Afterglow_a dog memoir

by Eileen Myles

  The speaker is ignored. You are sitting on your chair in the club. I’m saying that pit bulls cannot be named “the last fish” because the rich complexity of the name begs time to think which publicly does not exist. We are making it now. Meanwhile the short thick word must be used: pit bull. It protects us from committing the crime of one who, with a little more knowledge, would only use it to throw something or somebody else overboard. A swift culture turns all things to the purposes of destruction or manipulation. I drag my foot. The tragedy remains: had Kurt been able to feel the thinness, the diaphany of time he might have been endowed with the eventuality of transformation. He felt power, and he roared because if not he’d be only lamb and something slimy and scary a bald devil on a chart perhaps would ravage and eat him. Tear him to bits. Choose-listening might have been Kurt’s salvation. It wouldn’t have saved my father, they both were lambs, yet Kurt was a true shepherd, my father was not.15 Hitler was no shepherd. No lamb. And we know from all of their notebooks that all of these men were immersed in a sea of pictures, the speaking and singing and roaring came right out of their drawings.

  Hitler’s drawings from the earliest were already ill-focused, bad seeing. In World War I dogs did important work in the field of battle, and Hitler was also such a messenger. He did a dog’s work. If they didn’t have a dog they would use him. That’s history. How much would have changed if one dog one day did not show up. I push Rosie’s ass into its gap in time. Like Shelley Winter’s giant butt in Poseidon Adventure (the wildness of the drive-in). I speak of fat for a reason. In choose-listening we learn to randomly palp the fat of the story, tap, tap, zooming in on the heft of the speaker’s content, yet largely ignoring it, thereby gaining access to the pool of seismic attention, time as a warning or warming.

  We follow the speaker and their shifting states, look at their shirt (do I want it?) carefully examining their shoes, taking their pulse in terms of the rhythmic pitch, the seismic by which we know what is going on in the ocean on earth right here in the room in terms of information mattering. Each of us is a cell of that potential knowledge cluster, that mammoth green dog being lead right now through the cosmos.

  More and more of us came and the patterns got swifter and the knowing entirely disassembled and we will never reassemble it again but instead we now return to knowing’s just before. It is attractive.

  To add. I did this in my childhood too. And you too else you would not be here. In adulthood we must relearn the wisdom of the young who feels her inside while she is being taught she is wrong. To abide in the totalitarian, to survive one must look straight into the face of the nun or whoever and muse. Yet this brought so much upon me. Warily I learned to not absorb their enmity. Choose listen.

  I am like you. Innocent. I am confused. I am greedy. I am impatient. I sat in the club with my cookie and felt bored. My waters recede so slow. And colors brightening around me. I feel my body. I’m a man but there’s a woman in it. Drugs don’t drive my menses. A crazy new thought. The mood does.

  I bleed.

  I flow.

  Grumpily I want to speak. I watch them perform. I did not know I was Bo Jean yet. Like you I arrived in my seat through a miracle.16

  I wandered in through the tall metal gates on an autumnal evening was it 1982 or ’83 into the strange topiary of a West Village church yard the very landscape evoking a petite Versailles thereby filling me with a great sorrow for all the poor of Europe and that producing a beeping moving spot (observed by dogs overhead) quickly installed on the map of secret royalty: son/daughter of my father who like the inbred heirs of the continent and Ireland could not chew. Kurt Cobain, I should mention, died with a full fine set of teeth. Yet Courtney Love did all the biting. That is a failed system. So many other parallels flood into my mind right now. I stay simple. I won’t detail the fascinating overlays of rape and inferior seeing and puppet sex that favored the emergence of the disintegrated jaws of the Bourbon royalty, a cherished example. Though consider. When you say someone has a weak jaw, you are also implying that they (and their line) are on its way to extinction. On all planes. Men grow beards popularly now to hide their dying.

