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  Member

  Member

  by Michael Cisco

  Chômu Press

  Member

  by Michael Cisco

  Published by Chômu Press, MMXIII

  Member copyright © Michael Cisco 2013

  The right of Michael Cisco to be identified as Author of this

  Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the

  Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Published in October 2013 by Chômu Press.

  by arrangement with the author.

  All rights reserved by the author.

  First Kindle Edition

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Design and layout by: Bigeyebrow and Chômu Press

  Cover illustration by Sergio Membrillas

  E-mail: [email protected]

  Internet: chomupress.com

  Contents

  Member

  Section One: a beingsmileduponprocess

  Section Two: a rummageprocess and a murmuringprocess

  Section Three: peppermint boulders

  Glossary

  Member

  I’m dry. Dry dry dry dry dry dry dry. Dry as they come.

  This is the story of how I accidentally recruited myself into the cosmic game of Chorncendantra. I don’t know the story yet. I have the feeling it’s going on, though. You’ll learn my name and other choice particulars about me around the time you find out who you are. I don’t think about whom I tell, I just tell.

  I lie awake. I should be sleeping. I should be starting. I waste time instead. That’s the pattern I know.

  Before I can get to the point, there will have to be some dry thinking in parentheses. These magic moments of reflection may not sing on their own. They may be skipped. I won’t keep putting parentheses in. Once it goes that far, they can add themselves or not. Connect the parentheses and make a dry circle that evaporates and sinks into nothing. All the same, the circle was there. Hope you like it. Here we go.

  Section One:

  a beingsmileduponprocess

  (It’s one thing to contemplate going beyond. It’s another to begin, to take steps, to enter into practice. At that point the decision has already escaped itself. I can’t say where my steps are tending or whether this practice will ever stop feeling unreal, because I have only to stop for it to stop. Nothing apart from this artifice of mine keeps it going.

  I must never forget my practice, that is, lose sight of it however briefly, although I assume that an instant of forgetfulness is no great lapse. These instants must simply be kept to a minimum and prevented from assembling into a snowball. On the other hand, I must intend to forget my practice, because its purpose is to become my new nature, so that I won’t be able to explain or think of myself in the old way.

  A new nature. How is it even possible to want something as momentous as that? Stop being human. Leave them behind without disgust, without anger, any of these merely human things; achieve instead the inhumankindness of what?

  What I do isn’t important. My name and so on are unimportant. The point of the practice is to take me away from humanity, if only in my mind, by altering my way of thinking. This is to be done by changing established associations for new ones. It’s vitally important that I do this without bitterness, without rancor, or any other misanthropic feelings, or, at least, not because of these feelings. Not necessarily without emotion at all, but it should tend away from the kind of petulant and sullen emotions that will finally only hem me in a circle of human reaction. There should be no clear prior idea of the goal; at this early stage, that would be nothing better than a human fantasy. I have a direction, not a goal.

  I walk when I think. I’ve walked thousands of miles in my apartment, thinking. A sound for my downstairs neighbor to hear, crossing and recrossing my floor, and a thready trapezoid of light beneath the door. I suppose the interruption my shadow makes in the light, causes it to rake, like a lighthouse ray, the space outside my door, a space that is always pitch black, even in the daytime.

  The sensation would often recur, my eyes going out of focus slightly, or a slight rotation, the disharmony, the world rolling around me and my view just catching up, like the last moments only of a fading dizziness. It’s as if the world I see around me were projected in front of my eyes, and, on some occasions when I get a little dizzy and I turn my head, it’s as if there were a brief lag before that projection swings into place before my eyes again. I see nothing in that instant before the image slips back, but I’d swear that it’s brown, like a brown fog ocean. Not in front of anything.

  This probably isn’t important, but I have to record anything unusual as it occurs, because one doesn’t always see the meaning right away. That means there will be things in the record that go no further; I don’t want to assume I can know whether or not they will come to life and go further when, if ever, I return to them.

  The new scheme of associations and meditation shouldn’t mirror anthropic convention in opposition, but entirely differ. There should be two different maps, or one, the old model, is a map, and my more novel one will be another way of organizing information, in narrative form. The less conspicuous the difference, the better. For causes that have more to do with intuition than reason (if those really are two different faculties), I am sure the best difference would be so subtle that it could go unnoticed. Only the one who made a careful study of my statements and behavior would be able to detect it, and realize then the great difficulty involved in understanding what I mean by the seemingly obvious and ordinary things I say. But then, I’m not all that interested in being understood, or in flummoxing people either. The idea is liable to bring a smile briefly to my lips, but that’s all. This change is something I want for myself, in all selfishness. At the back of it is a need I don’t care enough to try to identify; all I care about is meeting it.

  I live my whole life against my own grain. Left to my own devices, I’d spend most of my time wandering in my imagination, happily. At the same time, I also go against a grain that I’m not so sure is my own. My thoughts have no order at all. They don’t let me sleep. There they go, and I lie there utterly unable to make head or tail of any of it, or even to account for the sheer speed and wild variety of my thoughts. Any attempt I make to intervene only agitates the whole still more. Eventually I get up and drag on my clothes.

