In Apuleius’s novel The Golden Ass, there is a mysterious interlude that has often been repeated since, in various versions and guises. No one is really sure what this interlude is supposed to mean. An old woman begins telling a story to a kidnapped girl. This story is the history of Cupid and Psyche, in which the god of love marries a mortal girl and maintains her in a magic home in which invisible servants do her bidding. The main condition of this marriage is that Psyche never see her husband’s face; yet Psyche is convinced by jealous relatives that she is living with a carnivorous beast. Confusion, harm, deaths, and many trials ensue. Throughout the story Psyche is guided by a series of speaking objects, plants, bodies of water. At the story’s end, Psyche and Cupid are married once again and Psyche gives birth to a daughter named Pleasure.
It is not clear what this tale, reported at second hand, has to do with the rest of Apuleius’s narrative, which concerns an idiot named Lucius, who mistakenly assumes the titular animal form (donkey) on account of a misplaced spell. All the same, this story, primarily a story about doubt and redemption, does not seem misplaced within the longer novel. Perhaps it is a story about learning, a story about what in us can learn. For it is possible that every story of metamorphosis is also a story about misrecognition. Sometimes even a reflection will do no good.
This is why I can say that now, when she rises from bed, for she is human again and has two legs onto which to rise, and comes to the familiar round mirror that hangs above the dresser, and does not see herself, or, rather, does not see what she has known to be herself, there, she, the protagonist, is not surprised. She can wonder and can marvel yet can hardly be surprised. The face she raises her hand to and touches is her face, as she has known it, in some sense, only time has passed, great amounts of time, as far as a human can understand. She is old, fragile, feeble. The skin on the front of her skull is creased and soft, hanging from the bone in flaps. Her hair is sparse and downy, colorless. Her eyelids sag and her eyeballs bulge and everywhere muscle that once encased her body has been lost. She stands in the sleeping attire of a much younger woman, a T-shirt advertising sports, and is decrepit. The light of the moon shows spots on her skin, the blueness of blood.
Slowly she returns to the bed where a man is sleeping. It is with care that she must lower herself; the bones seem ready to crack. It is a strange sensation to be so aware of the existence of one’s bones. And there is fatigue of a kind that she has never before experienced. She is breathless, weary. The young person beside her continues to sleep, undisturbed, his smooth flesh rising and falling. Now she begins to sink, now fade.
A young woman had disappeared; this was what they said. On the morning of the next day, this woman returned to her place in the world, the home she had occupied, happily, they say, though she had, unaccountably, in the time that she was gone, grown old, quite ancient, really. It seemed that the woman had died in her sleep, of what were quickly deemed natural causes. These events could not be explained and so have been very little spoken of since.
Two Poems
Martine Bellen
THE WOODS
The blue woods, the milkweed meadow woods, woods thick, woods night. Reams of dreaming woods. Vast woods in a dram of spirits. Mangrove woods with crabs and spiders. Mangroves with gators. Webs wending spirals between viny shelves for shells and schools of skeleton fish, anchored in mud, anchored in mind. Virgins and terrapins. Tarantulas and slugs. What in the world is not in the woods?
Everyone you love is in the woods.
Mother tells you Auntie’s heart is bad, that it has run amok. You hear this as a band of bandits heisted Auntie’s heart, removed it from her chest and locked it in a chest in the woods. You hear this as Auntie’s woods is in her heart.
When you hear with your eye, for the first time, the woods will become intimate.
There are woods you walk through every day.
Sometimes you are aware of the woods and some days you don’t notice.
Mother tells you Auntie’s hungry, she’s scared of the dark, she’s scared of death, scared to death. Mother gives you a wicker basket and scoots you out the mahogany door, the door that leads straight to the woods.
As you walk the woods, the fetid fragrance smells like Auntie’s putrefying flesh. The eyes of the woods are yellow irises. The teeth of the woods are like arrowheads.
