Not a sentence, but a breath, a caesura.

 

 

'Was it a bittersweet goodbye?'
'Happy to see your brother but happy to have your space back before the next person?'

My friend sent me those texts as I sat on the bus after dropping my little brother and his friend off at the airport. Part of me was deeply offended that I could be so misunderstood, that someone would blow off something that lived its deep rich life inside of my blood, beating inside of my heart and flowing through my veins and his at the same time, in a sympathetic rhythm, more resonant than almost any connection I have in this lifetime. I thought about where that hurt came from, as I flipped back through the twinges in my heart, equal parts emotion and image anchoring them to physical sensations, concrete places that reside in various corners of my body.

A midnight phone call this last year, his voice heavy with tears. In his final year of college, his future bright and clear as dawn breaking and he had broken up with his girlfriend of four years. They had grown so much and so different from high school to then, and he knew it was time. I remember being like her, scared of the unfamiliar, clinging to a person to sustain me because I didn't know how to sustain myself. But he had someone to teach him how assessable the world was, he had me. I had no one when I was his age, so I felt for them both, in different ways. Unmooring himself to prepare for leaving our hometown, the womb of his university, the familial warmth of his childhood friends to be an advocate for his own future, something about leaving her sent him reaching out for me.

I know when it is time to be a mother. I know who he was calling for. Me and more than me, because our mother is unable to hear us or relate to us, lost in a world of her own construction that has no room for anyone else's needs. I saw what he couldn't, he has so embarrassed deep down, because he didn't want to be with her, but he didn't want her to be with anyone else. His childhood and his manhood lived inside of her memory, he had given all of it to her with time and circumstance, and I could feel his fear that those parts of himself might evaporate when she holds another man's hand. That they wouldn't mean anything anymore. That like a breadcrumb path in the woods, a rejection of his past might make it hard to find his way home. So he called me. Of course he called me.

Bittersweetness is the knowledge that I was receiving these midnight moments that belonged to someone else, that this rush of love and tenderness belongs to the person who birthed the voice on the other side of that phone. Bitter because I was doing someone else's job, Sweetness because of how much I loved doing it. Anger at the incompetence of our mother, coupled with the fierce Joy of knowing that unlike me, he had someone.

'How is your visit with your brother going?'
'How did it go?'

Another friend, another text asking me to qualify my experience with my baby brother in superficial terms. Both individuals I was texting with are people whom I share intimate, intellectual relationships with, whom would never want to hurt my feelings, yet seemed to have inadvertently thrown a punch that landed. I'm still out of breath from rereading that last text in particular. 'Good' is a stupid word that has no place in my experiential vocabulary. It isn't true or real, its a label, a box, a dead end.

That is the opposite of what this past week was for the both of us. His visit was a celebration of leaving the last bits of his childself behind, a specific rite of passage into his future. I knew he was coming to me, because I was Mother and Father, his degree in Construction Management may have something to do with my own career path, and he had no one else to talk to about learning how to use tools and gaining favor from the various trades working around him. To honor his passion I sent him a gift to help him build his first tool kit. My mother is trying to start a business doing reiki and tarot readings, feng shui and meditation, promising to help people find their 'authentic' selves. She has never been curious about who her own children are and what makes us our specific selves.

Years ago, when I tried to communicate to my grandmother what my mother is underneath the character she is playing, my mother got to her first, and no one will answer the phone when I call anymore. She tells them whatever she wants, and no one is curious to know me or about me in my own family. Like I have no childhood, like I was always an orphaned adult, I watched my past evaporate into artificial constructs my mother uses to support whatever her current character happens to be. My grandmother is telling everyone that I have an undiagnosed mental illness. But amidst all the yarn being spun, my younger siblings have managed to cling to my back as I escaped, thank god its so fucking strong. My best feature, really.

I knew he was coming for the mother part of me, but I didn't realize until the moment I saw him that he was coming to slay her.

After this previous summer working on his first construction site, he had developed a thickness in his chest and arms that will eventually become a barrel containing his beautifully articulate heart. There is a quickness of response and a depth in his awareness that tells me that my job here is mostly done. I am released from holding myself inside of an archetype that I have been forced to wear, and even though I have loved wearing it, my little brother came to set me free from my own real life fairy tale. To meet the person behind the Mother.

He is like pure sunshine, he could have stayed with me forever if he wanted. But I am not sad that he left, because I am something different now, because I was sending him out to be in his clear, bright future, and thankfully, neither of us are afraid of this dawn.

I guess it was a good visit.

silt deposited on the cogs of a finely tuned machine after the seawater of a tsunami recedes,

 

 

dreams continue to surface, now that I am stepping farther and farther from the place where I worked my body ragged and fell easily into deep and dreamless sleep. The past two nights have felt like a waste, like I am doing hard work even when unconscious, and there is no rest in my body when I open my eyes to the murky winter light.

alone in a house that's under construction, but there are so many different houses, a long miniseries of moments before it is a different house and different circumstances. Sometimes I've been running from someone, but I only know that because of the foreboding feeling as I build a small nest of blankets and pillows on the frame of a couch and turn on one light above that space, to protect me from the overwhelming darkness contained in the walls and rooms around me. Twice I was avoiding the windows, the eyes of people looking in. I surveyed a space that didn't look or feel like me, its trapping unrelated to things I would value, but felt my only choice was to hunker down and wait.

