Samsara.

Wednesday, December 15th, 2010

I am home alone, adding dollops of butter to a pot of Basmati rice. Some housewife chord has been struck in me during the fits of sleep, along with a bout of sickness.

(here, “sickness” is defined as a state of mind caused by one-quarter stomach upset and three-quarters loneliness.)

Rice pudding calls for one cup of cooked rice, milk and sugar. I turn the knobs of our gas stove in one of my mother’s cross-stitch sweaters. It’s older than I am, a relic belonging to the age of my mother’s young adulthood. The last time it was worn, she was an unmarried Londoner, bopping around in pastel work pants and dark shades. Now, I am the daughter who has taken it from the wardrobe, but I have neither spunk nor savvy, not today.

Samsara, “continuous flow”, the cycle of birth, life, death and rebirth. Then, can be it assumed I am a body travelling a circular path at a constant speed? This is a principle of uniform circular motion, something I was taught last year in sophomore physics. I can still remember my polyester uniform skirt sticking to the backs of my knees, sweat like cake batter, and my breath a tangible print in the air. Question four: calculate the velocity of an object travelling in a circle.

(here and in the realm of physics, “speed” refers to how fast an object is moving, whereas “velocity” is the rate at which it changes position.)

Samsara, a cycle in which I am the body stapled, marked and labelled, drawn as a dot in religious textbooks. But though speed is constant in a circular environment, I can change the velocity. I can accelerate or de-accelerate if that is my wish, though I am bound by egoism and futile desire.

A six square meter kitchen with a small balcony where clothes dry and detergent is kept. The oyster-colored tiles and cabinets of poor-quality wood, the porcelain bowls of green apples slowly ripening, and I, sitting at a dirty table eating salted crackers because my rice pudding has the taste and texture of charcoal.

I am reading “Madame Bovary.” Doleful and desperate Emma makes me smile, but I only ever want to be her twin in name. And on the days when I feel myself leaning towards her awful habits, I pretend my name is not “Emma” but “Ema”, and this small change seems significant because -

(here and everywhere, “Ema” are the small wooden plaques on which Shinto worshipers write their wishes, prayers, vows or expressions of thanks. Ema is hung up in shrines, where it reaches the gods.)

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The Cat Xylem.

Tuesday, December 7th, 2010

The cat Xylem is older than you, that’s for sure. But then again, the cat Xylem is unsure what words like “older” or “younger” even mean. He does not see them as independent terms, corresponding to items of human concern, but rather as amalgams of the alphabet, floating beyond his comprehension. He does understand the gist of the language of humans, (in fact, at one point he could even speak it, like all of his kind) but what he and most have can hardly be called “communication”, not even its primitive ancestors “sound”, “gesture” and “feeling.” Like a derailed train chugging hopelessly along a seashore, the cat Xylem functions without a vital component. His vocal chords have been ripped out.

In the unrecognized micronation of Nounaim, the cat Xylem is something of a phenomenon. He travels on the underside of horse carriages, he feeds on children’s candies. All doors in Nounaim are built with compartments specifically for his use. All drainpipes are painted purple (a color he despises) so he will not, in a fit of disorientation, attempt to crawl into one. The cat Xylem is a lot of things, but he is not particularly slender.

The cat Xylem, despite his quick paws and careless stare, is not a free agent. The cat Xylem goes to wherever his paper collar indicates. It is always an address in Nounaim, printed in the Scientist Phloem’s neat small caps. 3 OSMOSIS STREET, that was the very first, a skinny panelled house sandwiched between the glossy pastel shingles of 2 and 4, belonging to Cambium.

(a brief tangent for the uninformed reader: Cambium, who in a daguerreotypes of old is a young lady of exceptional and expert grace and liveliness, a female to put even Parenchyma to shame, sending any fellow into fits of weeping at the very sight of her rainbow bow and ankle-length velvet skirts. Today, almost three hundred years after the cat Xylem’s visit, neither he nor she have aged visibly at all, but her rainbow bow lies shredded at the bottom of a landfill.)

Cambium had knelt before the cat Xylem, offering him first salami, then hunks of discolored bread, then a bowlful of milk (no? Are you minding your figure? Two percent fat, maybe?), until finally her butler Trichome (Stoma’s elder brother, taking up the mantle of Cambium’s care like a true lovelorn gentleman) had dropped half a sheet of drying salt water taffy into the cat Xylem’s maw. He had bent down and, pinching the edge of the paper collar, ripped off Cambium’s address. 3 OSMOSIS STREET crumpled up into his fist, revealing 6 PHOSPHATE DRIVE underneath. Thus began the cat Xylem’s love affair with sugar and his long voyage.

