Proximate Postcards (I)
“Proximate Postcards I” is a collaborative project — including the work of LA-based photographer/writer/composer Dylan Willoughby, who assembled a portfolio of photographs taken in downtown Los Angeles, San Pedro’s “Sunken City,” and downtown Long Beach — and two international writers living in Alabama, Alina Stefanescu of Romania, and Miriam Calleja of Malta. The idea of home and placements sits in a continuously creative relationship with respect to our sense of being in the world. Photography is to find texts, inasmuch as the photographs transform into found texts to find themselves, to find others.
“I return to notation as to a mother who protects me.”
— Roland Barthes, Le preparation du roman, 1979
/ / / / /
1: “Sunglasses DTLA” (Alina)
I met the Skull of a young girl modeled in plaster in a museum between headlines and bus stops the first time I skipped school. It was raining, and the water falling resembled the peasant dress my great-grandmother wore in the portrait which hung on the dark wooden walls of our hallway, except that the peasant dress was intended to symbolize the rain I imagined would arrive when, suddenly and dramatically, I fled school after trigonometry, knowing that my boyfriend would likely look for me – knowing he would look and worry, given that we had argued in the cafeteria earlier. But the privilege of seeing him look and worry – the very reason for which I left – was made impossible by my leaving. As for the rain, it arrived an hour later, by which point I had already been conquered by things I was sitting on, namely, the swing shaped like a metal dragon which resided in the park a mile down the road from the school; I had already been swinging and wondering if he was still looking for me, wondering also if he had realized that there had been an argument which occurred earlier in the cafeteria, an argument which represented the struggle between my hopes for community and my commitment to him, as an individual, with extensive emotional needs, and the sort of hearty lexicon required to communicate these needs to me, and make my head spin and spin and spin with him. Or rather, make my head spin a bit with the words I had come to associate with the idea of him — nervy, metamorphic, sensitive, sandy, necrophobic, delicious.
2: “Fake Fire” (Miriam)
The memory I forgot to include the other day took up the surface area of that melting fake fire. And you know how I hate it when something is on the tip of my tongue. How salt melts before you can taste it and then it’s just again, the memory of salt. My underground friends bought powerful wind machines and everyone lined up to be the first to see the absence of fire. We all held each other’s breath. And he, with his four fingers, held my waist.
Then the whispering started. Like a distaste, a bad whiff. Weak electricity passed between us. I patted my pocket to check for a notebook. I felt this incredible light to squat and take detailed instructions, but the fire was singeing the hairs on my arms.
I didn’t move because the moment would be memorable for him. It was a time of determination. Later they would call it “Il vento del destino” frozen and on fire. I already craved the next morning’s coffee and everything else was sky and waiting.
The yellow in our faces was heightened, yet we all stared towards our new god.
Destruction is a gorgeous mask. It is dragon-like in its slithering and yet the twenty four men that stand in it are puppets and masters. Who am I to look at their scripts? Each vial was passed down from the back of the crowd to the front and the one I drank was the temperature of the sea in August. You would not have liked it. It made me gag and I was too polite to even spit.
Later they would tell me the concentrate should have been mixed with rain and what the hell happened to all that acid rain they scared us about in the 80s?
3: “Corp San Pedro” (Alina)
Samuel Beckett said that the only Wagner he liked was Tristan and Isolde. At night, Beckett experienced excruciating leg cramps which required him to get up and stomp around the room. In the year of my similar leg cramps, The Self-Esteem Group for Girls began meeting after school in the gym on Mondays. A coach served as the advisor. The gym floor was blue as an ocean invented by men to replace the ones they remembered. Sweat pricked our nostrils — the scent of the men was their vehement intrusion into time designated to develop ourselves free outside their influence. In truth, I went only once. Once was all it took to know we could not see ourselves without them. The blue was everywhere. All the oceans men had sailed upon, and named.
On the beach, his skin exuded a pallor that was almost painful. I rubbed sunblock over his back and shoulders, slowing down whenever the image of this back in darkness stepped between my hands and the sunlight, in the idiomatic brightness of voices asking for beer; the feel of bare feet swaddled in sand, the rallentando blurring the distance between who we were to our friends and who we were to that particular darkness we shared and created. We carved ourselves from it like bad thieves.