You go in search of your auntie’s heart. Her dark, sick heart. In the heart of the woods.
You go in search of Auntie’s dreams.
One goes for one thing and returns with something else.
One learns in the dark. One sees and hears differently there. One fills one’s pockets with the dark.
You do not want to close your eyes. It’s dark in the woods. You ask Mother to keep the stars on, you ask for the moon to be your nightlight. You ask to take a dog with amber eyes that shine like the Lupus constellation, a seeing-eye dog that seizes small prey in the dark. You pray in the woods. It is your altar. You burn sweet sage, and you change in the woods. The woods is your alter ego.
You dress as a glowing worm in the woods. You become an oak, a mighty oak with red squirrels swirling down your limbs and branches. Your roots tangle in the earth of the woods. You learn the language of frogs in the woods. In the dark, scary woods you find your powers, your potions, your prowess. You learn the language of woods and find that it is not foreign. There are no foreign words in the woods.
When you enter the woods, when you breathe woods’ air as you exhale the woods, as you become the woods, your heart is no longer your heart.
When you enter the woods, you are alone; your heart races through your inner woods.
When you enter the woods, you aim to walk through the woods, you aim to find Auntie and then you aim to return to a place that is anti-woods, that is nonwoods, you aim to return home. You believe your home is not the woods. You believe your home is Auntie.
When you enter the woods your bones begin to ache. The boles sway. Trees nurse. When you enter the woods, your breath turns wet and life thrives from the air you share with the woods, the air you offer the woods.
When you enter the woods, you become the woods, you become its food. The heart that oxidizes your blood becomes the woods’ thousand and eight hearts. The sweat pouring from your brow becomes its dew. Your amber irises become the woods’ flowers. You are the woods’ blood as you race through the woods.
Of course you get lost in the woods, of course you can’t leave the woods—that is the nature of woods. Auntie got lost in the woods, wrote of the woods, sang woods words, woods worlds. Whorls of woods. Woods moons, woods dogs. Woods creep into buildings, spies of woods fly in the sky, expanding woods by night, disguising woods by day. Even if you extinguish all the wind of the woods, all the rings of the woods, there’d be books made of woods, libraries of trees, all singing woods’ paeans, inks of woods and atlases, clothespins and plastics, film and fabric, all rhizomes connecting to the woods—all roads, all roots, leading there.
MAPPA MUNDI OF THE UNCHARTED SEA
(Song to My Ancestors)
To penetrate our hydrosphere,
The fathomer must plumb memory
Moment by moment, mile after mile, must calculate the depth
Of a line of sound
Submerged in a pitcher of ocean,
Pouring wave after gravity wave into a tide-pool glass and starfish sky.
Shallow fractal shells on ocean shelves
Lace down the tapered back of black abyss,
And classical strains wend violinistic Ōkeanós
—The fathomer’s unconscious and unmapped ardor or water.
In the quiet of the sea, bioluminescence drifting
Past the deep knees of liquidity.
Our ancestors’ passive lower lair, where time and density clash with destiny
Our ancestors of alchemy energy, following t
he marine mammals’ lineage of light.
At first, underwater habitats and habits were hard to habituate
Plummeting
Subsurface ribbons and angels and eels, elephant seals.
The fathomer must have felt her ancient fish, scaly flesh
The continuous body of earth’s blood. (oceanic heat bath)
To make it work, they had to stop thinking
Of themselves as individuals
Who ever lived
On land.
To make it worse,
Prostrate before Ondine with whiskey and wine
They had to stop thinking as individuals.
(Memory of an Oceanic Party Girl)
Earthlings lost the shell game, a confidence trick that overconfidence
Tricked them into buying into
When air expired.
At goddess correspondence school, I traded in my fur for Neoprene
Despite what had been trending, there wasn’t a planet B,
So the earthlings dove into the sea,
Made their home in earth unknown,
Lemurring into under-life, without demurring.
Jump!