  Buoyantly we recall that the pit bull has a strong and superior jaw. My father came back as such a dog whereas at the time of his death he had no teeth. I recall the gleaming dentures he often presented to me as warning (superior teaching) and because of which I never went to the analyst, the psychiatrist, shaman or the priest but always and only the dentist instead.

  I said Abba. I was an errant cell squirreling into the club.

  People had been losing their teeth for hundreds of years in Ireland, that was the plan, because a toothless nation has no purchase on awe, the thickness will quickly come and surround everyone hence the phrase: “a thick mick.” Part of the curse of the Tuatha Dé Danann!17 Tooth loss is surely a corollary of the eventual unknowing, the drunkenness, the whole frothing lot of it.18

  Sitting in my metal chair “I” felt gripped by sorrow. If only I could speak. I called upon the power of the fairies to let me feed these herds—mentally ill and the leaden, the stylish agog triumphant (a final stage—to be avoided at all costs) to be catalytic; help me produce the grey, charm the room. I listened so careful to what each said the ritual being one would speak for half an hour and the rest of us were frozen in place with our cookies, coffee (the room billowing with smoke) while a man babbled on. A woman spoke about being depressed for fifteen years after which she went into a mental hospital. I was horrified. And enthralled. How can I get in on all the divulging. It’s my thing. Surely I will be lauded and since I am true poet my language nature will inevitably vibrate on a higher subtler plane. For nights and months I was ringing, churning, screeching and up-rooted; re-routed continually by the aleatory raising of hands. I drew a breath. I felt sure it was time to jump in. The club was my teacher. My moment had come. I had been silent now for about seven years.

  Rosie was a puppy in 1990 and I broke the rules once in a while and took her with me to the club and she wandered about the room being adorable, collecting pats and hugs. I was as usual deep in my process of sculpting a moving response to the speaker, up in my head like a depressed light house keeper in cool sneakers angling to ever so carefully slip my own sentiments up over the speaker’s story like an invisible mask through which my wisdom could slyly enter (a giant face) and take over the room. In my mind I was already talking, had been for years, and I imagined people being patient with me tonight if I spoke and that felt good and in that moment the speaker kindly looked at me. Simultaneously a thought struck. Cause I hadn’t seen Rosie for a while. Oh no.

  What if she pooped.

  Then the guy at the front of the room said you, fascinated I think by my sudden look. What do you have to say. The meeting was almost over. The pitch of the moment was so complete I could only divulge what was true.

  Well that’s my puppy Rosie walking around and … I was just wondering if she already had shit on the floor. The room roared. I had shared my vision with them for the first time, the uncollected thought and my wanting and my trying and my desiring was over at last and now finally I was in.

  In where. Well anywhere. I was in the room sure but I was also gone, totally lost. Speech arises and passes swiftly in the vapors of transition. I don’t know who spoke that night. I never would know her again. She was nobody I was in control of. How could it be true, this complete surrender of one’s own mind and the reality of opening it momentarily to everyone and how was this even desirable.

  You know the expression Elvis has left the building. It includes its opposite. When he entered he changed the room. He left and he changed it again. The thought that breaks both ways is equally holy. And it’s a holy space. That’s why the club is good. It’s not a prepared thing, the coming and going. It is the unexpected guest. Always all of us there were listening. And if you sat tight holding on to every single precious word of the person in front of you there’s no room for that sudden visitation. A though
t is an angel. A prophet. When I say “I am one” I mean I am like everyone. Or anyone you didn’t invite. Who was suddenly present.

  In choose listening we empty our minds of presence and absence, of poetry as it relates to actual speech, as place as opposed to time. Which is today. No it’s not. It’s the juncture. Today is a postcard slid in from just before and some saw it coming, and some of them are here and some of the people have not yet come. How can we possibly unite all those groups. We can’t. We can only open ourselves to the true and actual pictures in our own consciousness and through our participation in this endless corridor we discover at last that we are not alone. Is a dog turd lying on the floor. In the moment of the room’s laughter absolutely yes it was. We all constructed that poop together unexpectedly. That is the true ship. That is the only kind of knowing I am talking about. Goodbye. See you later!

