Last summer, on the recommendation of a friend, I read John Stilgoe’s Outside Lies Magic. The corny title belies the contents, which are fresh and heartfelt. Stilgoe is a zealous pedestrian. As in, devoted to walking. He makes a lion of the everyday explorer; someone who, simply by noticing, scares awareness into the “ordinary” landscape.

There are features of the landscape that are “closed to us,” he puts it. Topographies and histories we don’t know we’re missing. The person who stops to read what’s stamped on a manhole cover, or follows a power-line to the utility man’s fence-hole, realizes there are whole “systems of closed features.” This person uncloaks the Divine Hand, grounds the metaphysical, and sees the tracks we’ve laid. This person knows the quiet muscle of humans working in blind concert. This person is surprised and invigorated by scale.

What is Stilgoe advocating if not a primitive, unprogrammed empiricism? As it applies to the method, so to our individual selves: theory wants observation, and observation, experiment. Looking makes you curiouser and curiouser, an end in itself.

It’s true, isn’t it? Over and over again our bodies are made sensible by looking. I love cities because the signs are obvious; the settler’s intentions recorded in concrete. The challenge is recognizing the built-in blinders. Every object narrates, making skylines, parks and neighborhoods essentially unscientific. But so’s everything, from where a person stands.

In wilderness and rural places it’s even easier to divorce history from matter. Mountains are unsolvable and valleys seem enclosed. Thoreau looked around and nearly fell apart, writing, “To come in contact with it,–rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! The actual world! The common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? Where are we?”

I like to imagine the early explorers, naturalists and scientists looking around with at least as much vehemence as Thoreau. In an essay titled “Strangeness,” Lyn Hejinian writes that they “sought to discover the tangibility and singular distinctness of the world’s exuberant details and individualities without spiriting them away from each other.” In other words, they sought to reveal a thing without setting it apart. It’s a writer’s wish. But to reveal a thing entire is to reveal the universe entire. So you do your best; you describe.

I’ve long since reached my saturation point with irony. I’m sick of thinning my emotions with nuance, or cutting them with sarcasm. It’s why I fell in love with performance. Dramatics. Urgency. Tears. Rage. Love. Fate. Feelings. Performance may sound like the opposite of sincerity, but I think it has the power to refract and redouble our muted emotions. The result, for audience and performer alike, is something more proportioned to life.

Robertson continues: “It’s usually invoked as a stoical value, a holy humanness. Moral and national weight attends it. I’m interested in studying sincerity because I want and don’t want it. I mean, I want to be believed. But I also want to write through spaces that are utterly delusional. I need to be able to delude myself, for as long as it takes, as long as it takes to translate an emotion, a grievance, a politics, an intoxication, to a site, an outside.”

This: “I need to be able to delude myself, for as long as it takes…to translate an emotion.” I am interested in creating opportunities for people to delude themselves. And, maybe its me, but I felt it happen the tiniest bit at a recent DoS gathering.

We planned an Evening of Intercom Readings at the building. The (simple) idea being that listeners would sit downstairs in the venue while the reader sat upstairs and broadcast their words over the intercom system. Turns out that didn’t work, so we just stationed a mic upstairs and used the PA system, instead. Still, the effect was some homely, undressed magic.

A small group sat in dim light and watched one another while a faceless, if familiar, voice boomed from above. We had poetry, black metal lyrics, young adult fiction, romance, a song, and someone shared the sounds of eating a cookie. The void left by the reader became a sort of stage that the rest half-consciously filled.

When it was my turn to read, my throat went dry. It was somehow more vulnerable to have only my voice at my disposal. Delivering something meaningful, I felt the tension of wanting and not wanting to believed. But the plain farce of the presentation disarmed us. Our genuine attempts, meanings, sincerity: didn’t even get carded. It thrilled me more than I let on.

Thankfully, a cool friend captured parts of the event on video. Please enjoy.

It loved to happen. from Alisha on Vimeo.

THE MEN from THE GIRLS

Everything is at war.

DELORES waits on stage.

She commands the silence, then sings.

DELORES

Goodnight ladies.
Ladies goodnight.
It’s time to say goodbye.
Byebye!

No, just kidding. Kidding.

She stalls.

Here’s a secret for you: I set the truth loose down there like a dog. Didn’t you know? Dogs know exactly what they want, without even thinking.

Sorry.

Seriously though, there’s a rumor that just won’t die. Something like, less is more. Desire disappoints. Please. As if we all aren’t sick with all the things we want. Believe me, no one’s a Spartan for eternity.

I don’t care what your psychologists say, you are not ruled by your desires. You are ruled by me. By my desires.