  And I’m out walking. The book of Lieh-Zi says: “The highest man at rest is as though dead, in movement, he is like a machine.”

  I often feel some ‘mysticism’ almost congealing into a gospel inside me. This could be a very common, and commonly overlooked, experience, or it could be even more rare than the emission of an actual gospel.)

  Still walking. I had to get out for a while. It’s late enough now, and the streets are about as empty as they ever get. (Empty enough to be inviting, without being empty enough. Why is the presence of other people so exasperating?

  I can’t ignore them; I hate to feel that I’m one of them, I mean only another one of them. Hitting on a satisfactory answer, such as this, is a relief, but how can I know the answer is satisfactory? I mean, it’s difficult to know just what it is, in me, that is being satisfied. Perhaps it’s something that shouldn’t be satisfied. The raw sunlight, the alien street in which I am ignored like vermin, all that is inevitable, given a certain mode of production. How do I explain to you the silly voice that fills my head with crazy riddles and wild fantasies, emotions from nowhere, that this is my most precious possession, and I’m afraid I’ll lose it in this numbing inundation? When the pan pipes play and the banshees cal
l, I go.

  Tonight, I see rows of arches, sombre, grey-blue and darkened, the only thing that seems like a part of another dream, abandoned in this one. By whatever it is that sweeps away dreams in parts. The arches run under the railway trestle, which towers over me. The passing cars in the streets are anti-dream; I try my best to shade them, but their lancing beams of light hunt my eyes. I turn my head toward, let’s say, a group of houses, far across the park, and just at that moment a car pokes its glaring snout out from between two of them. Even worse are the people, who seem as if they couldn’t possibly have stepped out of any dream at all. You would never see them in a dream; they are entirely too characteristic. So little around me offers the relief of seeming like a dream. Just tourniquetted and constipated life.

  Above me, the clouds are making more clouds. The wind, weather, these clouds that glow against the dark sky are always from dreams. As I restlessly walk the streets in the dark, for the first time in years, right now I feel the dim suspicion of magic and of being the center. Something returns to me and pushes back against whatever keeps closing oppressively on me. The arches are still those colors, and they still span empty spaces.

  I don’t need or want to be redeemed, I think, what I want is a discipline. My eyes defocus for a minute, and everything is filmed in shimmering particles. What is the discipline? The dream is the discipline.

  Is this a dream?

  No, comes the answer.

  Time and again, without even a moment of blessed hesitation: no I am not dreaming. No dream is so monotonous, uninventive, gratingly particular, unrelievedly mean, and without highs or lows: no I am not dreaming. Dreams are never as indifferent to logic as this, whatever it is. A dream may be confusing, but it never loses my attention like this does. I’ve never had a dream I couldn’t be bothered with, or in which I found myself wishing that I were dreaming, dreaming anything.

  What is at work around me is steadily withering my dream, and that cannot be allowed. With its sickening ignobility and its tedious insistence on what it thinks is important; if only it didn’t linger on, spoiling me for thinking about anything else even when I have the opportunity. No, I’m not dreaming. Not yet—the vehement thought breaks in on me—not yet am I dreaming, but, by a practice, I will expand the dream to engulf what surrounds me, which I demote to a momentary aberration. Simply calling whatever is around me a dream won’t accomplish anything; you have to live the dream as a dream.

  I pass the arches. People go by me on the sidewalk, but I keep my eyes trained on remote objects, or on the ground, or out of focus. They want me to see them, and be distracted, these makeshift people. They could be a lot more convincing. I see my own silhouette in the light of a passing car, and I nearly forget. An inimical force is blowing on me, with each narrow housefront I pass, blowing numbness into my mind. The image, comparison, I nearly dislike for its grandiosity, but the streetlights really do look to me like the embers of a tragic conflagration, in which unique things have been lost forever.)

  Now I’m on the far side of the arches. I am several paces behind a man with a loose, swingy walk; he wears a short raincoat, a bag hangs down his back from a shoulder strap. There is a blue light there by his ear, must be his phone. He has it jammed against his ear, perhaps with his hand or perhaps with his raised right shoulder. He moves with an exaggerated freeness, and I begin to suspect he is either drunk or very tired, hurrying to stay ahead of a collapse, until he reaches home. I catch sight of him just under the arches, and I cross the street, climbing the gravelly slope between their legs, to leave him behind.

  (I stop and look down the length of a long passage carved by the arches, lit from below, rumbling, like the gates of hell. Go through that gate, and end up where? What does it matter where, if I am still the same? Is this person limited to celebrating or narrating or being a wretch, or is this the more typical, indefinite-type person with vaguer properties? Do I want a terrible, empty world to explore? Why recoil angrily from people, and regard them as trespassers? Am I a secret proprietor?