  Once you get this you are dog. Some get it occasionally. It is their one story. Others got it once and their friends who never got it like to tell it over and over again. The word enthusiasm refers to the early Christians who first got dog and they just couldn’t stop talking about it. History will say it was Jesus Christ but I’m saying the only kind of thickness that can truly transport a group of persons from here to there is the word “dog” which provokes laughter unlike god which produces awe, anger (which god) or contempt for all religion is secularism. Which is capitalism whether they name it god or not. We think of capitalists as digging a hole. Why bother when you can get a dog to dig that hole for you. Think of the prophet Rosie smiling. I dig you she says. Put that on a button. This is that club which I am imagining. Join us now.

  Everybody wanted to know what kind of dog the president in 2008 would get and this is presented in the media as (tee-hee) the um humorous end of the news item (yeah how about the end of the world, you idiots! …19) yet we refer to that dog as the bishop and that dog is carefully chosen. Oh you can’t imagine for how many thousands of years.

  It is a political dog. Certainly if the right dog had been in the White House during the Bush presidency the whole Serpent Queen moment might not have even begun. Jimmy Carter wouldn’t have had sex with a snake. There was no precedent for it.

  Eileen Myles you might remember made a fool’s run up to the presidency (1991–92) with Rosie in mind for the bishoprix but it did not succeed. Sadly it was a little too obvious.

  It’s a long moment the cross insemination of galaxies and it can still be stopped. In the simplest way. It can be slowed. How long is now. Think about it. Rosie is no longer with us as an entity but more like a holy card, a living picture on a chart. If I can explain the nature of a political animal, which she was, and situate her correctly in the current constellation of galaxies, here in New York, in America, and in North America, the Western Hemisphere, in Ireland and Istanbul and Florence, in Belfast and Morocco, even MacDowell colony of Southern New Hampshire20, and Marfa TX, sweeping the Earth and going across … galaxy number one, galaxy number 2 … so on to 18, animating all and

  coming back then cause you know

  cause you know

  cause you know

  cause you know

  cause you know

  cause you always have to return.

  8. Footnotes throughout courtesy of BJH. Personal testimony of “Eileen Myles” is lifted directly from her personal journals. I am Bo Jean and I speak anonymously.

  9. The father falling down in the Mar-Jon Motel in southern New Hampshire on a family vacation legs kicking and foam appearing at the corners of his mouth.

  10. The before is a space in the club but it is w/out dog.

  11. The ecstasy “of” foam is that it is pure joinery.

  12. Haller, in fact, and he is from this town where I write: Belfast, and that means get this “Mouth of the Sand Bar,” a cabdriver told me this though he said “mouth of fish.” Often the lie is better.

  13. The fact that Jesus walked on water proved that he was god but also dog.

  14. I want to propose a distinction between thickness and flatness together and the occurrence of flatness alone which is the innovation which inserts the three dimensional within the visual field. Even in my studio i.e. this “talk.”

  15. He drew Kilroy in my drawing pad.

  16. Eileen’s story. No. BJH is anonymous.

  17. Fairy culture.

  18. The same forecast of toothlessness is true for the American Indian. To be prisoner on your own land is to be raped of your pride. The thickness will soon descend. The American Black exists on an entirely different platform of pain. To be taken from his or her home, from your home, then be prisoner elsewhere is to be slave, then pet. The result is unholy, both for the captives and the host country (US) also often wholly erased like the rape victim. There is too much to be said on this subject here but it can be summed up by the fact that this kind of robbery is cellular. It assaults everyone’s pride, eventually. Except for dogs to whom we pray.

  19. How about the constant end which is war. War for resources, usually defunct juices and gases singing deep under the surface of the earth and the dogless capitalists squeeze it again and again like an orange until there is none. Only a husk of a planet where we live—without dog.)