You’ve got choices. You know what they say. If you can’t make the sun stand still, make him run.

Just kidding!

Life is short. What do they say? Let’s roll all our muscle and all our charm into a ball of bait. Well, I paraphrase. But, my advice to you, humans: Roll all your muscle and charm up into a stinking ball of bait, and…

Oh! This. Did you know this? You can outrun any animal on earth. Lope after him, keep on, and he’ll eventually drop dead. It’s true. Animals can’t sweat like you–

THE HEARTACHES clamber on.

Jesus, I was about to give up.

Girls and boys, I give you The Fuckups. Excuse me, Heartaches.

They sing in harmony and dance in subtle synchronization, a la The Shangri Las.

DELORES and THE HEARTACHES

Ain’t happiness a turn off? Ain’t bliss a bore?
Can’t we have a little fun anymore?
Bitter the rind and bitter the core.
Give me the misery of yesterday,
The heartbreak of yore.

You’d be sad to see us go, we know,
When your troubles have only begun.
Tell me where is the fun
If the worst that can be has been done?

No more typical terrors,
No normal nightmares,
Or predictably empty affairs.
I’ve put plenty of athletes in wheelchairs—
Big deal, they can’t walk, no one cares.

You’re beset with regret, and saddled with debt,
But no one here’s had their bones crushed, I bet.
No, none of you have really,
Brutally and truly,
None of you have really suffered, yet.

Or, More Poems for the Romance Files.

1.
Please don’t hold the poor
and lack against me;
the information is good.

More that I don’t hold.
I need to get
out. Here, meaning it’s been so hard,

and start to carve
little, for myself.
I hate women;

they always make me feel,
who are not unable to stop.

Many that clinks and even
shatters, including one
that peeled itself like a banana.

I have had so much,
so many waiting by
very sad materials.

2.
A spread of commitments,
like the need to fall.

The ambition for a landscape requires
you not notice any of these words.

Instead, practice arrangement,
turning from size to size.

Passing the time; calligraphy!
It is hard to live without granting

significance completely, like pouring
from two continuous sleeves.

I meant to see it like a bird
above the whole earth,

an unfolded envelope,
and know every shadow at once,

densely, like moles, who
bridge what’s already

bridged
without asking.

3.
But you wanted to describe the tomatoes
at night, of course: dark as contusions,

chubby with quiet blood, still without
an opinion on waiting. There, there,

but outward, that dimming
report wanted words.

A Couple of Quotes:

“If we wish to speak of it substantively, we must make a substantive of it by writing it out thus with hyphens between all its words. Nothing but this can possibly name its delicate idiosyncrasy. And if we wish to feel that idiosyncrasy we must reproduce the thought as it was uttered, with every word fringed and the whole sentence bathed in that original halo of obscure relations, which, like a horizon, then spread about its meaning.” –William James

“I’m a romantic; a sentimental person thinks things will last, a romantic person hopes against hope that they won’t.”
–F. Scott Fitzgerald

A Couple of Theories:

In one, everything is clipped. Cured. Captured and killed. The story is refined by a thousand retellings. Torn from the original giant and passed through successively smaller hands down smaller halls to the tiniest office with the tiniest editor at a knife’s-edge desk. Glib myth. Pat persuasion. A kiss.

In the other, we are after a panorama. Truth is not a point, an accuracy, but an entirety. A rambling drunk. An accommodating tangent. Beginning one sentence after another with, ‘Elsewhere…’ and ‘Meanwhile…’ and ‘Also…’

In both, romance is commanded by the impossible. It makes heights bearable. We can’t extend our reach, but we can manipulate the distance. One’s a stab, the other a flood. Angles on infinity.

A Couple of Poems:

1.

A man at Good Will scared me
with Hello! He was tall
and honked like a blade
of grass between my thumbs.
Then one with weak eyebrows told me
he couldn’t reprice those ‘til tomorrow.
A warning, like a craving, meant to shame me,
and the yarn was taken out of sight.
All this put me in a bad mood
and I thought again about the ad; the one naming
the little white gully of her chest, and
how she’d complimented his blank
–reply with the thing she liked
if this is you–
I left feeling my own bra fill
with sand. It was that kind of day,
when I had the idea, too late, of
answering his blank
with a list of things
I’d tried to buy
but couldn’t.

2.
The neighbors moved in to walls of primary blue.
I heard them hammering
at night, heard them back up against a first gladness

while I was making a kind new word for you;
one that includes river, inlet,
tributary and stream: the whole ocean
abbreviated to an arm,
like a pruned limb under my side—

What has this to do with neighbors?
Oh, an arriving love; a purchase.

