by Nisi Shawl
They brought me a pad and a marker. Nothing like a little hyperbole to get your point across.
The scientists were fascinated. They’d see things I didn’t notice. Soon they were anxiously waiting for my next piece. As soon as I could move around, they let me paint, sloshing colors on whatever I could for a canvas. Some high-decibel hyperbole got me my zero-G studio at the center of Ithaca Base.
Grumblings of prosecuting me for the murder of Willa Shembe eventually petered out.
And the work came effortlessly, rapidly, ecstatically—I’d revel in it for hours, and hate myself for not being able to keep up with it, for getting tired, and needing sleep. I’d beg Calvino for drugs so I could work for weeks at a time (he refused, of course—hyperbole won’t get you everything).
I’m now the most important artist of the Solar System. Scientists analyze my work for clues about the nature of other worlds. The art world hails me as the new master. Calvino hung that first shit-smear painting in his office. The Space Culture Project began making policy changes—the murals on future space colonies and starships will show my influence.
And Willa—a Siren in her own right, perhaps my most important Siren—keeps showing up through it all. Her face. Her body. Dancing through the universe. Dancing with the universe. Dancing the universe. Showing everybody that I’m not the only one responsible for all this great art. It embarrasses me—but I must acknowledge that Willa and the Sirens are my collaborators. I’d like to ignore it all and hog all the glory for myself, but she keeps showing up in the patterns of the flying paint.
In a way I enjoy painting her, as much as the rest. She’s so beautiful. Her classic Zulu features. Her bold, quiet, unending curiosity. The way she sacrificed herself, willingly and without hesitation, when others simply were torn apart and I hung onto my ego with a death-grip. She alone had the courage to truly hear the song of the Sirens, and join them in their cosmic dance.
Maybe she was the only human being I could love more than I love myself. Maybe…I’ll never know. I’ll never be able to touch her. I can only paint her.
And the cosmos she’s rapturously exploring.
An Idyll in Erehwyna
Hal Duncan
Really? he says.
Renart strumps about from room to room, mumping and mulligrumphing, thrunched by the right moger of the place to a crunkle of brow and a clamp on the jut of his chaft, thumb under chin, forefinger curling up under pursed lips. Over the weeks of merry visits from Ana Massinger (primarily to gab in billows of blue smoke over red wine, it seemed, and only secondarily to salve her sisterly fret that Puk—ensconced in the treehouse with Jaq but making regular barbarian raids on civilization for the sake of grub or ablution—was not hassling Renart to distraction, I hope,) curious prodding finally won from her, yesterday evening, an admission that all Renart’s return jaunts into Erehwyna have indeed been diverted to work, café, park, restaurant, tavern, tabac, in short any elsewhere than the Massinger home, because in all the stint they’ve been here on Mars, in Erehwyna, she still hasn’t sorted it to presentable.
Presentable? Renart says, having coaxed acceptance of a pataphysician’s eye and hand, it being, after all, his art to hone a life’s ergonomics to a healthy set of attitude, flesh and environs. Presentable? he says, having followed dinted directions, turned down into the culvert off Rue Stroedeker and arrived on the doorstep at the crack of noon, to stroll in, smiling assurances—It can’t be that bad—and scope the full horror of misplaced furniture and furnishings, boxes and crates, cases and contents that he might describe as half-stacked and half-strewn were it not for the implication of balance in those halves. Ana, how is this even habitable?
He weaves the chaos, room to room, wireframing the small ground floor apartment, square hall with pisser and scrubber on the left on entry, back suite and study beside, kitchen-cum-salon and master suite to the right, looking out on Stroedeker and sunshine. Cozy but ceilinged high, with fine pine parquet underfoot throughout. Light gray though, on the walls, a bachelor’s fashion of two decades ago, grim style of some strutter stancing dull machismo which, Ana explains, she didn’t have the tick to update. And as for the rest…she just didn’t glean a start for it.
He studies her for a tick, and the clutter of her attributes around.
Not a shock, he says. There is no start from here.
It’s not her, he means, the shade, so implacably not her that she’s surely sensed the futility of trying to crunk her life into this drabness; but so blandly shamming functionality that, like as not, it sold her on a lie of being passable, an unassuming blankness offering itself as plain backdrop for anyone and everyone: one shade fits all. As if everyone and anyone worked like that.