There is no sound here. No light. No autumn leaves.
Ocean without sausage, no derma
For the golem,
Only that great encompassing stream, compassionate
Scream or omphalos—
The fathomers scale
The longest mountain chain in this vast, tireless multiverse
Multiloss vest of life
Strung around the neck of the sea,
Buoyancy of diamonds, carbuncles, our most precious colonies.
Brother Who Comes Back
Before the Next Very Big Winter
Benjamin Hale
Maybe they don’t exist. But I want them to.
—Jane Goodall
He is painted on the sign that welcomes drivers coming into Black Rock from the east on Route 9, waving. A bronze statue of him stands in the center of town, depicted in the pose made classic by the creature (almost certainly a person in a gorilla suit) captured on the Patterson-Gimlin film: midstride, head turned, looking back over his shoulder at the man with the camera.
Sightings of the Black Rock Monster flare up from time to time with long lulls between. It’s as if the sightings crest and trough in accordance with some cosmic cycle, like cicadas (every seventeen years) or sunspots (every eleven). If the functions of the universe can be envisioned as a gyroscope, many wheels within wheels, then the punctuation of the Black Rock Monster sighting clusters is a tick mark on one of the slower-spinning, outermost wheels.
Audrey hated him. No: Audrey hated “him.” The idea of “him.” She considered the Black Rock Monster a sign that she was from a place too small to take itself seriously. Often, conversations about “him” that began in ironic, joking tones ended in the spooked swapping of unsubstantial anecdotes about such-and-such things seen or heard that “could not be explained.” Evidence, Audrey would ask (demand). Evidence. Where was the evidence? All we have is your stupid anecdotes about bumps in the night, the firsthand accounts of unreliable witnesses, and the rumors that circulate in the wake of what were surely either honest mistakes or cynical lies. “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” is what her Sunday School teacher said, when little Audrey, already a skeptic, told her she didn’t believe in God. Yes, but (Audrey, much later, wished she had said to her): Absence of evidence is not proof, the burden of which, as a believer, is on you, not me.
Later, when she was in college studying linguistics, Audrey would learn about evidentiality. Languages with multiple evidentials have grammatical elements (such as verb suffixes) that indicate not only mood, case, tense, and so on, but also how the speaker knows this information to be true. The Tuyuca and Tucano languages, for example, have five terms of evidentiality: firsthand witness, nonwitness, nonvisual sensory, inferential, assumed. For example, her professor used the sentence “It snowed last night.”
“Because,” he said, “if you go to sleep at night and there’s no snow on the ground, then you wake up in the morning, look out the window, and there’s snow on the ground, can you say, ‘It snowed’? If we were speaking Tuyuca or Tucano, we would have to say it something like this: Firsthand witness: ‘I saw it snow last night.’ Nonwitness secondhand: ‘Mom told me it snowed last night.’ Nonvisual sensory: ‘I haven’t gotten out of bed yet, but I can already tell from the quiet of the house that it snowed last night.’ Inferential: ‘I didn’t see it snow, but I see snow, so I believe that it snowed last night.’ Assumed: ‘I shan’t bother to look out the window, the weatherman said it would snow, so I believe that it snowed last night.’”
Audrey would remember the small mountain town she grew up in as always evidencing a recent snow. In the winter, really heavy snowfalls can almost bury the stop signs. But it was the leftover snow that sticks around everywhere all winter and spring that she would remember most of all and associate with her hometown. On mornings after blizzards, snowplows and bulldozers scoot the snow into enormous piles against the sides of buildings, and the compacted snow crusts and glazes over with ice; by spring it’s so hard it can’t be cracked with a chisel. Gloopy cascades of icicles melt and refreeze again and again, eventually making their sluggish glissandos from the corners of rooftops down to the ground. The gutters are always pattering in the spring.
