to become something unrecognizable, waiting to feel the sublime light of the gods on my face again.

Does it seem to you like the gods aren’t coming this time? The trees are still today like they’ve never been before, waiting for more rain, waiting for a heart-stopping storm, a vivid and violent performance to send their limbs flying through the air. The trees are praying that something big is coming soon, a disturbance in the upper atmosphere, a turbulent reimagining of time and space that could temporarily rearrange all priorities within a few square miles. The trees are praying that they’ll soon be terrorized, demeaned, and drenched: ripped bark, lost limbs, fallen nests. It will be worth it, they say, it will be glorious.

And I feel the same way. I’ve played it safe for long enough. I’ve drawn lines and boundaries that meant nothing at all. To everyone I cursed: I forgive you now. To everyone I dismissed: I know you’re still trying hard to become what you really are, to lose these heavy fears and blossom into a vibrant spectacle of love. I know how hard it is, how long it takes. I’m exactly the same as you.

I’m always trying to choose the hero’s journey, the valiant rise from stagnation, from fear, from this holding pattern. A few days ago I told my therapist (ugh) that maybe I can’t be the hero this time. I told my family (Jesus Christ, fuck me) that I’m not the same as I was before, I can’t overcome their disapproval, their rejection, their anger, their misconceptions of me. I can’t talk them through it. I don’t want to convince them to love me in the face of my flaws. I don’t want to hold their hands and say that we can all forgive ourselves, every morning, and accept that we will never be enough.

I just feel sad about it: We will never be enough.

“Maybe I’m not the hero at all,” I said to you yesterday. “Maybe I never was.”

But this savage, perfect world waits for no one. There are chaotic red highways of grief running through all of these forgotten towns inside the dark map of our bodies, bringing much needed supplies to the invading forces we didn’t see until it was almost too late. We don’t want to know more about them, but we don’t have a choice. There’s no time for hesitation, no time to imagine a better country for old men, no time to go back to casually insulting these rivers and fields and gentle hills, these rocky mountain passes and deep lakes that never gave us every single thing we ever asked for, like we dreamed they would some day, finally, in the distant, rapidly evaporating future. Instead we have to fall to our knees and pray to keep what we have. We have to defend this land with everything we’ve got.

I can tell you I’m not a hero and that’s true. But I can still play a hero if the role opens up. I know my lines and I know how to fight. And maybe that’s all anyone does anyway. Our feelings are traitorous even as we grab our guns. Our desires betray us even as we throw ourselves into these fox holes and hope to be spared.

Inaction is the death of romance. I can’t live with that. I won’t wait until you’re dead to tell the world how I feel about you. I won’t wait until I’m almost dead to notice that I got everything I asked for, I had it all along, it’s right here, come back to this forgotten town and feel it all with me. Let’s get on our knees and pray together, the way we did when we were very small and we couldn’t feel the mercy of the tall trees, we didn’t hear our pulses sync up with the cicadas, we didn’t realize that the battlefield was safer than the bunker. I’ve loved you since I was so little and so alone. My love for you is a violent spectacle: ripped bark, lost limbs, fallen nests. It will be worth it. Are you listening? Listen to me. It will be glorious.

***

There was room for poetry at the end of this long war novel I finished the other night. There was so much space for the author to express something sublime and transcendent, about being dragged into hell as a lonely soul and wanting so much more for your life, about waking up one day with no control over the forces that might seal your fate, about being exposed to stray fire and erased and forgotten for no good reason at all, with no victory march and no swelling strings, with no honor and no glory, with no time to reconsider before you’re wiped out of the picture. But the author had worn himself out after the first long chapters and by the end he was just tired.

“I’m no hero,” he told his editor, and that was that. “I’m tired. I’ve done enough.”

Sometimes you just run out of time. You don’t want to fight that hard anymore. You hear the call, but you ignore it. You put it out of your mind and move on.

I understand and I forgive him, but that’s not me. I’ve been pretending it’s me but it’s not. I was built for battle, made for toil and trouble, born ready to scrap my way through the chaos of war. This morning I opened the door to the screened-in porch and let the swamp into my blood, and an orchestra of cicadas flowed like a cresting wave into my ear drums, and I knew that there wasn’t any more time to hesitate. I’ll rush straight to the front line without waiting for my courage to show itself, I’ll throw my body into the fray before my optimism kicks in, I’ll speak in tongues or speak in fucking clichés if that’s what it takes, I’ll keep fighting through the despair even as my eyes fill with tears, even as I realize I’ll only be erased, even as the audience files out, disappointed, and the world moves on without me.

I can show you my heart even when it’s the same old goddamn thing over and over: slick and stupid, beating away like a stubborn frog, determined and undaunted, an ugly, adaptive beast, full of dangerous love for you in spite of everything you’ve ever said to me, in spite of everything you’ve never done, in spite of all the ways you’ve failed me, and yes you have failed me, yes you have let me down, let’s just say it out loud for a change, let’s just admit that you weren’t up for any of it, you heard the call but you ignored it. It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that that’s not me. I’ll keep coming back in spite of everything you’ll never understand. A stubborn frog, my heart, a real bastard. A real hero.

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One Year The Milkweed (1944), Arshile Gorky

Last night I had a dream that I was in a play. I was hoping for a big part but instead I had one line, written in all caps on a piece of white cardboard, no context provided, no script available. My line was:

A NEW SWELL, AT LEAST.

My character was a nameless woman standing next to a man with a name. I was a wife. I was supposed to look into the river and deliver my one line.

A NEW SWELL, AT LEAST.

In the dream, I practiced my line a few different ways, trying to figure out which way sounded the least fake, the least hammy, the most natural, the most heartfelt.

