IF YOU CAN'T TAKE THE HEAT GET OUT OF THIS WORLD
It’s incredibly hot in Portland Oregon but I’m letting Appa sit on me so she can be level with the fan. I do this because she’s covered in fur and has no control over her external environment. I want her to live a long and beautiful life on earth, a life both limited and enriched by domesticity (enriched might be a stretched), and this simple desire is compounded by the general terror that my action or lack of action will cause others to suffer. I’m now sitting on the floor beside her while she licks herself in an entirely unremarkable way. Nothing about her behavior would appear abnormal to me on another day, but I’ve swallowed a worm in the form of internet research on heat stroke which is currently wriggling beneath the skin surface of my body sounding off internal alarms, ones that sound like: A BEING IN YOUR CARE NEEDS A DIFFERENT FORM OF CARE OR ELSE GRAVE CONSEQUENCES WILL RAIN DOWN UPON YOU AND THOSE YOU LOVE! …. but she’s chilling. Do you ever experience the desire to worry? I’ve been wondering what worrying does for me, why I choose it even when I’m fully aware of its poison. I’m not going to write a whole lot on this now because it’s too hot but if you answered yes feel free to sound off in the comments as they say.
Here is a poem ostensibly written April 7th of this year:
april 7th
filming the motion of verbs
divorced from stimuli
divorced from human language
inchoate as young bacteria
with the same programmed inertia
what can you do with
implicit knowledge of the heart?
go to the store without your face
without your friendships
without memories of prospective motherhood
go to the store with a bag
and fill it with sleeping objects
but how will you know they are sleeping?
it can be understood that dreams
have their own animality
formless and forgotten side streets
of the mind
occipital visions with green light
hazing down
past parking lots and figurative intersections
I can be understandably inventive
or curiously vacant on any given day
the way some mornings the daphne’s scent creeps
through the window
and others it just smells like clay
I must have gotten the line about sleeping objects from the Octavio Paz poem “A Wind Called Bob Rauschenberg,” which I haven’t been able to find anywhere except this Anne Carson lecture on stillness.
The above hyperlink will take you to the precise moment in the lecture where she reads this strange-beautiful poem. I hardly knew who Octavio Paz was when I first heard it. I also hardly knew who Bob Rauschenberg was. Now I know of Paz, through the eyes of Roberto Bolaño, as a caricature of the 1970s & 80s Latin American Literary Establishment. It may not even be fair to link the eyes to Bolaño himself, but to his young avatar Belano who plays a central role in The Savage Detectives. Trust that I want to and will tell you more about this book but not now because again i’s too hot. All I’ll say is that it’s deliriously good and I miss it every day. I still don’t know much about Bob Rauschenberg.
This is the Spotify playlist I’ve been making since late spring. I’m almost tired of it from over-play but maybe you’ll enjoy looking through it or listening to it :) I call this my first summer as a woman because something has only recently begun to make sense about my status as “woman” no longer “girl” but still girl-proximate (it’s a bodily feeling I won’t try to explain here and now), and the heat really aligns with or illuminates this process of sense-making sign-shifting stirrings. The playlist is incredibly long and can be shuffled or played chronologically.
Whenever it’s this hot I think about the heat dome of 2021 which killed hundreds of people and at least a billion marine animals. I think specifically about descriptions of the stench of death, the briny stench of bleached sea animals, and I become very sad. I’ll be back with another installment some time in the next few days.
P.S. Appa is thriving! Here she is sprawled in front of the fan (NOT PICTURED).