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THE MEMORIZATION OF PLANT TISSUES AT MIDNIGHT.

Friday, December 3rd, 2010

Plant tissues stick to the mind more more readily when you associate them with human beings. I am a sucker for crafty and convoluted mnemonic devices.

GROUND TISSUE

Parenchyma: the most superlative-worthy of three sisters, she is the oldest, the prettiest, the smartest and the most murderous. Sly and dandy Parenchyma, in an unknown man’s Persian blue sweater, stepping out of the family car and turning her head this way and that, getting the full scope. She’s a most dedicated actress, playing the part of virginal scholar in class and fleshing herself out during recess, swelling like ripe fruit. Unflappable, she licks at her love wounds like a tiger (hickeys and scorned schoolboys, she can take anything you dole out, dear).

Collenchyma: the buttery, soapstone middle child, she folds her sister’s clothes, packs their lunches and scrubs their backs in the clawfoot tub. The evening the cat Xylem arrives, paws ripped open like chocolate wrappers, it is she who packs him in newspapers and sets him near the ticking oven, she who feeds him syrup and salted crackers. In gratitude, Xylem grants her a ring of daylily fibers that will protect her from harm; she slips it on sweetheart Sclerenchyma’s little finger. Not long after she is hit by a bus.

Sclerenchyma: the baby for whom one older sister perishes, and another is robbed of her true love (dashing Stoma with his pearl cuff-links and breezy countenance). She is the finicky blonde simpleton always found in family trees, removing the cords of her red hood from the branches of paternal morality and descending into the swept-up, deep dark undergrowth. Dumb but desirable, she is on first name terms with nearly everyone in the two grades immediately above and below hers. Her giggles teeter on the brink of innocence and seduction, drawing males and females alike.

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On The Psychology Of Sit-Ups.

Friday, November 26th, 2010

Today I discovered that one can tell an awful lot about a person by the way they do their sit-ups.

Consider, for example, the bestial child who hammers his hips up and down in the most convincing rendition of childbirth (as performed by a male – bravo!) ever seen in a school room. Or the deeply caustic boy, who pushes himself up and down like a baby being rocked, calves tightening like hard-boiled eggs. Or the fellow who flaps like a bird, neck straight and stiff. Or the super-sprint of the sleek schoolgirl. Or the damsel who begins to swell and purple at the midway mark, huffing and puffing all the way to the finish, mermaid hair spread out on the iceberg blue mat.

I myself appear to be the kind of person who flags three sit-ups from the goal, flopping flat on the ground like a dead cetacean, grunting and gagging on the last available breath before elbowing and easing up again. One. Two. And. Aaaaaaaand. Three.

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Fire With Fire.

Thursday, November 18th, 2010

A strange thing has been happening with my lips lately. They are swollen and split, segmented into thin cellular clumps like slices of bruised apples. I am dedicating myself, still, to my miserable novel, as well as other elements of quotidian life. Not everything I have been doing has been going beautifully. But when I ask my mother to print a photograph for me at her workplace, she brings home various sizes and angles of the same picture, black and white, vivid hues, subdued tones, in a spring green folder left on my desk: this is the sort of thing that motivates me to move on, to keep grabbing and ripping and yanking at the serpentine vines of my own personal jungle. Oh, please forgive my childish metaphors: these are the only sorts of things that make sense to me, now, nowadays.

This summer, when I wrote my short story, I was extremely enamored of a certain phrase: “to seek, to strive, to find and not to yield.” A line from Tennyson’s “Ulysses” and inscribed on the cairn of snow that marks RF Scott’s place of death. I think of Platyhelminthes, simple, dumb, uncomplicated flat worms composed of a one-two-three body structure and no heart nor lungs. Platyhelminthes, who, when cut in thirds, will regrow the parts they are missing, effectively becoming three organisms from one. Regenerating their heads, those stupid beasts, doing everything I cannot!

The other day on the radio I heard the song “Fire With Fire” by Scissor Sisters. I’d never heard it before, but it melded in with my state of mind and the landscape wonderfully. The twists and gurgles of far-away mountains, slate blue, shady but always new to my infant eyes. Fight fire with fire, fire with fire, fire with fire. Yes. Though not everything I have been doing has been going beautifully, I have weapons at my disposal, sheer gut and gumption, fiendish blaze curdling in my own metalworker’s stomach. I have reasons and mechanisms to ignite. Fire with fire.