What you have here, he says, is a quiddity trap.
Quiddity, the whatness of an object, is the essential, the nature of a thing as an instance of its class. Haccaeity, the thisness of an object, is the existential, the nature of a thing as construct of quirks defying reduction to quiddity. In the era of Davenport, the deluge of machined objects made for an angst of drowning. Without the notion of projectivity, all reduced to subject and object, abject at best, where was the haccaeity of factoried chow and togs, flatpack fittings and gimcrack commodities? Where even the thisness in a pleasure become parlance, formulated for replication as geekware loaded in the meat machines? In the Society of the Spectacle, as she herself has lived the fallout of, post-modernity, post-singularity, even a human seemed all quiddity, quirks merely the unique settings of shared attributes. Skinsacks with a tuple of signifiers inside that could be scanned into a simulacrum—geist as soul, Ana would say, for those who scorned superstition but could not surrender it. Hence her flight with emancipated sixer bro to the sanity, which is to say civility, of Mars.
Davenport broached a new paradigm in abolition of quiddity, his supposition: that in every corral of objects abstractable to a class by common attributes and behaviors, every object in that corral is not merely distinct in its unique mix of attribute settings but cannot be fully described without recourse to attributes inapplicable to all others of its class.
Not only is this electron not equal to that electron, but it is not equivalent.
This, Renart says with a handflick at the drab paint, is a shade for everyone and therefore no one.
So. Arms folded, Renart stands in the master bedsuite, brooding on a wall, glancing now and then at Ana, at the scatterings of jumble. The haccaeity of this canny scientist sprawling out around her in a humidor of Kaseians on the mantlepiece, a sim syrinx propped upright in a corner, the sleeves cut off her Geister jerkin; actually, he thinks, this shouldn’t be so gnarly. He’s rather savvy of Ana’s haccaeity by now, and fond of it.
◊
Resounding the clomp of fleshling feet and shifting furniture upon her patchwork panels, bouncing back their voices in the emptying room she floors, Pitys can’t help but think back fondly on the old days of Arcadia, of mountain heights, ravines, and shepherds calling out to hear their echoes in the hills she cloaked as the pine tree, Pinus pinea, or sturdier still in her Stone Pine form, and tall and proud, growing some twelve to twenty meters high, even over twenty-five sometimes.
The shifts of life, she thinks. She’s sure of all her kind she senses shift most keenly. Senses? Undergoes more like. She lives shift, not as sharply as the fleshlings tromping in and out the master bedsuite of the Massinger abode, shuffling with weights between them, dropping a clatter or thump of something now and then, and cursing or being cursed for it—Rot and bones, Puk! give that here!—no, not that sharply, but more keen than many a tree. She displays it as she grows.
In youth? Ah, in youth she is a bushy globe and, for her first five to ten years, bears leaves that mark her juvenile, growing as little singletons, blue-green and glaucous, a mere snip of two to four centimeters long, quite different from the adult leaves that start to sprout amidst these from the fourth or fifth year on, five times the length—sometimes as much as thirty centimeters
long, indeed, albeit those are quite exceptional—mid-green and growing bundled into twos. By her tenth year, roughly speaking, though she might still sprout some juvenile leaves in regrowth after injury, a broken shoot or whatnot, just to show that she still can, those mature leaves have usurped the juvenile entirely, and she’ll spread a wide umbrella canopy from her thick trunk with its thick bark, red-brown, carved by deep fissures into broad vertical plates. In full maturity she sports a broad and flat crown forty to sixty meters wide.
She doesn’t rush all shifts, of course. It takes three years, a longer stint than any other pine requires, for her broad ovoid cones to reach maturity at eight to fifteen centimeters long. Within these cones, pine nuts or piñones, pinhões or pinoli, her seeds are large, two centimeters long, pale brown beneath the powdery black coat that rubs off to a gentle thumb. The crude four to eight millimeter wing on each is like to fall off on its own, but then it’s largely ineffective for dispersal by Susurrus anyway, flighty godling of the Martian wind, so her seeds are animal-dispersed—mainly by the azure-winged magpie once upon a time, but these days mostly by the fleshlings who, it seems, find her a useful wood for furniture or floors. Like the floor of this townhouse apartment, which is bare now, bedsuite hollowed by the fleshlings, one of whom crouches to stroke her, bless him, calls a question that soon gets its answer in a fumbling of armfuls in through the doorway, followed shortly by grand flappings that spread out the dustsheets, lay them softly down now, to protect her.
