M i c h a e l J o s e p h W a l s h —
from Toccata and Fugue for the Foreigner
Both blossoms and fruits maintain moments: they are a commotion. You dye the white cloud within the blue sky. In the wanderer’s insane stride toward an elsewhere, blue, yellow, red, and white are mind. Intimacy renews intimacy, and unleashed eroticism is obliged to resort to new limits: those of organs, which then falter. Furthermore, just as a skilled butcher or his apprentice, having killed a cow, will sit at a crossroads cutting it up into pieces, so the foreigner’s face burns with happiness, precisely knuckled down where the faces of a boat join.
I crawled into bed feeling soggy, and blurry in that way. By then I knew from experience that there was nothing else I could do. My own face, I realized, was reflected in my constellation of needs, and when I closed my eyes I could see it there floating in front of me, glowing and covered in spikes. “Even a place like this,” I thought, “is a story that’s always ending,” and when I finally rose from bed I felt odd, like I’d been bullied. I’d been so naïve. The air was wet, the sky was dark. I hung my head out the window and watched two birds trace their giant arcs in front of me, suggesting the word “Yes” with a preternatural intensity, and as they disappeared slowly into my mind’s upper pool my hum of satisfaction deepened into a cautionary roar. I was “awake,” at this point, somewhere between laughing and crying, and for a long time after that there was no telling where I’d be. “Where am I,” I’d ask, over and over, until I realized that wondering’s not always wanting to know, and then I watched as that permission spread over everything: a pestilence, sweetly corrupting, with tendrils that flapped like white tongues in the wind.
The entire body is a mouth: I call it a red furnace. Each word is less the sign of a thing than of my distrust for them: fleshless skeletons smeared with blood, connected with tendons. From live metaphor to dead metaphor, with the blood of the finger or the tongue: the inner work of the prosthesis resonates differently in our individual bodies. We feel the pulls of the different media: fan and mirror, blossom and fruit. They ring in the flesh for myriad miles.
Eventually I had to admit that in returning to my dreams so often I was only looking for company that was the same as being alone. I had no telos, I’d given up thinking. I watched as one by one my pasts twirled back to face me, until I finally understood that I was myself the camera, that my memories’ creations were destined to be my own. “Snap,” I said, to make it official. After that I was whole, flush with my viewfinder, and I spent what felt like days turning that feeling over in my mind’s eye like a pig on a spit. The wind was howling; the stars were volatilely arranged. To get to sleep I’d close my eyes and imagine myself as a prelude to an exorcism, watching the world fold out into a maelstrom of wire and wood. A sheet of light spilled out of the sky one morning, and I was never the same again. I was petrichor, an apparitional surge. I was a clay head stuffed with flowers in the center of a still pool.
We arrive at the concept grey, the grey point. We kill space and give light to space. In this body there are kidneys, liver, pleura, tendons, heart, spleen, and lungs. This was the soil it grew in, this the hour it bloomed.Whenever I encountered those stories, I missed them. Had I been wrong to push through? It was like that relief you feel when whatever else you could be doing—rocking from side to side with your eyes rolled back in your head, say—when even that, unearthly or not, starts to bore you. And so I wandered, I drifted. I roamed here and there like a corpse incompletely exhumed. I was shapeless then, a real modern boy, and I marveled at the ruthlessness with which my dreams broke open into their own smiling replacements. I tagged this feeling “seed-burst,” “pink leaf.” The world unfolded and continued to unfold. It looked at me, smiling, then looked away, still smiling, and all the while I felt calm, correct somehow, like a tightly pulled drum. My eyes buzzed, my head swelled. My hair moved weirdly in some kind of wind.
---NOTE
The non-italicized passages of “Toccata and Fugue for the Foreigner” are made mainly of fragments from a number of texts, including Julie Kristeva’s Strangers to Ourselves, the journals of Henry David Thoreau, and the Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha (trans. Bhikkhu Nanamoli and Bhikkhu Bodhi).
The italicized passages are made mainly of fragments from a personal diary I kept from 2016–2018. They also include a few borrowed phrases from John Ashbery, Laura (Riding) Jackson, and Yi Sang.
The phrase “company that was the same as being alone” is borrowed from “Winter, 1965,” a short story by Frederic Tuten.
“Toccata and Fugue for the Foreigner” is the title of the first chapter of Kristeva’s Strangers to Ourselves.
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