Someone passed him a can of Coors Light. I paused to survey his unassuming back, the shoulder blades, the tawny freckles, the blotches of white creamy substance and my fingerprints all over him. If the moment could be considered a museum, there was shame in it, a public restroom in my fingerprints’ laziness and indistinction; a caption beneath the exhibit that betrayed a fancy vulgarity which made it impossible for me to see myself clearly, to trace what I had done or felt or seen as distinct. There was laughter rolling around us and his shoulder stuck with it. I missed the jest. He turned to smile at me. He said things. He kissed me. I sunk into said-things and Beckett and lips. I couldn’t unsee the marks my fingers left on objects and people. Or could I see myself in those markings, and the signs of encounter, even human skin becomes hi when held by the eye for a duration.
4: “Deko San Pedro” (Miriam)
9 a.m.
Bryher sat on the rocks and declared it the perfect place due to the way it hugged her bum. It was our little corner at White Rocks, although it sometimes smelled of horny men’s piss. You had to avoid it at 8am and 5pm, unless you were into that sort of flashing. But anywhere in between, it could be a small paradise, if you didn’t mind the cigarette butts and spying eyes. Across the bay you’d notice bare skin but not much else. You’d see more with binoculars, but if you were using binoculars at this beach, you already had problems to share with your therapist anyway.
2 p.m.
Her dislocation did not come as a surprise. I went there to use white space, she went there for words and the black absurd of a hopeless cosmos.
2:10 p.m.
[Deko] meaning forehead, not to be confused with [Dekiru] because to do something is not akin to developing a migraine about it. There are two kinds of people and you can choose to be a spectator, a flasher, a victim, or one that takes their walks on the other side of the bay.
1987 – 10 a.m.
Around the corner I plunged into deep blue without my swimmies on. It’s how you did it in those days if you forgot that babies are natural swimmers. But it all depends on the month you were born in. A February baby should have had a chance, but didn’t. And so you can run the back of your hand down my shin and feel the scar of rocks, the first day I was in the sea unaided. There must have been blood, I wonder.
2020 May 7th 8 a.m.
On lighter days you spoke about Frog and Puppy, our rocks. OURS. Not your seat or my seat, but a collective in a place most frequent by graffiti artists and vandals. We musn’t forget the flashers, only you loved to say frog-et, who belonged to neither of the two, but who claimed their spot even when all you could hear were crickets.
3 hours and counting
And [Deku]; neither of us were heroes, or better than anyone else.
5: “Happy Again” (Alina)
Everything is like something else.
I should have waited before I learned this.
— John Ashbery, “No Longer Very Clear”
I did not want to feel what the gate intended for me to feel. Nor did I wish to be responsible for the materiality of its inhibitions.
The gate desired an old friend to sit near its rust-dappled slit and wait for the man to come and unlock it. The sun was not loud enough to form shadows. When asked what he liked most about Berlin, Samuel Beckett replied, “I like the spaces between the houses.” All that remains between the self and the gate is the imperative tone of metallic material, the strange correspondence between a coffin and the arcade game in the small grocery owned by the young couple, the beard hiding the mouth of the man who felt certain he could love this woman (his wife, his life, his fertile meadow of metaphors) forever, and vowed to continue loving her in the present— namely, that pocket of time in which she set up the puppet display on a green shelf — as well as the distant future, a duration he felt guilty imagining, since it would likely exclude the living presence of his parents. What sort of metaphors would the two need in order to explain the coming events to one another? How would experience change them as individuals? How would the continuous use of metaphors forcibly shape what could have been otherwise?
I did not want to write a craft essay about terrible metaphors. Nor did I wish to make a point about embodied critique in relation to literature. Many of us had dropped quarters into the mouth of that arcade machine and used buttons to chase glowing balls across the screen. Like wolves dressed up for tea in a German forest, we chased the balls and ate them, hoping our grandmothers did not notice as they spoke with the young couple about the dangers of everyday life.
On a good day in the writing life, the big gate remains shut. The cement fence is a tenderness with violence its lap. One out of three eyewitness identifications turns out to be incorrect. The dusk puts its hands inside your head and makes you promise to forget.
6. “ATM DTLA (Miriam)
0505: I mean how many times do I have to remind her? It’s basically her one job. Jesus H. Her only job. Karen? Will you hang on? What was the..? Ah, I mean it tells you something that I can’t remember our anniversary. May, right? JanFebMarch. 0505. There, yes. Anyway, I’ll drop off the dry cleaning and the kids. I could do with a drink.