Sometimes there was a man trapping me in, a slender gangster who barred all my exits, surrounding me with the innards of walls, the insulation foam spilling out, the studs exposed. In one episode, I talked to him, throwing my arms around him coyly, bargaining for my safety. We both knew what I was doing, but it pleased him. every time I put my arms around him, he doused us in clean, clear water escaping from a broken pipe. As he walked away, I wrung my hair out, fat drops of water striking the floor.

In the last episode I only spoke to him through the wood of a caution taped door, and while it felt as though I could make the wall give way with little effort, I knew he would see, so paused to consider my options. As I looked around, I realized I was in my childhood home, and suddenly saw my only escape route was out the window in my mother's room. Still staring at the piece of door in front of me, I saw down the hallway to those windows, the colors of her bedroom, the blue sarong draped over one particular open window blowing in a breeze. It was the window with the gardenia bush underneath it, and the pear and apple trees that never fruited, a few paces away, and it was sunny and refreshing and free outside of it.

When I opened my eyes, the fabric hanging of the windows in my own room let just enough light in that I could distinguish the pattern of the wind as it blew snow back and forth, weaving as it fell.





A few months ago I dreamed I was on a construction site that had torn everything down, but the foundations of a house. In the dirt, I came across a vessel, a pot like those we dig up in roman ruins. Inside, sticking out of the hole in its side - was a fish, stiff from using all the muscles in its body to try to breath. I picked it up, filled with respect for this creature managing to stay alive in an environment where it couldn't even breath, and I knew there was water underneath the foundations I could put it in. The foundation resembled a roman system for radiant heating - small columns at regular intervals sustained the weight of the building, but allowed heated or cooled water to be poured underneath, to suffuse the floors with the temp of the water. As I let the fish slide from my hand, I suddenly understood that it would move towards the source of freshest water, possibly finding a current it could follow to a more habitable place. Curious to watch it feel and respond, I lowered myself into the narrow crevasse between concrete and dirt. My pelvis got stuck for a moment, I had to tip it sideways to fit. Underneath the concrete slab, my fish was following something it could taste or feel, but it passed other fish like it, suspended in animation, mouths wide as if gasping for breath, frozen in place. Something inside of me knew that since my fish had been so long out of water, this little bit seemed rich in something that suddenly had been too little for the others.

I don't know what ever happened to that fish, but I do know it is the same one that has lived in my chest for years, the one I never notice until I am asked to commit to something, and it begins to flip around in desperation, as if it suddenly doesn't have water to move through, to breath in.

every tool has a genealogy

 

 

 

Post class reflection on the History/Process of Deconstruction and where it might be headed:

 

It strikes me as hugely important, the ways in which buildings were brought down much earlier in the growth and development of modern civilization - the idea that people paid for the opportunity to be involved, because almost every aspect was salvaged and sold immediately, that the building's components were considered valuable even if the building itself was no longer meant-to-be. How breathing a new building into being involved exhaling an old building and that something could coalesce and disperse without degrading some other aspect of the life cycle of the urban landscape.

But what really changed?

Human Labor began to require expenses previously uninvolved in the process? Or was it the development of technology and new kinds of building materials? What was driving the American frontier that made creating mechanized muscle so profitable? As the scale of cities and human potentiality also expand, how easy does it become to un-see the cellular matrix, to consider the brick and the human vessel for mechanical force as necessary but essentially un-special units of any structure.

There was a time in our past where history was considered valuable, in people and in things, institutions and ideas. I have no idea where the shift was - that made virginity the ideal - that an all consuming drive for the newest thing means that once put into circulation, everything we come in contact with is depreciating in value to society. In our attempt to avoid the necessity of entropy, we facilitate the speed in which it takes hold. It is like we are choosing to define the world not as a system fluctuating around us, but as a system slowly dying.

This idea of modular construction that allows complete break down and reuse of entire structures may be something that gets looked back on with disdain, like the boxes scattered over the landscape from the modernist movement - sometimes it is important to see the brush strokes in the painting, since it gives clues about the artist's thinking, the specific problem they might have been working out in the paint, about shadows and reflected light, about what color laughter in the eyes might be. If we looked at every piece of the mundane process of constructing things, buildings or human beings as if every moment and particle were somehow divinely inspired, how might that affect what they grow up to become? If we could feel respect for each brick and the job it will do, would that respect extend itself to the individual placing that brick into the skin of its building? Are they common laborers or Priests shaping Matter, carving our history onto the earth?

But what of the Architect? Where does he live in this painting? What is the nature of the piece of music he is conducting?

I think it depends on the nature of the building. If longevity is involved in the thought process, than the utility of a building will have to shift along with time, or get swept away by the future. How would we interact differently with space if it was designed to ride the waves of human need and expression? Does it mean that the essential creator of that design is lost in the fluctuations? Are you any less an artist if what you have made is rich earth for people to grow in, rather than monuments to god, ourselves and posterity? And by offering the option to co-create space, how does that fold in the inhabitants - how they might claim a space, relate to or identify with it, and how they might also consider the people that helped craft it?

How can construction/deconstruction be an invitation, rather than an attack?