Dadaoism (An Anthology)

by Oliver, Reggie

  *

  Though I am a spider, grief makes me feel like a clown. There I go, even now, blowing up another black balloon to join the many others on the floor, decorating the darkened living room with black crepe, jetting from me as I jump from that red lampshade into the closet, the door of which creaks shut—how like a startled laugh.

  *

  There are things down here that are mostly just piles of veins, things that are root-like masses of blood with button eyes, bits of bone and rock for teeth in makeshift mouths. They begin as dust bunnies and so that is what they are called, though they do not of course resemble rabbits. A bit of lint that acquires a pulse and occult needs, and there you have it.

  I first encountered one just above the ground, late in the night, when I’d gone out wandering beneath what I thought was, to my numerous poor eyes, an astonishingly bright and sickly yellow moon, sunk at the horizon. I was able to draw closer to it, however, and realized it was a discarded melon rind in the side of a rubbish heap, fluorescing with a fungus. I wasn’t sure, then, if I was even above ground, and I sat still in anticipation of a topside breeze that was not forthcoming. I heard the dust bunny before I saw it. Those that sound all sound differently on account of their randomly assembled vocal apparatuses. This one had enough of a throat to neigh with. In fact, I saw that it was largely a throat, as it crawled out from the heap of debris, neighing, into the open air—or, nay—into the cavity formed by the heap’s decomposition—and swelled a kind of fleshy red bellows stolen (that is how they acquire most of their organs) from who knows what. The red nets of its circulatory system pulsed as it neighed at me, dragging its flabby, tumescent length toward me with a rudimentary red hand that, as it clutched, shot out tendrils that in reaching also attempted to form other organs. When these failed to cohere or inflate, and this was nearly always the case, they fell on the ground and were dragged along, and these crimson cords and clumps more often succeeded, as they caught and dragged along bits of rubbish, in taking on a higher level of organization. But the thing remained mostly a helpless, neighing throat—and I did not have to defend myself beyond leading it toward a bedspring where it became entangled.

  *

  His corpse is a weight in my history, stretching the web of it out of shape. It has such gravity in the present, it pulls the past down towards it—so that his death registers in everything that came before it. It becomes apparent I was waiting for it to occur, that I’d begun writing in anticipation of his death, in order not just to mark his departure, but also to register every sign of it that came before the event.

  Adventures in negativity spun from what never failed not to be—nothing having occurred but that bodies fell, variously suspended for a time, towards the ground, or lay on the ground, imagining they were falling. Maybe I thought I was doing this as a preservative act, a connective act, but I’d already also begun not to live and to become part of what destroys us both. Still I emerge, as if from all the eyes blinded by an explosion that reaches infinitely back in time, reducing everything to a single devastated moment.

  *

  In a cardboard box in which had been arranged a number of pale severed hands, drained of their blood and chosen for the delicacy of their fingers, the lecture goes on,

  “Cornelius Agrippa teaches that, and I here quote, ‘it is impossible that a prepared matter should not receive life, or a more noble form…’ which is to say that matter tends toward restlessness, to celestial disturbance. We ourselves are examples of this tendency, this restlessness. What is a spider but a bit of dirt that moves when it shouldn’t? I’ve written a poem on the subject, shall I read it?

  Long lunar legs

  bundled suggestively

  transparent crooked lines

  absorbing the little light of the room

  a spot of dust become a skeleton hand

  spiders grow in all the corners of this universe

  and in the lining of the night

  they lay their eggs.”