A NEW swell, at least.

A new swell! At least…

A new SWELL, at least.

I wasn’t sure my line was holding enough weight, adding enough meaning. So I searched for the director. When I found her, I discovered that she was my high school chorus teacher. I told her that I wanted to rewrite my line to give it a little more flair, a little more poetic thrust. I just needed a few minutes to rework it, to sit with the words and experiment with them.

The director looked at me in disbelief. I suddenly understood that this play was written by one of the great masters. I couldn’t rewrite his words or improve them. No one could. The play was a timeless classic. My job was to deliver my one line exactly as written and then get the hell out of the way. My role was WIFE, a woman who stands next to a man, a woman in the crowd who cries out an observation

“A new swell at least!”

and then disappears and is forgotten.

I could say my line any damn way I wanted and no one would fucking care. My delivery could be casual or disapproving, skeptical or optimistic. It didn’t matter. It wouldn’t affect anything or make any difference at all.

a new swell at least

When I woke up, I lay in bed and thought about how plays are written by people trying to figure out the meaning of life. What an amazing way to spend your time! Why wasn’t I a playwright? Did it never occur to me to even try?

When I was growing up, a playwright was always a man who already had a name. A playwright was a man with a typewriter and a script full of pages, so many pages full of typed words. A woman could only hope for one scrap of white cardboard with five words scrawled on it IN ALL CAPS.

I could’ve been a playwright, I thought. Playwrights are just people who care about the meaning of life!

I imagined myself as a playwright, sitting at an old wooden table with a typewriter on it, smoothing my hands across the wood surface so I could feel its melodies pulsing under my palms. The world is an infinite mosaic of melodic molecules, I thought, vibrating at different speeds, in different rhythms. This thought propelled me out of bed.

A new swell, at least.

***

Today I’m a different person than I was yesterday. My ego has returned from a long trip to a far away land. There are white and gray clouds drifting toward the yard, over the tall oak trees, vibrating with the promise of rain. I can feel the pulse of this day. I can rewrite every masterpiece, and give any faceless sidekick a starring role.

The sleeping dead love me better like this, savage and selfish. They want to tell me about floods and feasts, famines and festivals, rising tides and stars floating alone in deep space, waiting for the right moment to return, maybe not in this century, maybe under a Leo moon, maybe when the birds agree on a date, maybe after you lose your best lines and win the wretched, unbearable truth.

I promise the dead that I’ll take more risks.

It’s not always the same thing over and over, they say. You just forgot how to listen. The noise in your head blocked our signal.

I’ll listen more closely I tell them. I’ll treasure silence over reason. I’ll prioritize emptiness over fullness. What does it mean to search for fullness anyway? The second you start looking for it, determined to trace your previous path, to repeat the same patterns and achieve the same rewards, you become a clumsy algorithm, a hasty robot, a malfunctioning appliance, trying to reproduce the same old results at any cost.

I can’t keep aiming for transcendence, for genius, for immortality. I can’t keep writing for an indifferent audience, ignored at worst and misinterpreted at best.

Today I’ll write for the hopeful dead instead, wide awake under the gravel driveway, swimming carelessly through the tree tops, waiting patiently behind these walls for their chance to interject a memory or an emotion into my pages. I’m waiting and listening. I’m patient and empty.

How many carbs are in a falafel? I wonder, anxiously filling the void, and the spirits recoil.

Don’t gather facts, they say. Sit with the unbearable truth.

***

When you don’t stay tuned to the vibrations around you, you start to let other people’s misunderstandings of you become your identity. You mimic other people’s methods and processes and delivery systems. You aim to speed up production and eliminate redundancies. You look to your smart phone and your smart watch for answers until you’re pretty sure that these objects are smarter than you are.

You’re wrong. Only stupid objects are programmed to chase certainty. Imaginative subjects explore the unknown.

Stubborn robots pretend to be sure of things they’ll never understand from a very early age. They perform inquiry so gracefully, a mesmerizing fan dance to disguise their naked prejudices. Remember how she told me how I felt, where I stood, what I had been through, and what I’m still struggling with now?

I sat there in silence, marveling at her conviction, waiting for her words to finally hit on something real and true, but it never happened. Eventually I realized that she was describing her own fears, draped in flattering concern and compassion: It’s so hard for someone in your position to accept someone in my position.

What is my position? I wondered, adrift on her unknowable assumptions about me. What’s my motivation in this scene? What are my lines? What role have I been assigned this time? Then I remembered what she was really saying: It’s so hard for someone in my position to accept someone in your position.

People who refuse to take a position are always describing where other people stand. But that’s never been me. Why not just ask me how I feel? Why not just get to know me, instead of trying to seem like someone I should know? Is this vibrating world just a painted backdrop for your private melodramas?

If so, I’ll send you love from a great distance instead, like the sleeping dead, who move through this mosaic whispering about endless droughts and monsters storms, batterings and lashings, devastation and dread. And when you finally ask for what you want plainly, when you finally give yourself a name and a face and the right to your own desires, when you finally stop wondering what sounds the least fake, the least hammy, the most natural, the most heartfelt, that’s when you’ll understand what’s real and how precious it is.

You will lose your best lines and win the wretched, unbearable truth, that we are all vibrating at different speeds, in different rhythms, and you can’t presume to know a thing about anyone else. You are only alive for so long, and the world will remain unknowable until you’re dead and gone.

Still, you’ll dare to ask better and better questions

and you’ll dare to ask for what you want.

You’ll ask because

each ask

is

a new swell at least.

Thanks for reading and supporting Ask Molly. Send me your stray thoughts: askpolly@protonmail.com.

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