It’s not the reverence of antiquity, but she can’t help but be reminded of it. On Mount Mainalos, there were pine groves sacred to the god Pan, who had loved her as an Oread nymph, never forsook his love, for all that she fled and took this form in her escape to thwart his hanker. It’s not the reverence of antiquity, but it does seem…an echo of it, down the ages. Sacred to Dionysus, the Aleppo pine was still an inspiration aeons later, for Paul Cézanne, moved by his garden in Aix-en-Provence, to put brush to canvas and articulate his ardor in Les Grands Arbres. And still, even now, more aeons and a world away, the echoes still resound.
◊
Wet sand, manila envelope, cappuccino, dry clay, wrapping paper, Nefertiti’s foundation—none of these quite match the color in hue and luster, a brown paled to buff but pinked as with embarrassment.
It looks nice, says Jaq. It’s like…shy sandstone.
The room is echoey empty to his voice, just the painted walls, the polished floor, and four fleshlings all jiggered, quanked by the sore swink and gaumed with paint, two of them fair spattered to clatty, the lovers Jaq and Puk roped in to sharpen the shift, make themselves useful for a change, having cabbled in play through the work—Don’t just stand there looking glaikit, dunderhead—Says the gormless galoot—Big numpty—Wee nyaff—and tipped the banter into full-on rammy shenanigans with the spraypacks, until curbed by simultaneous bellows from both Ana and Renart: Quit it!
The paint, which it would be an ignorance of haccaeity to call pale brown, is drying to a crust on Jaq’s face now, a full face-pack sprayed full brunt, sleeved off to smearage of streaks; and on the wall it is already tacky to the touch; and it is, Ana agrees, a whole lot better, much more her.
Renart brings in now, from the kitchen, the zig-zag chair of Gerrit Rietveld: four square planes of beechwood, dovetail-jointed; back vertical down to z-shape of: seat, diagonal, base: angles crisp as apple crunch. It won’t go here, he thinks, but it’s ideal for a seat, to study and plan: order, design, composition; tone, form, symmetry; balance: Sondheim chanelling Seurat.
A bedsuite for Ana scientist smoker syrinxist and so on Massinger, who insists that her science is not a reduction of his craft in its abstraction, but an expansion. At the extremes of science we enter poetry, she claims, the purest application of mathematics. Poesis is the suppositional calculus, notated not in symbol but in stance: epistemic, alethic, deontic, boulomaic. And if she should be able to see the impossibility of a viable life in a dull grey room, he should be able to wrangle a few numbers into sense especially when, look, it’s a glassy permutation of a Fibonnaci Spiral.
Puk, as Renart is musing, Ana making coffee, and Jaq idling, is weaving this decorative exploit into their gaming of an harpagmos, which required a twofold offering during the course of it—a votive tablet of painted wood, an animal sacrifice—at the sanctuary of Hermes and Aphrodite. The window frame, he has decided, can be their votive tablet turned inside out, object opened to its delineating edges to articulate its reverence with greater import, to make the world itself its prayer.
And there’s beef in the chiller, says Jaq. For Ana’s chili. What? It’s dead animal.
Which reminds him: Puk needs new togs, Jaq has resolved, and it’s his task as erastes to busk his eromenos, bedizen the lad. He starts blethering of Puk, comical with trouserlegs rolled up to bare shins, wading in the brook at the bottom of the stead. They could hit the markets if they’re surplus now, or if Sifu Renart can savvy the shipshaping of the bedsuite as pronto as Jaq is sure he will.
We need to get you some proper britches, he says.
◊
She is three in one, Karya, a trinity of sisters, English walnut flanked by hazelnut and sweet chestnut, Juglans regia flanked by Coryllus avellana and Castanea vesca, wearing the same name in all three guises to the Greeks who harvested from all three types of nut tree, this triune aspect an echo perhaps of the two sisters who schemed viciously to thwart a Lakonian maiden’s dalliance with Dionysus, and were driven mad for it, fled up the scree slopes of Mount Taygetos where they were turned to stones, while she herself, dying, was changed into a deciduous tree growing twenty-five to thirty-five meters tall, her male flowers drooping catkins which fruit in autumn with green fleshy husks around the edible nut, her summer canopies now lining the Avenue K. Leslie Steiner, shattering the sunlight as Susurrus dances her, to dapple Jaq and Puk and a gaggle of skimbooted kidsters who zip past them, whooping.