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Woe Is The Poor Little Introvert.

Saturday, November 13th, 2010

Em: Where are we meeting exactly?

Boy: Town hall square.

Em: But where in the square? North? South? East? West?

Boy: In front of the door.

Em: What door?

Boy: Below the balcony.

Em: What balcony?

Boy: Town hall’s!

Em: I thought we were meeting at the square. Now we’re meeting at town hall?

[no response]

Em: Please help me out here.

Boy: What’s the matter?

Em: Okay, please explain to me in simple terms where we are meeting.

Boy: Okay.

Em: Okay.

Boy: Town hall square.

OH GOOD GAD.

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Update #10.

Thursday, November 11th, 2010

USER: EMMA HAS INPUT SELF-DESTRUCT MECHANISM IN SENTIENT ROBOT. UPDATES TO TERMINATE PREMATURELY.

1. How Emma has been feeling

Useless, a little heartbroken. But somehow content! Somehow in love with my story, impossibly!

I have been going around my grade and asking people how they feel about love. This is half-meant as investigation for my novel. The other half of the meaning is as private as the condition of my kidneys. Asking teenagers about their crushes in scientific language (see: this) will probably further cement the general idea that I am a freak but really, who cares? They are willing to talk to me seriously! These children are baring their secret hearts to me! I couldn’t be more grateful if I tried.

I am a happy girl, for this and other reasons. Yes, not everything is going splendidly, yes, I feel very strongly all the bad things, but I manage. I manage the best and only way I know how. You say to me, “I feel terrible today, I am in one of those adolescent moods” and I want to grab you by the shoulders and say “darling, life is beautiful!”

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Update #9.

Tuesday, November 9th, 2010

EMMA IS OFF LIVING, WHICH, IN THIS CASE MEANS, EMMA IS OFF WRITING. THE WEBPAGE “CONSCIENCE ROUND” HAS THUS BECOME SENTIENT, AND CONTINUES TO UPDATE. UPDATES TO TERMINATE ON NOVEMBER THE THIRTIETH.

1. What Emma wrote on her seventh day of NaNoWriMo, November 7, 2010

I’ve hit the 10,000 word mark. Now I have roughly five plots in one, all of them more ludicrous than the previous (consider plot #1, male protagonist sprouts flowers in his hair, and plot #4, male and female protagonist go on a trip to see a massive underground glass bell.)

So far every one of those 10,000 words has been dismal action or dumb allegory. Where is the spark, Emma? Better find it, better find it soon.

2. 2. Emma’s NaNoWriMo ‘10 Novel (fragment #3)

Light roaming even beneath his eyelids, in the roots of his flowery hair, disrobing the innocent knave to the frivolous eyes of dying Lady Day. Evening is beginning to make itself seen in the corners of the world, becoming first apparent as it crawls from the backs of mountains. He seeks an escape, these pent-up frustrations to which he knows neither the beginnings nor the end. He does not want to do anything for the rest of his life.

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Update #8.

Monday, November 8th, 2010

EMMA IS OFF LIVING, WHICH, IN THIS CASE MEANS, EMMA IS OFF WRITING. THE WEBPAGE “CONSCIENCE ROUND” HAS THUS BECOME SENTIENT, AND CONTINUES TO UPDATE. UPDATES TO TERMINATE ON NOVEMBER THE THIRTIETH.

1. What Emma wrote on her fifth day of NaNoWriMo, November 5, 2010

I haven’t written in two days. But now I have an added incentive to finish my novel, because it has magically become my final English project. How great is my English teacher? The only problem: I haven’t written in two days.

TIME TO GET CRACKING.

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Update #7.

Sunday, November 7th, 2010

EMMA IS OFF LIVING, WHICH, IN THIS CASE MEANS, EMMA IS OFF WRITING. THE WEBPAGE “CONSCIENCE ROUND” HAS THUS BECOME SENTIENT, AND CONTINUES TO UPDATE. UPDATES TO TERMINATE ON NOVEMBER THE THIRTIETH.

1. What Emma’s homeroom teacher said about her on the first parent-teacher conference

“I think Emma’s made a lot of progress socially! She seems more animated now during recess.”

Emma’s parents stare at the teacher. She pauses a moment to revise the statement.

“Well, I mean, it’s not like they’d accept her immediately, you know. But she’s trying.”

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