his arm out along the chair, and as she watched it seemed to get longer, seemed to extend beyond the wooden knob at the end of the overstuffed chair and out into the room. It was almost black with design, almost completely filled in as if his purpose had been almost fulfilled, and he were finally content. And she too felt a sort of heavy contentment like a mantel of feathers come over her shoulders and down her back. It could have been a tangled mat of black hair coating his arm, so thick the lines had become and would feel fuzzy like hair, the skin broken and healed over, linesturned to hair. She felt for the raw edge of her thumb, the broken and raw cuticle, moving forefinger over thumb again and again. She felt her face burn and was sure that without moving and without lifting his hand into the air which was so smoky and thick to burn her eyes and make her blink back the watering, making it more and more difficult to keep the healing lines in any semblance of focus, he would hit her flat across the left side of her face, a clear ancient profile against the white of the wall.
Her Subject/His Subject
When I raise my arm I do not usually try to raise it (Wenn ich meinen Arm hebe, versuche ich meistens nichts, ihn zu heben).
âWittgenstein
Her subject is people in landscapes of estrangement; his subject is the landscape. You are never looking out the window, he says to her. Here you are driving through the most beautiful section of the California coast, and you are talking to me about a novel you are reading, the words on the pages, the charactersâ clothes. I am in the scotch broom, he says, and yes, he seems to be as far as I can tell, and he is right I am not. It is everywhere on the side of the hill wherever the redwoods take a break and one ought to smell its sweet smell but all I can smell is eucalyptus and thatâs what grows by my bedroom window at home.
We drive for hours. He thinks about the fog blowing in off the ocean. It drifts over the fields and overthe road. One moment we canât see the road, the next it is clear. Sometimes he is talking about his subject and sometimes not, but it is always whatâs there. When we stop at a rest stop and look out over the view he knows how the gullies were formed, what the weather patterns will be, which ridges connect north and south.
To me the foggy blur over the tops of trees is a mental affair. You hold in your mind another time and live there in that other imagined time while the present time, new and raw in some way, presses for attention. But the other time is held like a fragile glass, transparent but up close in front of oneâs face. This is a practice from childhood. It serves no purpose except to counter the insistence of present time and to block it a bit. I canât remember when I havenât done this. Being in two places at one time. This is my definition of a person, I say, as if I were saying something definitive and true. He thinks Iâm trying to be clever.
It began, no doubt, as a protective device. That seems to make sense. But when you try to think of when it was that the other time became important, you canât. It ought to have been a sharp pain that wrenched one time from another, made you opt out for good reason, but you canât think of one. You can think of a year when you fell from the rotted tree in the side yard and broke your arm but the pain is merely a word, not even as vivid as the small scar. And anyhow, what would it be to think of a sharp pain which is not something most of us can do. All I can think of is someone large leaningover my hunched shoulders telling me to try, try she said, to sit still. The racing part of my body was still racing out the back door, into the backyard, and out into the street where it had been just moments before and I was trying. The idea of trying is what puts one in two places at once since the idea of trying also contains the idea of not trying. I want to try, I want to
Her Subject/His Subject
When I raise my arm I do not usually try to raise it (Wenn ich meinen Arm hebe, versuche ich meistens nichts, ihn zu heben).
âWittgenstein
Her subject is people in landscapes of estrangement; his subject is the landscape. You are never looking out the window, he says to her. Here you are driving through the most beautiful section of the California coast, and you are talking to me about a novel you are reading, the words on the pages, the charactersâ clothes. I am in the scotch broom, he says, and yes, he seems to be as far as I can tell, and he is right I am not. It is everywhere on the side of the hill wherever the redwoods take a break and one ought to smell its sweet smell but all I can smell is eucalyptus and thatâs what grows by my bedroom window at home.
We drive for hours. He thinks about the fog blowing in off the ocean. It drifts over the fields and overthe road. One moment we canât see the road, the next it is clear. Sometimes he is talking about his subject and sometimes not, but it is always whatâs there. When we stop at a rest stop and look out over the view he knows how the gullies were formed, what the weather patterns will be, which ridges connect north and south.
To me the foggy blur over the tops of trees is a mental affair. You hold in your mind another time and live there in that other imagined time while the present time, new and raw in some way, presses for attention. But the other time is held like a fragile glass, transparent but up close in front of oneâs face. This is a practice from childhood. It serves no purpose except to counter the insistence of present time and to block it a bit. I canât remember when I havenât done this. Being in two places at one time. This is my definition of a person, I say, as if I were saying something definitive and true. He thinks Iâm trying to be clever.
It began, no doubt, as a protective device. That seems to make sense. But when you try to think of when it was that the other time became important, you canât. It ought to have been a sharp pain that wrenched one time from another, made you opt out for good reason, but you canât think of one. You can think of a year when you fell from the rotted tree in the side yard and broke your arm but the pain is merely a word, not even as vivid as the small scar. And anyhow, what would it be to think of a sharp pain which is not something most of us can do. All I can think of is someone large leaningover my hunched shoulders telling me to try, try she said, to sit still. The racing part of my body was still racing out the back door, into the backyard, and out into the street where it had been just moments before and I was trying. The idea of trying is what puts one in two places at once since the idea of trying also contains the idea of not trying. I want to try, I want to
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