5942: Well, the problem isn’t the together time, it’s the lack of alone time. I was listening to a podcast where they said that the reporting was mostly about how lonely people were when they lived alone, but there was next to little reporting about how everyone got on each other’s nerves when there were too many people living in the same space. The dinner table became the everything table, you know, and so on. What are you having for dinner?
4321: Yeah he’s … you know, I hate to sound basic … but I’m almost out of his league. Do you remember when the Scorpions sang Wind of Change? I mean that’s his favorite song. Now. The one written by the government. I feel like I might find bits of the Berlin wall in his living room. And girl, his KitKat days are so over. He took me to eat sushi, which I suppose gave him a 7 on 10, a little bit better than last week’s chap-uccino. Ugh. Can you imagine the amount of cringe? My lashes almost came off. I’m broke girl, B-R-O-K-E.
7. “Expressive Gate” (Alina)
The note glued to the gate said: She had allies among the publishers.
At the time, I was writing a novel about gates, landscaping regimes, literary criticism and affiliated gatekeepers. Loneliness solicited assistance. I reached out to my writing community.
“But there are no women in this story,” said the interesting male critic who owned a forest.
I pointed out that my protagonist was a woman. It goes without saying that the characters with a significant influence on the plot all identified as females.
“But they are flimsy,” he said, “The women appear airy, awkward – weak.”
“Ha ha.” I laughed lightly and tried to enter at the edge of his statement, like the modest lace hem of a beige skirt. And: “Are you body-shaming the women in my corpus for their inability to display the particular muscularity associated with strength in the aesthetics of masculinity?”
Certainly I was being flirtatious, lace dripping from my wrists.
“I said nothing about muscles,” the paper-mill-owning critic replied.
“There is, however, an implication –” I said.
“There is also a man-i-pulation,” he snapped. “The women – your women – are what other critics have called woke, white Brooklynite careerists with manipulative purses.”
I studied his tuberose eyes and saw nothing — not even his large, inherited forest.
There was no way to understand him. I was not interested in understanding him. At this point, I’d lost all intellectual interest and what remained was the purity of lurid intrigue.
I leaned towards him and ran my tongue across the rim of his upper lip. He trembled, inhaling sharply, emitting a thin clarinet-like whistle. The febrility of his response was disappointing. His response demonstrated little resistance. As we did lubricious things, I kept my eyes open and watched the windows for lightning.
Afterwards, he moved gently, like a little lamb with a loaded glock, through the apartment.
We watched an old film together; he refrained from reading the subtitles aloud.
“Look,” I said to him, “I will give the female character a daughter that will destroy her.”
The critic placed his hand on my cheek and smiled. It felt as if we had reached a new level of misunderstanding.
8. “Decisions” (Miriam)
She reports anxiety but reports no depression, no panic attacks, no sleep disturbances, no thoughts
bout suicide, and no thoughts of hurting others. She mumbles but we strike this off the record
as [joke]. She reports heat intolerance but reports no fatigue. She reports no fever, no chills, no
night sweats, normal appetite, and no sleep disturbances: insomnia. She reports no difficulty
hearing. She reports no difficulty smelling. She reports no dry mouth except at every injustice. She
reports no sore throat. She reports no chest pain, no palpitations, and no ankle edema. She reports
no cough, no wheezing, and no shortness of breath. She reports no pain during urination, no
incontinence, no difficulty urinating, no hematuria, no increased frequency, no feelings of urgency
[“as long as you are still referring to urination”], and no flank pain. Here she verifies the
meaning of ‘flank’ and nods, then shakes her head and verifies ‘no’. She reports no muscle aches,
no muscle weakness, no muscle cramps, no arthralgias/joint pain, and no back pain except when
she misses a deep plunge into blue. She reports no abnormal mole, no rashes, and no growths /
lesions. Here, she appears to attempt humor; something in her smile rolls over and dies. She
reports no loss of consciousness but what is consciousness anyway? The tape goes off the record,
then back on the record. No slurred speech, no weakness, no numbness, no tingling, and no
seizures. She reports no bruising, no swollen glands, and no bleeding disorders.
Physical Exam
Constitutional: General Appearance: well groomed and obese.
Ambulation: ambulating normally.
Level of Distress: no acute distress, as stated by patient.
9: “Dolly Varden” (Alina)
The nametag on his shirt said his name was Luther.