Black Rock, Colorado, is famous for two things: the Black Rock Monster and good skiing in the winter, when the town of forty-five hundred residents inflates to three times that from first snow to snowmelt. All winter long the locals play host to wealthy outsiders, upon whom the town’s economy depends and whom the locals simultaneously hate, almost openly. (That muzzled desire to bite the hand that feeds is there in most economies of seasonal tourism.) The Black Rock Monster is only ever spotted in the off-season, usually toward the end of it in the fall, which Audrey’s mother used to speculate was a product of underemployment and boredom. A few weeks later, when the temperature dives and the skiers arrive in their glowing aurora of brightly colored nylon and Gore-Tex, the jobs return, and people no longer have the time to think they see mythical monsters in the woods. Hospitality and service kill the beast.
The earliest alleged sightings predate the incorporation of Black Rock’s township. In 1912, three silver prospectors living on the outskirts of Black Rock claimed that a group of “ape-men” had bombarded their cabin with rocks. One of the prospectors, Theophilus Phelan, claimed to have shot and killed one of them with a rifle, but could not recover the body. Many years later, as an old man, Phelan self-published a rambling, barely sensical book about it, which was sold around town in the souvenir shops, alongside backcountry tchotchkes like dream catchers and mounted jackalope heads. Phelan’s book was also, to Audrey’s embarrassment, sold in the lobby of the hotel, in a niche of the wooden rack that held brochures for local attractions and maps of the ski runs.
(Audrey’s parents owned the Pronghorn Lodge, a midrange hotel—not the place where people held weddings, but where they booked the spillover guests. It was a Western-themed faux chalet built in the late sixties, the building and almost everything in it made out of logs. The lighting fixtures were made of elk antlers, thorny entanglements that cast intricate nets of shadow in the hallways at night. Over the years, for lack of many other watering holes in Black Rock, the bar downstairs had become a neighborhood local. Audrey’s mother usually tended it. Audrey’s family lived in a house behind the hotel. Audrey and her brothers had half grown up in the hotel, had all been de facto part-time employees from the age at which they could be trusted to carry things without dropping them.)
Theophilus Phelan’s story had always struck Audrey as particularly ridiculous, and not only because (as Phelan detailed in his memoir) in his years and travels he had also encountered space aliens an
d caught a glimpse of Ogopogo, the monster that haunts Okanagan Lake in British Columbia (what are the odds?), but mainly because throwing rocks at a cabin seemed an implausibly sophomoric thing for wild ape-men of the mountains to do.
Prior to Phelan’s account, the Ute Indians told legends of a giant, hairy creature that walks on two legs like a man, and is seen very rarely, always from very far off, and only at certain times in certain seasons, usually the late summer and fall. They had names for the apparition that Audrey was told translated literally as “The Bad-Smelling Tree Man,” “Big, Big, Hairy Figure with Eyes Sunk Deep in Head,” and “Brother Who Comes Back Before the Next Very Big Winter.”
The more famous incident “happened” in 1961, when Brian Franklin, the owner of an auto-mechanic shop and at the time a member of the town council (Audrey supposed Franklin’s dossier as a local business owner and active member of the community were in the retelling meant to underscore his credibility), discovered tracks—five-toed, eighteen-inch footprints—while on a hike with his son in the early morning after a night of heavy rain. He drove to town and brought back witnesses, showed them the massive footprints, and someone made a plaster cast of one of them (replicas of which were also available for sale in the souvenir shops).
The sightings quieted down for another ten years or so, and then there was another spike in the midseventies. Since then there had been another long—longer—lull. They were due for another wave of sightings, and sure as the clockwork of heaven, it came.
First, there was a spate of overturned and rooted-through garbage cans. People woken up in the middle of the night by frightful noises, something banging and rattling outside their windows. Even well-lidded garbage cans, bungee-corded shut, were found in the morning with their contents strewn helter-skelter across front yards and driveways, especially if they had contained food or remnants of food.
Conjunctions 64: Natural Causes Page 8