ft ground

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[pdf]

Anything else to add before I start over with a plot and Robin Cook’s style?

The novel Plats is now available for hard copy distribution through this site.
7 years of writing distilled to 156 pages, 468 paragraphs, 5148 lines.

back cover text:

A woman, a day.

The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being absent from one’s body, is the condition of the normal person.

Words may come together in sentences because they have similar sounds, rather than appropriately related meaning. Fragments of thoughts may lead to other fragments of thoughts so that, before long the original intent of the communication is lost.

Because a durable feeling of belonging is practically impossible, because this city has not been organized to provide it, because cities far evolved are irrational and include impossible contradictions, because the silent voice is the most subtle and powerful lever that any city provides, because all words, silent or breathed, have to be oriented toward the pursuit of something quite impossible to attain: a feeling of security in the presence of strangers, she, because of the very insecurity which has always characterized her, has tended to divorcement from those things with whom she has never felt secure, so that her day is only the emptily magical pronunciation of making a skin for her body which she effects only with the words that she speaks only to herself.

Please write to:
j(uliette)t(ango)@sisyphean.com
with your name and address, or simply leave a comment in this entry for a copy.

final round editing. [pdf]

im going to say that major compositional efforts on this novel have now concluded. how anticlimactic.

You lose your cadence. You lose the sequence of colors that allows one setting to connect with the next. In the windowless room, with no vantage point, the colors pass before your eyes, yellow, grey, black, white, green, rose, rose, white, black, black, orange, blue, red, yellow, grey, green, black, violet, violet. After they line up they happen again, walking in a loop from street to street or staring into the blank wall of the apartment. You find yourself staying up into the night, partially awake, but upright, staring into the historical smoothness of the blank wall. It is only to stay awake, to let the sequence of colors keep playing out. It is not out of love for life, for the saturation of time, but a rot that lingers from the day that has degraded your capacity to change into a sleeper, or a walker, it stills you without aim or identity and over the greater sequence of nights it has encrusted your apartment with sifted out throngs of unidentifiable filler. You have forgotten all of origin stories. They dont have origins that connect with your life. When you look across them you feel your life beginning. They just accumulated and whether they were gone or multiplied you wouldnt sleep or want. You find out very late that there is nothing about you of consequence. You stand up infrequently and round the apartment checking the collection in the tableau for some kind of change, some layer of age that has been peeled away to reveal the real thing inside it. You look to see if anything has moved, if someone else has been there during the day to rotate one of the candle votive, perfume bottles, mugs or table lamps in the dust. You are concerned about circular things. You feel the night in the roof of your mouth. Another windowless room. It could be night or day. The follicles of hair on your scalp ache from being flattened against a high backed arm chair and your neck tingles. Everything that happens to you comes from within. Where else could it originate. There is nothing beyond these dark walls, more dark walls and an endless dusty floor. Your toes throb and your calves tighten; your spine atrophies. The last color is white and it sticks. Everything around you is caught. Your skin and flesh are inert packed sand in a particulate atmosphere of lamplight. Your breath is everywhere. It is caught up around you and your face sweats, your clothes bind over clothes against your skin in increasingly damp layers and you struggle, but grow numb. It isnt a process, it is merely a state. If you could control it this would be the instant of your corporeal birth. It is every morning the distraction that hides the auroral instant, and again the weight of day and where it keeps you. Each day your body goes. Where do you go. Where are you.
(more…)

A teakettle covered with cooking grime on a clean stove. There are trains of thin grease chasing stilled droplets on the glossy wall stilled over years by paint droplets. The walls are thick. Seeing the teakettle through the high window, just barely the crown of its shape, you know the rest. It is half empty with cold dark water. It is cold against your hand. It sits untouched for days. You dont like tea. It gets cold too fast. It is for after a day that has passed without you in it, where parts of you are lost in scraps of paper or in the cycling of a fluorescent light. You make tea as a lure for yourself and hold cups between your palms burning at the start, then warm and numb through swollen blood in your hands and then cold. It is a registration process. It is a physical passage of time after an abstract one, barely bridging into the darkness where you sleep in your body at the end and awake, beginning already gone, a cold kettle, a dry mug.
(more…)

