Automatic writing starts like this, possibly. Who knows? It might start with a kiss, or with the snapping of small-caliber gunfire. But we watch the men on stage and feel we know what they're talking about, even when we've never met. The rain stops, and mimicking birds fly overhead, looking for their nightly roosts. A single star cuts through the blue glow of twilight, dancing on currents of air like a small girl twirling to the accompaniment of hymn tunes on a summer Sunday morning. It's the dog star in springtime, soon to vanish into the heat of the sun, bouncing alongside the steady fall of the evening star. We see ourselves in the pair, each of us claiming the crazy scattering as our own, glad for the company of one more stable, declining even the tiniest bit more slowly. In truth we are both the mountain they crawl towards, descending not in a repeated series of moments but through the decay of centuries. When we are finally worn to nothing, though, the stars will still chase the planets in our wake, even if nothing with eyes remains to watch the hunt. As these two turn below the edge of earth, moths turn in alternating circles with no guide to draw them.

Automatic writing ends like this: The ringing guitar leans on the lonely amplifier, eddies of feedback spiraling ever louder as the room slowly empties. A deaf old cat leans into the body of the amp as though its rasping rumble were the purr of its mother. A cockroach scurries into the noise, sole survivor of the atomic blast in search of scraps of flesh, until the cat's eye leaps to track it. One pounce, and the insect might be in the buffetting of traffic instead of the twilight of civilization. Each stinging paw flips the carapace over and over until the lights of the midway flash and spin in the tiny brain. Carnival barkers cannot penetrate the din of the ringing guitar, and their arms and mouths flap soundlessly at the laughing passers-by. A child runs loose through the crowd, touching the rail of each booth and hurrying to the next. Cotton candy goes flying overhead and hands fly up to snatch bits of it right from the air. The strings of pink and blue stream across the sky, twirling into an indigo vortex that spins moths, birds, airplanes, and finally planets and stars into its eyeless orbit. It drips ever larger black tears that fall away into nonexistence. From every corner of the increasing void grow up trees of light, forking into infinite branches even as they meet at the center of everything and nothing. In that tangle of light we find ourselves created, shining out in divergence like that crazy canine star chasing worlds across the sky.

This is how automatic writing begins: You take my hand, and every light in the sky, every flower in the field, every bird and cat and dancing child automatically writes its trace across my memory in jumbles of strings of light and strings of sugar and strings of careening sound. I can never recall them without recalling your touch entwined in them.


2009-07-11 Cubbyhole Coffeehouse