Notes

How do I explain such a page of notes? How do I tell you, beloved readers, that, the more I write, the more feverish my pace, the greater the pull of my graphomania upon my wrist, the more words flow through me period? Words that are my own. Words that are nonsense. Words that are, yes, the words of others. It yanks and tugs on my wrist, its other hand — paw? — lingering so sweetly on my neck, drawing lazy fingers across as though to bleed me dry of ink, and from out of me spills my words and also the words that have ever made me what I am.

Here, then, are the references as I remember them. I will apologize no further.

[…] and I do not believe she merged cross-tree with anyone except perhaps Ashes Denote That Fire Was, who is building in themself a gestalt of the clade as best they can.

From Dickinson:

We have always borne an obsession with Emily Dickinson. For years and years, and years and years and years she has lived within us, a remnant of some stage play we performed with our superlative friend, centuries back now.

Is it so surprising, then, that after cross-tree merging had been introduced as an option for us, that the one who would seek to collect within themself the entirety of the Ode clade — those who remain, dear readers! — would take for a name a line of Dickinson? We will be ever ourselves.

It was a land of long, rolling hills and yet longer flat basins that always drank most thirstily from the seasonal storms that did their best to thrash the Earth below.

Cf. Dwale:

The seasonal storms have poured upon the grassy flat,
The leafless stalks abound like thirsty mouths.
Puddles form and soon are swarmed with little fish,
And all the arid life has fled despair.

I will admit, my friends, that I had considered penning in the rest of this poem of Dwale’s, for it is replete with references joyful and otherwise — “Within her womb there grows a golden bloom”: you can see the association with dandelions, yes? Those flowers we are helplessly taken with? — but it is raw, far too raw, to be thinking about the death of winter and the growth implicit in spring when this story I have told ends as it does.

And I am raw, far too raw, to tell it.

On The Child’s paintings

I have written extensively on these hyper-black shapes that The Child paints and more about her besides in Motes Played. A little book for little skunks, yes? For she deserves her story told — and just so! Just like this! A tale written in a style befitting her — as much as does The Woman.

Miss Michelle Hadje, five foot four.

Cf. John Keats:

I do think better of womankind than to suppose they care whether Mister John Keats five feet high likes them or not.

On The Oneirotect’s pronouns

The Oneirotect uses for itself several pronouns — though the set you see here in this text are ‘she’, ’they’, ’ey’, and ‘it’ — which serves as a reflection both of its critter nature and the fluidity of eir engagement with gender– no, with the slipperiness of identity as a whole. This is the role of language with identity: to be a poor reflection through some imperfect mirror, a version of the self seen through some glass, darkly.

You will note the same is also true of The Dog, who, yes, is prone to a critter nature, but who also sometimes views himself as ‘it’ and sometimes itself as ‘he’. For better or worse the identity of animals, of ’low beasts’, is entwined with that of things, and for some, that is a joy.

It is enjoyable, and often it is loved, but it is not really beloved.

Cf. David Rakoff:

Should you happen to be possessed of a certain verbal acuity coupled with a relentless, hair-trigger humor and surface cheer spackling over a chronic melancholia and loneliness — a grotesquely caricatured version of your deepest self, which you trot out at the slightest provocation to endearing and glib comic effect, thus rendering you the kind of fellow who is beloved by all yet loved by none, all of it to distract, however fleetingly, from the cold and dead-faced truth that with each passing year you face the unavoidable certainty of a solitary future in which you will perish one day while vainly attempting the Heimlich maneuver on yourself over the back of a kitchen chair — then this confirmation that you have triumphed again and managed to gull yet another mark, except this time it was the one person you’d hoped might be immune to your ever-creakier, puddle-shallow, sideshow-barker variation on adorable, even though you’d been launching this campaign weekly with a single-minded concentration from day one — well, it conjures up feelings that are best described as mixed, to say the least.

The distinction between a thing that is loved and a thing that is beloved is a type of subtlety that we seem to enjoy dwelling within rather a lot. The Instance Artist has spoken of an anxiety that it might be the type of person who is “beloved by all yet loved by none,” given how difficult it felt for it to let anyone get truly close to it. The Oneirotect describes food the other way around, however: ey fears that its food may be merely loved, rather than so much more broadly beloved.

One must never ask an author their desires on where their work ought lie on the loved-beloved scale.

[…] all the world’s a horror.

Cf. William Shakespeare:

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances […]

[…] through a glass, darkly.

Cf. 1 Cor 13:12-13 (KJV)

¹² For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. ¹³ And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.

What a strange man Paul who was Saul of Tarsus was! We, the Ode clade, are Jews by inheritance, if not by belief, and yet even we cannot escape the cultural Christianity that so pervaded society phys-side when still we lived there.

And it is not without beauty, yes? For this passage is beautiful, and so too is more of this chapter:

⁴ Love [as recent versions translate the ‘charity’ above. —Rye] is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant ⁵ or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable; it keeps no record of wrongs; 6 it does not rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoices in the truth. ⁷ It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

⁸ Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. ⁹ For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part, ¹⁰ but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end.

Just as it is not without its terror, yes? For verse 11 was used against The Child in a cutting letter from Hammered Silver, first line of the sixth stanza, from the NRSVUE translation used above:

¹¹ When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways.

Such bitterness! Words as a weapon! I write below of how we loathe our connections, and here was a moment of that loathing, for I remember well the pain that we all felt at that cruelty, but this is not that story, and so I will linger on the ideas of glasses darkly.

The Sightwright suffered as I do, as The Oneirotect does, and perhaps even as The Woman did.

Cf. John Winthrop

We must delight in each other; make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body.

[…]

All the parts of this body being thus united are made so contiguous in a special relation as they must needs partake of each other’s strength and infirmity, joy and sorrow, weal and woe. (1 Cor. 12:26) If one member suffers, all suffer with it; if one be in honor, all rejoice with it.

I have little care for sermons written by 17^th century imperialist Christian politicians but for these occasional little quips. It is, perhaps, a thing belonging more to sermons than it is to the time or the people. Here, we see in Winthrop’s words an idea that has wrapped around itself within my mind and formed itself into a new take on clades and family and life sys-side as a whole, these last eight years.

We are one body, the Ode clade. We are one body and we each of us Odists are members thereof. We do indeed rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, do we not?

We may hate that at times. We may loathe that we be thus united and we may resent that we must make each others’ conditions our own. We have proven that to ourselves most assiduously over the years, for the clade has fractured in ways large and small.

And yet, we are still one body. We are still all of us Michelle Hadje who was Sasha. We are still all of us connected, and if one of us suffers, all of us suffer with them, for even if we may wear some smug smile of satisfaction that one of our dearly beloathèd is in pain, such resentment is a suffering.

Imagine such on the scale of the System, though! All of us members of one body! 2.3 trillion of us live here, and we are all beholden to the same piece of hardware, the same Dreamer dreaming us all in all of our love and all of our stupid, petty little squabbles that make us who we are–

I have gotten carried away. The Sightwright suffered as I do, as The Oneirotect does, and perhaps even as The Woman did, and so we all suffered with them, and the fallout of their loss is with us still.

With art comes fear.

I had originally intended referencing I book I used for a season when teaching, Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland, and even shaped the words I truly spoke that day to fit. On rereading, however, I came across the first sentence of chapter 2: “Those who would make art might well begin by reflecting on the fate of those who preceded them: most who began, quit.” It was at this point that I had to stop reading and pace anxiously the fields behind our cluster of townhouses, watering with tears the thirsty grasses.