Now it has been too long to remember where you fit into a particular denouement, lost in the middle of an unbroken day, a grid of locations and sun angles or hypnotic street light clouds, that you played some key role in perhaps, the significance of it, now that you see the horizon high above the alley, would surely be better at the convergence of someone else and a long faint story. You walk briskly, steam fired and frenzied, each step a spasm that runs through your body, shake yourself apart, into the thick night. The night is at your back, darkness before you, and thoughts and bits of terrain or light are lost throughout, and lost within them are effects untethered and cascading. They sing out in a wordless and silent accusation of friction and movement, not knowing where you are to them or where they are to the causes that make them seek you, they rumble noiselessly in place, never moving, lingering implications. Walking through the dark parting in pure black sand smoothly around you, you leave nothing behind. The night closes behind you. The past is what you wade through. It doesnt lift you up. These things you shelter in your body, you know them as yours, and when you are torn to pieces, when you dry out in the arid end and your fine blood, the secret of your vessel, yours, blows into the dunes, the things you thought were yours the least, the shoes, the figurines, coins, stamps, and rooms, are all that are left to make you exist. Those traces are barely describable, nameless things, just things. You havent been observant enough to populate the passings and surfacings of those things with their own particularities. You dont recognize their physical shapes enough to let them exit from into an electric being that is inside of you that builds charges with other things, that changes and not longer relies on the signal of its shape, it becomes yours, you can erase from it what you need to, it can be a benign presence, emptied of itself into you. Things are your enemies. They are silent. You are stricken by every thing. In the apartments lining the road loom significant collections of old junk and useful placeholders. You experience is impermeable. The scraps of parallel lives, and worse yet, abandoned lives, jeer passively. Each hurls unintelligible secrets about you, each is unidentifiable horror. The world exists outside of you. It is terrible and relentless. You are not observant enough to recognize the same things again and again and each new glimpse down the road is filled with those old apartment hauntings, covered with your fingerprints, swimming in your spit, and bound with your old hair. What do you expect it to do as you leave it behind. Things are still. Secrets need destinations.

You wont see her. You have old remembrances that wash out from her feet into the spot she lays. They have faces and requests, distant eyes behind windows, distant bodies over the horizon living different lives. Thoughts, from moments ago perhaps, when she stood on the carpet with her skirt over your feet, with face in the dim, weathered away, hard from regretting you, are hidden in plaster envelopes and dropped into the path of wind driven sand. You wont see her because you dont want her. Seeing her like that makes her yours, indelibly. What could you do with that thread of a life. You are looking at her feet. Her toes are purple, downturned, born, worked, and retired. You are not the mirror at the end of it. You didnt organize the city so that you could come upon this image, but you would. The scenario is old, but you didnt feel the burden until it actually arrived. The moments that you knew to be prefigured, the set aside images that interlock with the plats that your story left empty, where bare floors run with fluid from beneath doors, leaden clouds ride dawn breezes, a half curved smile and pleading hands are the conspicuous evidence that you have caused something. You lost your life from old thought that a day and a night would fill the empty space that no past and no future leave, all the empty plats that one day and one night could fill. But it was only a thought and you never acted. If you are now seeing something, her stretched into nothing behind the door, if you leave her dried out next to the bath, where you found her in that thought, you pick up her shoes, if you put them on, pull the curtain, look out the window into the night and walk out the door, then it is visible, already thrown across the midnight from the bathroom mirror and into the alley, and it has happened and is over, before you even realized that what you had been waiting for was that lost moment, your first conception, when you swung your arms out of the darkness and took a step forward. Now there is nothing left, but you have a new pair of shoes.

When you go to her, step silently across the carpet. When you go to her, her feet hang out from the ajar door. Her knees block the door from fully opening and a long vertical slit with your cheek against the damp doorjamb has her calves, the hollow behind her knee and pale veins, desert dry stiffening tendons, a heavy skirt over a sharp hip, with other shades of skirts worn for slips falling in scallops on tile, into a dress over her shoulderblade and hair spread across the floor before the bathtub. The water is high and lapping with the force of the running faucet hidden by the door. When you go to her the water in the bathtub is just about the profile of the rim where it rolls outward to form a lip. It doesnt raise or lower as the faucet runs. Her face has ocean eyes, the steam of water dreams in a sand sea. When you go to her, through a cascade of reflections, her eyes are shallow allusions. Their stillness is of eyes on a sand horizon watching for the sunrise.
(more…)

You are alone, noticing the solitude in spells, you fall asleep, you dont change from sleep to consciousness. You are surrounded, scribbling on the inside of a windowless body. Asleep or awake there is nothing outside of it. Lamps show brown light with a grain that you feel needling outward on your skin and eyelids. It doesnt cast shadows. In between the light is nothing. It is still raining. Someone through the apartment is turning out lights as they move until the darkness is clear enough that you see your legs out before you. A stria of crystalline light points from a back hallway, across your bare feet, and up the inside of the front door. An icy corona lines the ajar door, fluorescent light playing off of cold surfaces, mirrors, tile, water. A pair of shoes in the foreground. Feet, stacked ankle on ankle over the threshold of the opening.
(more…)