The goddess Artemis told her dad Dion of the unfortunate affair, insisted that he found a sanctuary in honor of Artemis Karyatis. So, at Karyai in Lakonia, in her sacred grove of walnut or hazelnut trees, she had priestesses known as Karyatides, this sisterhood of the nut tree immortalized: in the porch of the Erechthion on the Acropolis in Athens, in stone canephora carrying baskets on their heads full of sacred foods for the goddess’s feast, each pillar of individuality carved with its own face, hair, drapery, and stance; and in similar stone caryatids down the ages, in Classical Rome, Renaissance Italy, Northern Mannerism.
As if every walnut tree were not a caryatid, and each tree unique, as here, along the whole length and on both sides of the avenue of shops and stalls the lovers stroll, these stately rows of verdant pillarings a ceremonial sorority in procession, leading back the way erastes and eromenos came, to the little dogleg of Stroedeker and the culvert off it, to the townhouse doorstep and a newly dedicated sanctuary more sacred than the grandest temple in its modest unpretension, as a home.
◊
I’m not really much for cooking, says Ana.
She slices the ends off an onion and peels, brown flakes of dry papery crunkle falling away, retaining curvature on the counter where they’re tossed, the smoother layer beneath stripping bit by bit under a thumbnail and scowl, to naked pearl white. She halves the whole now, lays each half flat, and slices, this half first—each knifecut through the pale crump of strata as crisp as the air is, sharp acidic waft watering eyes—then the next. Rough methodical chopping of the fanning slices, and the odd stray chunk firing out tiddlywinks from beneath the blade, serve as a No comment on her self-assessment. Satisfied, she grabs a wooden spoon and takes the plateful to the pot, swipes the lot into a sizzle of olive oil, stirs.
Renart, as she stirs up the sizzle to a slowly richening aroma, as the onions shift imperceptibly gradually toward translucence, is still pottering on about his work, lumping gubbins dumped in Puk’s room or the hall, sometimes the kitchen, through to the master bedsuite, rapt in his task to a Scoobedy-doop-do
op, bibbedy-bap absent and elsewhere mode of focus. In his element, it seems.
She dumps the diced steak in, to another sizzle, stirs, stirs, and returns to the chopping board.
One sweet red pepper, one orange pepper, both cut vertically from the stem, down and around and back up, to be cracked open and have the seeds stripped and shaken and teased out with a finger. She returns to tumble the browning beef roughly with the spoon, flick a morsel over here or there.
Scoob, scoobedy-doobedy-doo-bow. Smells nice.
Four jalapeños, two green, two red, one of each finely diced, one of each sliced. These she takes to the pot and adds. Another stir, digging under with the spoon to shovel, fold, checking for blood-red, turning.
Off in the bedsuite again, Renart folds togs and shelves them, carving some cunning system, no doubt, that will put all to hand, as she dresses of a morn, with the precision of some antique knight’s squire sprung to buckle armor; but Susurrus leaves him to it, is more attentive to the cooking, relishing the shift of it in him, the tickle of air currents spiraled from the heat, the tang of oniony steam that seeps him, swirls in him through the kitchen with the open window that invited him inside.
At the cooker, Ana cracks a can of some cheap carbonated drink, full of sugar and spice, pours it gluggling and hissing into the pot—her secret ingredient.
Tum-ti-tum, ti-tum-tum-tum!
Dried chili flakes sprinkled liberally from a bag. A crush of crimsons and terracottas, seeded with dark and light ochres, it looks like it belongs in the pestle of some ancient artist, to be ground for pigment, mixed with egg yolk and applied to a church wall in tempera fresco, or daubed with a finger on the ceiling of a cave to conjure a bison in silhouette.
The tail of the turkey-cock turns to the sun! Sander of Tempe channeling Stevens.
A carton of chopped tomatoes. A carton of kidney beans. A stir. A step back, a release of breath, halfway a stance of satisfaction at a dusted job, halfway a momentary daze, as if at a loss as to what to do now, or in suspicion of loose ends left. She looks at Renart, who stands in the kitchen doorway.