Book Excerpt: Three from Tricia Middleton’s Novel-in-Verse Obsidian Situations

Cloud’s artworks, miraculous caskets for the home, are among the spectral phenomena joining simultaneous time with space; they are magnetic forcefields, dotted turquoise ponds glinting around the room, redounding her feelings toward the furthest reaches of eternity. There isa funny melancholy to how we met in this dimension of time. Material precognitions from years earlier brought us together in this odd conglomeration much later in our shared life span. We are still struggling a little to be seen, but we are here. Eyes want so much to refuse the gentle frailty of this lostness we adore out of shame for their own inadequacy. To be open to this unknown is to get inside of things themselves, or to be the doting reliquary sheltering them in return. Come into being this little stray without much place in the world if you like, such a creature is just bright enough to announce that yes, perhaps this transfigurations momentarily beyond you, but not too far—see, if you can!

I find it easy to be her things, almost like she has made this all for me, inviting me particularly to be this weathered blanket or loose strand of hair sewn into its fabric, to slip through one of the many cigarette burns in the blanket, emerging into a new world as that black hole. The softer side of object relations is the experience of all matter as alive, is the feeling of potential transference with all beings through transient, aleatoric associations prone to dissolving before one’s eyes, is to love only a temporary mother, is to mourn her loss indelibly.

“Misplaced jetsam waif, you can’t go on trampling the streets day and night like some guttersnipe wanderer, you need a home, a snug place to call your own, to reflect upon what happens while you are out there circulating yourself,” the star cloud said to me.

“Yes, I know, I am looking for this place, believe me, I am,” was my lonesome reply.

It can be so agonizing, this disintegrating existence, but at least I am able to be here, to experience this moment of collapse, illuminated as this modest speck of dust by a faraway star. I am a solitary, provisional spark, momentarily picking up her blazing light across the night, the transitory images she reflects in my eyes decomposing before me as quickly as they appear. It would make me sob uncontrollably to finally be invited back home again, back to my unknown home, but I do not hold out much hope for that ever happening.

Relegated to the domestic sphere, as bought children or housewives fluctuating in time, I love those old florid, romantic aesthetics precisely because they were rejected at a decisive moment as too effete, too profligate. Disdain saturates the drapery, reiterating its ridicule as the eternal return of scorn; the collective contempt for these delicate visions can be murderous at times. Neoclassicism, minimalism, or: the stylistic origins of denial as decorative motif.

As if by some longstanding routine, avoidance, fear, and distrust all make their appearance: fear of me, an avoidance of my form, and distrust in creative overflow culminate into pointless frustrations over an inescapable, possibly illusory sense of private irrelevance. As a ruin compelled to continue no matter what befalls me, I deliberately adorn myself in the sources of this defensive derision, as a makeshift, disintegrating home, wandering around worthlessly as the world, omnipresent, superfluous, and forgotten. Dwelling somewhere within this outlandishly broken Rocaille confusion—living counteractively to riches as a formal consideration—is elemental to the work I do. I am on an unwavering collision course with hurt and the rejection of unusual artworks at all times. It is difficult for me to grasp what is going on from within any given material I might occupy, and even more confounding for others to comprehend why one might create something they also found to be totally out of line, situating the conversation there; but I have always loved the abused and discarded among us the most. Antipathy toward forms we’ve reduced to nothing, rendered unto death as idiomatic décor, loathing the irrevocably broken home containing them, fermenting disgusted declarations against these bewildering spheres denounced as valueless hoards, really exhausts me. Oblivion, involuntarily prodigious stupor, swathed in amnesiac coats worn with remorse, is how it all goes if you don’t just yield to the wound occasionally.

To make objects intended to hold form out of free material is already a questionable precipice to find oneself on, but to promote one stylistic approach over another in this overcrowded marketplace of dubious enterprises is untrammeled folly. Tidy lines as the in-control, oblate’s version of another professionally fabricated furniture ideal, as a corrective to chaos, does not appeal to me. To abrogate the confusion of existence, as if it were a clutter to be managed, is palpable futility, a regrettable make-work project and false renunciation of nothing at all. What is available beyond this back-and-forth shadow play is something unconcerned with form as phenomena available to these pranks or hollow performances of taste. It is a darkened cleft without limit where only senselessness prevails, but everything flourishes in riotous abandonment to exhaustion, exuberance, always demanding more life, more death, laughing so hard at your sad can of vanta black.

Testing myself to get a sense of the proportions I live within, I ask the air: “What are my dimensions? Do I have a body? Where am I? What can I do about this incomprehensible situation I find myself in?”

Transmuting from one substance into another, one life into another, I can remember the overall process, but none of the details. I just know that right now, I am beyond my own capacity, outside of time as I recall it. I can’t take much more of this pressure, these forces, so unfamiliar are the contours, the timorous formlessness, and the ceaseless images of it all.

“What are you looking for?” he asked me.

“I don’t know,” I replied.

“I never know what I am looking for, and it seldom occurs to me to be so deterministic about my affairs,” were the additional remarks I kept in reserve.

He told me he wanted to set the mood, that he wanted to take his time with me, but we were both nowhere in fact. Sadly, I am only ether, gathering around an impression of a self as I float above the ruelles and gardens, attempting to revolutionize the seen with the unseen. I am worn into nothing from overuse and not from lack of existence. I am threadbare, the heels scraped off a pair of shoes; atmospheric stones are my lofty cobbler. I am an unravelling lethal sheet, a noxious shade of taupe, somewhere in between a dirt encrusted tarp and a fine silk woven in that same tone, as I drift overhead, apologetically poisonous, contaminating the pretty blue sky as this unwelcome phantom. Dwindling as evaporating mists, I begin to disappear. I could continue as disembodied sense memories, as old catchphrases jump cutting through dusty grooves imprinted on a pliable surface, unable to coalesce around a signal that might announce these sentences aloud, but there are no listeners le” to hear me. The ever-encroaching effects of reality are no longer a problem in this condition. Old harassments are no longer pressing in. Material that cannot quit this sphere, presences, obscure stimulations prompting unhinged responses, becoming unwanted obsessions coupled with my own lack of any discernable form, are a challenge to this degraded appearance of a self I carry with me; though I am happy to have these uncomfortable absences still keeping me company. As I am taken in and retained, my life within this diaphanous blue plastic sack swirling in the sky has become a quiet torture to me. I am surrounded by vibrating atmospheres that cannot be consolidated into consciousness, for there is nothing le” for me to hang on to in here, however relaxed my fading handle on things becomes. What I might perceive this silhouette of a self to be, my persistent I, is always sweeping in and out of this bag. My contents are constantly replaced with new impressions that never quite cohere into memories that lamentably haunt me anyway. The relentless impulse to make new language as a confused recording of my own forgetting shatters what could loosely be called my identity into disjointed shards that do not reharmonize into their prior configuration. Me, it, is lucky to have made it so far without ever having made one rational or calculated decision. I really do deserve a lot of credit for this tremendous feat in objectively hostile circumstances. That I might also record whatever else satisfies my caprices along the way, being and observing everything, is my contribution to a culture that offers mostly pain, loss, and neglect—not as an imaginary salve, but to confirm your suspicions.

He said to me later, “I am interested in feelings, emotions, a lot more than I can say.”

Silently I shook my head and put the down phone.