  Crouched as if frightened, almost nothing at all in his aged, diminutive state but a wad of coarse white hair in the corner, the professor rasps,

  “Now Agrippa teaches the generation of creatures or beings from suitable matters, and I quote,

  ‘For we know that of worms are generated gnats; of a horse wasps; of a calf and ox bees, of a crab, his legs being taken off and he buried in the ground, a scorpion; of a duck dried into powder, and put into water are generated frogs, but if it be baked in a pie, and cut into pieces and put into a moist place under the ground, toads are generated of it…’

  “Etc, etc… Agrippa goes on to say that,

  ‘A congruity of natural things is sufficient for the receiving of influences from the celestial; because when nothing doth hind the celestials to send forth their lights upon inferiors, they suffer no matter to be destitute of their virtue.’2

  “Suffer, indeed! Virtue, indeed! Now, this restless, celestial force… which treats the entire substance of life, ‘suitable matters,’ as if it were its slimy plaything, inflating it, twisting it into shapes that exist only to wear themselves out and in rotting give rise to other shapes… can be demonstrated, actively observed in its most basic manifestation in the shadow of a corpse’s hand. You may protest that a shadow is not any kind of substance at all, that like the alphabet it is one of those things that follows after other things… but the shadow is the ground of being worn thin, the merest suggestions of something’s presence, the part of the body that is least material—further, shadows secretly precede their forms and control them parasitically, satanically… being screams, bent and slightly divorced from itself, in the place where the shadow meets the skin. If the group of you would help me to arrange these two hands in the shape on the diagram I’ve passed out for you... there, thank you, yes like that, the elderly atop the youth’s as if it were, yes, perfect.”

  As a group we position the two white hands together, the joints of their fingers popping as we arrange them—with difficulty but to great effect—in the shape depicted on the handout, at the center of the classroom. The end result is frightening, so much so that we laugh nervously as the professor’s assistant lights a match at the other end of the room, causing the hands to cast a shadow on the cardboard wall.

  Everyone gasps as they see the shaking black splendor of the hand shadow. It resembles an enormous spider, superior in form to the greatest of the tarantulas. As a hole is poked into the cardboard box to let in the “celestial influence” of which the professor had spoken, the shadow begins to turn as if it has left the surface of the wall. It appears to sink inward, and in doing so, as it is pulled out of shape, it re-emerges from itself—as if it were being turned continuously inside out. I saw then that this process was being repeated everywhere there was something to see in the shadow; spiders in spiders consuming and generating themselves in infinite arrangements; loathsome horror telescoping into infinite microcosm. The dead hands were, of course, entirely still. Or so it appeared.

  *

  I’d like to speak about my adventures aboard the HMS Triumph, a 74-gun man-of-war. In particular I’d like to speak about the Triumph’s sailors and the terrible fate that befell those beautiful men.

  You might not have taken me for the maritime type, though you must know some of my cousins actually live in the water: strange little spinners under the surface of lakes and rivers. Anyway, I came aboard in an officer’s hatbox. This was in 1910 and the hats of the officers of the Royal Navy were cocked, with their points worn to the front and back. The boxes in which they were stored matched their shape. Mysterious, musty, felt-lined compartments, like cases for bizarrely shaped instruments. There is something funereal about those magnificent hats, with their curious shape, their crests topped as they were by a bundled black ribbon held tight with gold braid. The sight of a sailor asleep, his black, cocked hat tilted down over his hidden face, his arms and legs resting splayed, as if blasted into that position by a cannon ball that has miraculously left e
verything—including his heavy, rope-burnt hands—intact, is a sight that haunts me. Sailors wear their great, dark hats, dark as the sea beneath them, as emblems of the noble (or not) death into which, at any moment, they may slip. Anyway, so it was that I boarded the Triumph, as if in a tiny, irregularly shaped coffin, with high hopes for strange adventures.

  How I love the creaking of a ship at sea! It is a sound second in my heart only to the sound of a rope against the gallows, heavy with a slowly turning load—a sound that is quite like the creaking of a ship at sea. And I associate both these sounds with the light of lanterns, in close and dark sleeping quarters.

  The Triumph was sent to aid a Spanish vessel bearing a cargo of mercury. The ship had gone ashore in a storm and the sailors, secretly and at night (as the vessel was in sight of a French fort), took to the task of bringing aboard that load of quicksilver. The night stank of brine and the sweat of 200+ men—an odor I greedily sucked up with my large, hairy nostrils—as I watched from the deck of the Triumph. The men labored amidst the storm-racked wreckage of the Spanish ship. And then, oh! The sudden stillness of the tumult, towards morning, broken only by the terrible peals of a hitherto unheard from thunder, the deep and cavernous sound of which, amidst the sudden hush, seemed to portend an event of tragic magnitude…

  We set sail with the mercury stored in the room that held the sailors’ rum, some of it also in their sleeping quarters. The leather bags that held the mercury eventually broke apart and the men, not knowing the danger, marveled as silver beads of it rolled across the floorboards.