Intimacy is always reserving the rehearsal room. With a push, it makes way. It ousts the water from the basin, the sea from the boat, and familiarizes gestures of removal.

The body is a series of readjustments. Can you make it seem to take an eternity? With gloved hands, or your scarf, there are some things to go after in gangs. Families by the boatload would carry spears and make screaming settlement on the ocean.

Some resident whales we have known like a gesture we take to mean: more this way. And the transient whales like a training for the deep. And off shore the answer swimming out of hearing.

Because you are slow enough; because, like mercy, you repeat yourself. In the morning of the next day, whenever the whale opens its mouth: mountains one moment, nothing but sky the next, and islands frequently, and we perceive by this that he is rushing swiftly to all parts of the sea.

Can anything besides boredom defeat romance? Stop me—boredom is just a love song sung in eliminations, as hands love the hours with tucked thumbs and weather invents the charts’ devotion; What our eyes do to prose.

Intelligence is romantic. I wrote that down but I also remembered. The opposite of what’s real is not fancy. Someone else finished that thought, beautifully.

My parents mailed me pictures of my dog in another woman’s jewelry. I look at the pictures like a challenge; I show them off.

How do you explain the inseparable number of things without the impatience
of import? Bring it all to shore, as we do in sentences. This is a sentence. And someone else, with a footnote.

I could start again, to shore; give up the index for a human traffic light.

What I mean is just that if the gates are really gone we’ve been more watchful than we thought: narrow if not permissive, deliberate if not careful. Not sure, letting anything amount to consent.

“When speaking Russian, a self is felt but has no proper name.” But in English we’re cowboys: bridled romance carries us from context to noun.

We cup a landscape for its porcelain rim and trace it, only. This is the meaning of a palace of time, the sanctity of tubing down the river.

I am devoted, then, to a charged tedium, a slack interest. At The Office of Weary Surprises, I regulate summer temperatures. When the clock says to, I lead company exercises: stare and hum, stretch the truth, saddle up and weep.

Naysay is an annual publication of augury and postdiction. It’s a personal project in which I read and interpret the coffee grounds of my year. Some of you may remember Naysay Volume 1: That was only after, published as a zine and distributed via USPS.

Volume 2: Fortune Cookies was published, appropriately, in a batch of 100 fortune cookies, distributed for free at this years’ What the Heck Fest.

I am sharing the full text here, too, in audio. Listen to me read our fortune.

fig.1
Romance doesn’t happen just anywhere.
You are its natural habitat, a life so wonderfully confined.
Your time limited, your sceneries small, your sentences curbed.
For you, the right words are as good as air travel.

fig.2
Romance is a weed that crops in memory and yields garlands.
It is half a heart parading as the whole.
Not deceit, but a generous, magnified honesty.

fig.3
Romance is loaded.
It keeps piles of unguarded forgeries.
Romance dumped the gold standard and ran off with inflation.
It elopes with each new fraction of a cent.

fig.4
Romance can tell a story, but never a joke.
It’s a device that invents numbers then loses count.

fig.5
It learns from arrows.
Thins to a line and hardens to a point.
Narrows enough to be held and drawn; to pierce.

fig.6
The Art of Letting Someone In is pocked with secrets, so Romance withholds something, always.
It is a minefield of dimples just below the horizon.

fig.7
Romance abstracts possibility from the lump in your throat.
It invents, rehearses and refines a future without betraying intention.

fig.8
It is a most humane harbinger, prophesying only in private.
And it serves divinations like delicacies.

fig.9
Romance needs what is given.
Its power is surprise.

fig.10
It’s a knack.
Draw tomorrow over today, then hook the past and bury it center: a belt of vaulted earth.

fig. 1: Like richness piling inward; life unto yourself.
I was in church eating eggs off my lap while this guy was watching. But he couldn’t smell them, buttery—that was just for me.

fig. 2: Like how a hand can only touch you one place at a time.
I wanted to bury a knife in the sidewalk. Instead, I walked to the hillside and dug up the freshest roots I could find. There is no good time to save; no such season as shortage.

fig. 3: Like recovery.
I peed my pants in my own bedroom. Puddled on the wood floor. I couldn’t stop it, I was curious. I had to pee so bad I was mostly relieved. It wasn’t difficult to clean up.

fig. 4: Like being perforated.
We sat under a tarp that seemed to draw its breath with the wind. It pressed up against branches, trying to stay longer, then sagged a darker blue. He gave me his number. Bless him, his voice tremors of bravery, a tantrum folded in his hand.

fig. 5: Like it’s the first time.
I woke up pealing your bell.