  20. A healing place.

  xxxx

  A man with grey hair walks down a dirt road. He utters uh. Sometimes a moan or a muffled sound and he lights a cigarette. His gait is slow, he doesn’t stumble but there’s almost a stutter in his walk. Next to him is a woman with her grey hair tied up in a messy bun. She wears a black teeshirt and is largely silent and the man points things out to her from time to time. The light is extremely bright. It’s hot. They’re examining an excavation. He points to a sculptural plaque with bodies, gods probably. She grunts appreciatively. They walk around. The houses are yellow, and there’s bright orange flowers like morning glories lining the fences of the neighborhood—neither rich nor poor though probably both. The yards are all dedicated to a craft manufacture (tiles) so there are hunks of quartz sitting on pedestals. It’s a holiday. No one’s around. The man stops and lights a cigarette. He groans. The woman asks him something and he seems indignant. He reddens. She grows quiet. The sky is a deep clear blue. The trees are at the height of their prowess. It’s summer and they sway in the slight wind of the day, about noon. The two seem barely related but together for purposes of their own. He sometimes eyes her after a bit of witticism and she stoically observes him without scorn not giving a proper foil either. She thinks this is her dignity. He thinks she is boring. That’s how it looks. It’s like we stepped out of the movies and landed in another one. Exactly that. This one feels reddish, maroon and faded somehow even in its brightness. The people walking one another are later in life, she clearly in better health than him. She says something about the orange flowers. He shakes his hand to deny it, dismissing her thought. She relapses into silence. They stand in front of a larger bush with pink flowers. He presents a theory. She says something else. He shakes his head in disagreement. Both of them admire a blue wall. Him first though she had been thinking about it. Now her appreciation sounds false. She takes a picture. He hates her. Lights another cigarette. At a certain point as he’s pointing out the marbled sub-structure of the falling down walls she asks him to repeat something. He does—with mild condescension. She is unable to hear the words he says. She asks him to repeat the words. He mocks her strongly saying the words in a tone that suggests that the listener is an inattentive fool. Later she will insist he treat her with some respect but now she is stunned that he feels so entitled to enmity he even will direct it at her. The pattern continues in different settings for about three or four days. The man attempts to buy cigarettes in a small wooden hut. The young man in the green teeshirt seems unfamiliar with the words. The man repeats himself. The young man shakes his head. The older man does the same exaggerated performance of the name of the item he desires and the young man pulls it out of his shelf looking slightly intimidated, no just paler somehow less present but
his dark eyes quickly sail to the woman’s and he smiles and she liquefies her eyes to say she agrees. It’s unclear if the older man observes this performance. At night they walk along a promenade filled with families and teenagers. At one point she asks him about his family and he tells her a sorrowful story about his father and then his sister too. He relates these events to times in his life, in both their lives when they met. They both think in some way about how you never know about the tragedies in the lives of the people you live around. They actually don’t know each other at all having met thirty years earlier in the city. He might have liked her then if she had been willing to let him amuse her. She disliked how easy things came to him when he was newly arrived from another town and she wonders if she will have an opportunity to tell him this. When she looks back on the trip she still sees the trademark tiles of the town on the public wastebaskets and continue to wish she could have one, could buy it or steal it. Why don’t they sell them she wonders but the charm is that the basket is just sitting there and they value this too. It would be like going into someone’s house and wanting to buy their wastebasket. She thinks of their long slow walks in the late morning midday sun around the old monuments and the yellow houses one of which he purportedly came here to buy. He’s going to die she thinks. When they pay their bill at the hotel restaurant his liquor bill is enormous though he didn’t seems to be drinking all day long. He had another way it shows right there on the bill. When she drops him in the cab they talk quickly and angrily to each other because he doesn’t know exactly where she is going though he had given the driver the address. She can’t understand why he is upset. He is going home to the bad smelling apartment where he will die.