  Sometime later, on a black sea as still as glass, I watched a fellow sing a lullaby to his friend, who lay hidden beneath covers on his bunk—but for his face which stared wildly, handsomely, with hollow cheeks rouged by mercury sickness.

  His friend was singing under his breath, mumbling with a tongue swollen from the sickness. The scene ended with a choked sob and a bullish bellow as the serenaded fellow sank, with a snap of the neck, back against the pillow into a final, wide-eyed sleep.

  Imagine the men, lumbering around or lying supine, unable to stop drooling, delirious, rosy cheeked, and trembling. One young sailor, an especially brawny and obstinate young man, went so mad that he wore his full-dress uniform night and day. Thick ropes of saliva fell onto the blue and gold-edged collar of his coat and dampened the taut white pants usually reserved for shore leave. How he stared and stared at nothing there! And the captain! I could see that he began to chart the ship’s course in a most unusual fashion.

  It began with unwholesome attentions to the cabin boy, a mute, blue-eyed boy whose silence was known to be tied to a palm sized, pink scar on the back of his head. A tattoo on the boy’s bicep told the story of how he’d received the scar from an attacking bear. The boy’s features were exquisitely cold and perfect; his blue eyes, together with his pale skin, suggested an alarming transparency, a ghostliness that threw the livid, fleshy redness of the scar into terrific relief. It looked like so many things, like a lightning strike in a forest of black glass, a flower, or a scrap of meat.

  The captain found himself staring at the boy’s scalp and allowing the ship to drift into an extensive northern darkness; an area that was perhaps in reality a dream of a place, rather than somewhere definite—a cast and a coldness, a black stillness that approaching death lent to what, for all they knew, might have been bright days. And in this mars-black land, the captain fancied that the scar was lit, that the scar even shone; a soft saffron lantern that the captain watched at the bow of the ship. And there it was that the boy, greatly influenced by the captain’s suggestions, remained positioned, shivering in the dark as the captain sat in his deck chair behind him, staring at his scalp and believing they now moved toward that which the scar light intended to illuminate. He stared into the back of the boy’s head as if he were viewing a divine star, providence incarnate and aglow. He made no adjustments as the ship ran on in a sea as silent as velvet, the ship sometimes creaking, like dry bones in a plush bag.

  When we saw the first icebergs—yes, I saw them too, drunk on the visions of the dying and the mad—when we saw the icebergs, which seemed lit internally, electrically, so bright were they against the starless depths of the night—when we saw them the boy broke the silence with a strange trilling, and he began to rock in his heavy down coat.

  The ship crashed very quickly and very quietly, into a snowy island. A man came to meet us! In his wake there followed a curious hush that seemed the apotheosis of all the quiet that came before. The man had a head of crumpled black paper, like a black flower, like a silent black fire. He held out a small, porcelain hand that looked naked against the snow.