Admittedly, I spoke his name aloud to personalize a question about fire-arms on the hotel premises — a trick I’d learned from books about how to influence friends and defeat people — only to find myself more disoriented by the surging disgust that appeared as the hotel employee inadvertently linked up, in my mind, with the Protestant reformer known as Martin Luther, a man forever tainted by Theodor Adorno’s description of him in Minima Moralia, under the section titled “Wrestling Club” wherein the critical theorist surmised that Luther had been “the inventor of inwardness,” as well as the inventor of “throwing his inkpot at the devil, who does not exist … already intending it for the peasants and the Jews.”
Frozen by product, Luther’s bright red mustache failed to move as I inquired about the possibility of additional towels, security, and guns. “We don’t have that sort of nonsense here,” Luther assured me, his voice softened by the roar of motorcyclists idling their behemoths outside the office door.
“Cool,” I said. “Have you been involved in a wrestling club?”
“I haven’t,” he replied as he reached down behind the desk to lift a heavy object that happened to be his left leg. Using both hands, he placed his leg upon the desk and I noticed his pants were pinned above the prostheses at the knee like a sort of preliminary dust ruffle. Carefully, with the expansive empathy I’d studied in books, I proceeded to admire his prosthetic leg and listened attentively as Luther recounted its story of origin, which should not be mistaken for its cosmology. “That’s wild,” I said. “But I guess it would make sense to wonder if you have an ink pot. I mean — do you possess an ink pot?”
“As a matter of fact, I do,” Luther said. “But it’s empty. It’s an inkpot I kept as a souvenir of the year stationed abroad when I was heavily involved in writing important letters.” Before he had the opportunity to detail the inkpot’s history, the glass door swung open and two black-leather-encrusted bozos covered in motorcycle accouterments stood before us. One of these bozos was wearing the thousand-pocket vest I’d seen advertised on the television at the Greyhound Station. Ignoring my presence, Thousand-Pocket Vest ™ spoke directly to Luther as if they were old friends from college. They chatted about bullets for pistols made on 3-D printers as he removed a room key from the cabinet. Key in hand, the two men existed noisily, the inner thighs of their pleather pants created a sound like shuffling house-slippers. I asked Luther if the musicians were his friends.
“Never seen them before in my life,” he sighed. “People just take advantage of this nametag to violate my privacy.”
I couldn’t tell if he was sad or serious or sad-serious, though certainly something was shifting between us in relation to language, or whatever I had read in a book about language. Just as I felt we were getting closer to understanding the situation, one of motorcyclists shuffle-stomped back in through the front door and said something about the fucking Coke machine or how the machine had fucked his friend very loudly, and I remembered the final line from Adorno’s wrestling-club rampage, which — at this point — seemed to have been written as a caption for a portrait of the motorcycle bozos, particularly since they lacked the sort of chest muscles affiliated with actual fitness. “Only a crippled mind needs self-hatred in order to demonstrate its intellectual essence — untruth — by the size of its biceps,” Adorno said. When Thousand-Pocket Vest ™ invited me to join him and his menagerie at a nearby pub, I said I hate myself and yes.
10: “Man and Woman DTLA” (Miriam)
At first I sewed in just a word. They used it like a mantra, assimilated it into their muscle. I got the idea from writing en plein air and an elderly lady sat next to me and said it was the first time she was supporting the arts.
Later it became whole stanzas in the gluteus maximus. It made people feel safe, that their message was pinned down when they sat.
He was an experiment born of loneliness. Look at the way I put him together, miskin. At night I liked to spoon with him, run my hands from his round belly and into his chest hair. It is a little more wiry than I’d planned, but then I tried to put more effort into his face and well … you can see what happened.
“Please look into camera 2 as you answer the next question.”
The first full line was ‘disregard my tangled breath’ sewn into the pectoralis major. He has all the lines I’ve mentioned earlier. And a tool kit built into his right shoulder. I make all my models ambidextrous.
She’s … I thought we weren’t going to talk about her today … Camera 1?
I built her in the dark. It was the second lockdown and loneliness had settled into lust. I took long baths and seduced myself. My hand became that of a stranger upon my face, my neck, between my thighs.
After that the face was second nature. My hands were adept at feeling beauty out. I stayed up one night and her fingers startled me in the morning. Colder than mine, less urgent. Her vocal chords were tuned just right. When we spooned, her feathered hair went into my nose and made me giggle.
His hands were not as gentle and it only took not locking him up once. Her eyes were exaggerated and his were wrong, but they did see eye to eye on this one.
It wasn’t meant to be funny!
