47094: 9 Even the Rain Changes Once You've Touched Bottom
And she’d be on it. And remember most of it.
What she also liked was the way the light spread about. Some days are like those dreams you have that you can’t tell anyone about and have to fight alone, even when you can’t actually remember. But there’s always something she noticed: some places have good vibes and others not. She liked to sleep where she knew the vibe wasn’t going to harm her the next day. But she knew there were never guarantees. Some things look more like fate and take strange routes. Like when she lay down dead on the side of this street at this time of night in the rain. The whole thing might have taken about six minutes. No longer. The thoughts that rolled on by were:
‘ She’s gone back into the stream’ and then:
‘I don’t even begin to know what that means.’
But what is it to have died like this? It means she didn’t think it was possible to go back into this world because everything had gone. These are dangerous moments, not dangerous in themselves but because of what others might make of them, like a nasty pearl broach glittering on a faded person’s lapel which folks might make sniggering, derogatory remarks about, behind someone's back of course, like wicked gossip these people become dedicated to even though they know it’s wrong which ends up being so destructive because gossip is one of those things that always stops before finishing. So it lingers and has a glassy aura. It makes it impossible to dress so no one can be sure if they get anything true. Take her masturbation scenes. These were about being hurt, angry and horny inside the desperation of what felt like an execution, one of those things you can’t shake anyone’s hands afterwards nor look them straight in the eye because you’ve encountered at a physical level the rejection of suicide despite the persistence of hopeless encounters between your questioning and the silence of the universe. And even then, whatever vastness this reaches, it seems empty and inhuman, this most human thing, like the heart of beauty revealed.
But you need to have a very careful way of putting that to anyone because its not the sort of thing people like to have in mind. People tend to miss the point of sex. Truly, sex scenes are usually a waste of time. 'There’s white lightening and a chick' is as close as you might be able to go. But in so many faces you see a craving for more than that, looking for a way out. The mystery she often thought about was why people weren’t bouncing around happier than they were. And then she considered that a desire for an idea – any idea – was just bait. She’d say:
'Don’t live like fish. Avoid the hook. Avoid the hook. Avoid the hook.'
When did she die? Well, her doctors told her not to ask that. This world is our vast dream. Of course it has its monsters. Dreams always have those. She worked to keep her literacy at arms length but never stopped reading. This world of hers was a world punctuated by hooligan soldiers. It’s why she never liked to finish her sentences, or pause. Was this murder? Put things like this and see what we make of it. Plotting murder requires neither love nor hate and certainly not too much alcohol. It is the kind of act usually done by people who either watch a lot of tv or else live as if they were in a tv show.
She liked cooking, cinema and walking. In these she was able to conjure up mighty spirits and hallucinatory visions. She wakes and sits up and doesn’t cry about the horrors but about the good things, and then she realises that she’s not dead anymore but other things might have been. She perhaps wonders about the people milling about between clouds and clouds. She has a sense of herself petrified and surprising, like a ghost sitting up unattended, statuesque, with sacred opinions about the rain. This downpour is one that at first you hear but can’t see nor feel. It's like the heavens are hissing, with strange projections of light. The raindrops themselves are taking too long to appear, as if something destructive was pending and was being held back over her head as if she’s someone who absolutely cannot be dead. There isn’t harmony as we might like to conceive it. Even the sky looked a mess.
Ask: what enormous articulation is happening when a hand has grasped something and won’t, can’t, shall not let go and is shaking, shaking with such a frantic and ferocious force that everyone has to just let it be, wait until the frenzy is over, like the madness of birds?
Read 47094 from the beginning here.
Read the complete novel 'The Ecstatic Silence' here.