  *

  I am able, by meditating, by holding perfectly still for days on end, to open windows in dust motes. Curious, tiny black windows in which I see myself reflected. By rocking in a kind of trance I sometimes tumble toward these windows and find myself greatly diminished, tiny as a pinhead, and perched upon their cold panes. The glass shines with reflected light, and my legs scrape the window like little eyelashes as I rush toward another dust mote, a sound as loud to me and as exciting as horses’ hooves. At the next dust mote I may open another window. And on to another, and another if I like. Though I find this form of travel intoxicating, it is ultimately disappointing, for though I am able to open a seemingly infinite number of very tiny windows with this trick, I can never see into any of them. I can run to the edge of the glass where there is a bit of something golden that glints. Whatever it is, the sight of it always wakes me. So I travel from window to window, each of which remains for me a black mirror—but for a sense I have of great abysses beneath the glass. I have an awful desire to look in those spaces that lurk beyond the reflection of my tiny, terrible face. The sight of all my eyes fills me with a feeling quite grotesque. They resemble the windows in which they are reflected, and so, when I look at my eyes, I seem not to see anything, to not be anything other than mirrors held up against mirrors. I lose myself for an infinity in the blankness that’s implied on my side, as it exists on the other. Then I seem to wake in anything that stirs the air, momentarily nothing more than a self-aware movement of dust. This is a painful and frightening experience; near unconsciousness broken by fits and starts; awareness like a struck match sputtering out in windy darkness. Light catching, crushed, trapped in the matter it illuminates. I live brief and terrifying lives with no connection to the one I usually know, except on waking to my more regular experience, when I am able to recall them—though they seem wholly the many hurriedly extinguished lives of things other than myself. I can compare this experience to one that I have had when molting. At the moment when I emerge from my old skin, vulnerable and soft, I sometimes have almost no sense of my surroundings as separate from myself, and I have the awful impression that I am trapped inside myself in the form of my environment. Awareness, for a moment, is little more than panic at the state of my immensity and my paradoxical enclosure in that vastness. Panic and claustrophobia, I have come to believe, are directly tied to awareness in its barest sense.

  *

  And then there are my days of vacation: cold, gray, interminably polar. Ice accumulates on my beard, or worse—it fractures the black lake of a lesser eye, or two, or three, into ruined black blisters that won’t be of any use to me until I molt into my summer set of eyes. To be able to shed old eyes is surely something. Really, I drop my peepers as easily as sunflowers lose their seeds; and there I find myself, my velvety feet anxious in the smooth soot of nowhere at night, and then, oh—I see it up ahead, an iceberg. It’s just a matter of beaching oneself after that, as it were, of climbing onto the blue shelf of ice in appropriate enough a fashion that nothing clings of the night to one’s person. For in the interim it happens that the purest blacks can’t help but mix. How many times I’ve had to shoo away errant shades posing as my limbs, or the shadows of my limbs, or the shadows of my limbs’ shadows—though then they are so small and slight they are really only worth the troub
le it takes to dispatch a gnat, and it’s a job for tweezers. PHOOOOOTH! There, I hear it… the latex monuments of Ether Island are inflating, enormous infantile ghost hands of latex rising on dark air.

  *

  In a little nook among rubble, off the way, I awake to find that I have been gathering dust and that I am nearly late for another presentation I am to give on the subject of premature burial. It is to be called “On Being Buried Alive: the Case for Universal Entombment.” Fortunately I have my notes with me, and so I dust myself off and rush to a black lectern, it is quite near, hanging at an odd angle over a pit of refuse. There, presumably, the rest of my class are waiting—hidden and resting perhaps. I fear I am rather late, what with all the dust I shake from myself as I ascend the lectern and sit in a corner where I am fairly sure I cannot be seen by those I cannot see.

  “To be is to be buried, to be heavy, to be blinded. What are thoughts but so many little gasps for air?”

  I wait for a sound. There are none.

  “One sometimes has a notion that one is buried in the earth, one’s mouth packed with soil, one’s eyes perhaps open and staring in the dirt, and one sometimes dreams that one’s hands are endowed with little claws, or that one has many legs suited for digging. One dreams they have dug out a home, a town, a life, when all the while, eyes open or closed, all is blackness. How is it that this blackness—how is it that this blackness which we are, which we sometimes realize we are—this night which is even the stuff of our eyes—can imagine it is other than it is?”

  I wait again for a sound, there is at first nothing, but then the sound of something heavy passing overhead, something heavy which brings a little rain of dry earth down upon the pit of trash where, presumably, reside my classmates.

  “Edgar Allan Poe’s claustrophobia—and its expression in his work via the theme of premature burial—might have stemmed from an intuition of his status as already buried; an awareness of the whole of being as continuous with itself—an intuition after which the thought of one’s own existence as a separate entity would be horrific, as such a thing—the experience of universal night waking up as someone—is insane, and would amount to an intuition of the status of oneself as buried, buried inside oneself.