  There, across the river, a huge flame dances in the air, right by the curve of the elevated track. The magical feeling comes back over me as I look at it, down the long green breast of the meadow in the dark to the still leafless trees, the river like a furrowed brow of iron, and the flame shrinks and ruffles itself out again on the far side, and the dim stars peer down through the glare up above.

  Coming back from the park, off to the right, the smoke stacks of the power station pray out a long plume of luminous vapor. The dim black sky, the bridge decked out in hanging lights, are all beautiful. In my mind’s mind I’m telling the spell I want it to go on. I want to participate. It’s as though there’s a simple choice, you participate in one or the other, and I want the other. I want it because it blocks the one.)

  I pass a street that is uncharacteristically empty all down its length. It’s like a long, bowed corridor, a dog’s tongue, roofed over by the bare trees. And he, the man I’d seen some time before, with his swingy walk, steps out into that street about a block or so away from me. He is very cinematically framed in the middle, stepping out into this emptiness, and suddenly his knees buckle. His whole swingy body swings backwards. He drops and his head falls straight down, striking the pavement with a noise I can hear from here, ringing like a hollow gourd.

  I run over to him. He’s lying there like a house of cards that’s been smashed. As I draw near there’s a clamor in my head. The roaring mob of my thoughts is jabbering each loud and clear. The streetlight goes out disobligingly just as I reach him. In the dark, I fumble with his clothes, trying to drag him out of the street. He’s dead weight. By his weight, somehow by his strangely excessive weight, more than it seems a man of his size should weigh, and by his perfect slackness, I know he’s dead.

  With effort, I bring him to the curb and lay him on his back. The streetlight winks dimly back on. In its feeble light I see his drawn face, creased, like a disheviled bed, and slack. He lies partially atop his bag, which distorts his posture. I drag it out from under him and toss it aside, settling him flat. The corpse is already ice cold, his joints are supple, exaggeratedly, but his flesh is stiff and unyielding inside his clothes.

  Glancing around, I catch sight of the wan blue glow of his phone, lying underneath a car. The street is lined with ordinary houses, crowded close together. For a moment I hesitate in front of the house directly in front of which I placed the body, but there’s brown paper taped over the front windows and the tiny front lot is half dug up, spotted with holes and heaps of dirt. The upper windows are so dark, there may not be any glass in them at all.

  “If nobody’s home in this seemingly deserted house,” I say to myself, “I lose nothing by trying it.”

  Practically at the very moment I knock at the door, there’s an answering sound from inside. I can’t say what it was, just a sound. I stand there wondering if I heard a voice, or if something, disturbed by my pounding, had fallen to the floor inside.

  “Who is it? What do you want?”

  “Is this house occupied?”

  “Of course it’s occupied! Go away!”

  “Can I talk to you a moment more, please?” I ask. “Would you mind opening up a moment?”

  “You’re damn right I’d mind! Who exactly did you say you were?”

  “I didn’t—look, I feel like an idiot shouting at a closed door—”

  “I know a remedy for that.”

  “—and I’m sure you... Listen, there’s been an accident.”

  The door snaps, rattles, and swings open. A man with a necktie stands there in the gloom, looking out at me querulously. I can see a small topaz of light far in the rear of the house, behind him, shining on the corner of a table, a wall clock, an arched doorway.

  “What’s that?” the man asks after a minute or two, pointing beyond me.

  Over my shoulder, I find myself checking to see if the corpse is still there. It lies as I suppose I left it, sprawling on the pavement, blue f
ace turned up.

  “I found him in the street, just before your house.”

  As my eyes attune themselves to the deeper dark within, I can make out ladders standing in attendance to either side of the man, big plastic drums on the floor, and some tarps rolled up against the walls. A chill odor of fresh plaster seeps out into the night.

  “Well, I don’t know him,” the man says, lifting his chin and craning slightly from side to side.

  “I don’t have a telephone,” I say. “Would you mind calling an ambulance?”

  Without a word, the man turns and walks back into the house, toward the topaz of light. His feet clump hollowly as he crosses empty rooms. I sit down on the step to wait, not wanting to be too close to the body.

  The man doesn’t come back. When I happen to look up again, a big fluffy white dog is indelicately snuffling at the body. A young couple stands at the other end of its leash, staring down at the corpse. They notice me noticing them.

  “Is he...?” the young man trails off. His face and hers are criss-crossed by branches.

  “Drunk, I think.” To spare them.

  “You think wrong,” the young woman says. “That man’s dead.”

  “Well,” I answer, a little nettled, “all right. So he’s dead.”

  “Did you know him?” the young man asks.

  “Did you?” I reply.

  They both look at him for a few seconds. Their eyes gleam through their tree shadow masks.

  “Come on Teddy,” the woman says, and the leash ripples.

  Checking the open door behind me, I see the man sitting in the chair at the kitchen table, turned from me in profile. He bends over the table, and might be drawing, or poring intently over a crossword puzzle. He’s removed his tie, or at least there is a necktie draped over the back of the wooden chair, and he’s undone and folded back his shirt cuffs. His face, his upper body are cut off by the doorway.