Valerie and Arianna Talk
11 August 2008
I’ve been having trouble lately, getting going and going for real. It’s bound to happen. It’s normal to get confused. It’s a good thing to throw away a stack of well-written paper because they don’t make sense and hence are not well written. It’s OK. And so, after deciding another trip to the trash bin was in order, I wrote a practice conversation for some focus where I think I’m failing.
Arianna oils herself up. Valerie gets comfortable; she hovers for a moment on her knees, on the towel, on the stone slab which is the balcony, pushing out of her mind the walls which compose the inner-block and all their gaping windows. Valerie looks to Arianna whose breasts now glisten like the hood of a silver car on a bright day, they refract the sun’s light from the nipples, shooting light off as if light were a well-sharpened spear. Valerie quickly strips down her pants to her underwear, she quickly takes off her shirt and throws herself, belly down on the towel, pushing out those gaping windows.
Since a glassful of water sizzled the computing agents of Arianna’s laptop, she has been what Valerie likes to call, social. She talks and hangs-out and most importantly, she’s friendly. It’s as if all her ‘friends’ were in Facebook, in blogs and emails and without them she has had to turn to who is around her: Valerie, a real person.
“We really should go out tonight,” says Arianna from her now prone position.
“OK,” responds Valerie just out for the ride.
“I haven’t been to Cleo’s bar in so long. That’s where I met Andrew, you know. Maybe I, we, would have just as much luck tonight, you never know who could show up or what Cleo could arrange. I’m just in the mood for a dark Italian man, one who doesn’t live with his mom, he could have a girlfriend or be married, that would be fine. Not too well dressed, not dressed better than me, with just enough style so that he looks good and knows he looks good.”
“That can’t be all that difficult,” laughs Valerie. “Italian men are everywhere just waiting for a pretty straniera to fall into their laps.”
“The problem is is that I’ve been in Rome too long. They seem to know that I know my way around. They especially love naive American girls, ones that get so drunk they don’t even know where they live, the ones who’ll go home with anyone no matter how they look. Living in Rome for two years has given me standards: No Italians that live with their moms, no tourists and no guys seen hitting on dumb drunk American girls. That would be like sleeping with naive stupidity itself.”
Valerie has nothing to add. She hasn’t been in Rome for two years, she’s been in Rome for two months. She flips to lie on her back. Valerie’s eyes are sealed shut so as not to notice her own breasts now lumped over flatly, exposed to the sun, to the sky, exposed to the walls of gaping windows. She pretends that her and Arianna are alone up here. This is how Valerie improves, piano, piano, in exhibitionism. What comes like cream pie to Arianna comes like gold digging for Valerie.
“When I first moved here,” continues Arianna, talking up, the words come down; the two young women are lying head to head. “I wasn’t this way at all! I was voracious. I slept with anyone. I’m so happy I’ve finally learned.”
“Don’t you think that’s why we indulge in so much excess sometimes? That’s how I know my limits, what I can and can not do.”
“I guess,” responds Arianna unconvinced. “But that doesn’t erase my stupid actions, they’re so obvious when I look back.”
“So much looks stupid with one’s head turned to the past. I’m not finished fucking up yet, that would mean I would be finished with everything, that I would be at the end. No more fun and nothing left to learn. . . Why did you come to Rome anyway?”
“I don’t know,” Arianna sits up and laughs. The sweat is pouring down her forehead, there is no air blowing past the balcony which juts into the center of the block. “Sometimes I ask myself and I don’t know. I can’t remember having one reason, an, ‘I’m moving to Rome because…’ I knew no one, I knew nothing about it. I must have heard the name somewhere, Rome, you know, it sounds so magical, where things can happen, anything can happen. I just needed to get out of Finland, I needed a change. ‘Rome, it’s warm there,’ that’s what I probably thought, I don’t know…”
Arianna now turns to her belly. It is her ass framed by the two arcs of her black thong now turned to the sky.
There is a difficulty picturing Arianna in Finland. Even in Valerie’s mind, this dark skinned young woman seems out of place in the land of summer’s midnight sun; the way she carries herself, the way she is, all of her reeks of the Mediterranean. Perhaps Arianna can’t imagine herself there either for even her English has been stripped of any hints that it may be a second language. Of an identity change in foreign countries, Valerie is guilty herself.
Into the crook of a sweaty elbow Arianna has fallen, asleep or awake but more likely somewhere in between. That’s OK, Valerie has nothing more to say. The sun streams down hot and Valerie enjoys how the rays are pulled into her skin, pulled into her skin by some invisible force which she believes to connect herself to that great ball of white fire. Sun lying is like sun worship; like the passive sheep brought bloody to the altar. So Valerie lies, still and topless, somewhere between awake and asleep. She digs deep into the sensations of her body, the way the sun lathers her in sweat and sinks into her with its omnipresent force.
Thinking thus, Valerie could care less for open windows; she is bursting with gratitude for the thrill of bare nipples.
The Desert Nomad
2 July 2008
[Another excerpt from the current draft of the current part and current chapter of The Body’s Long Madness]
Six knees drop into the sand led by the eldest and most weather worn. He takes his hand and brushes slowly and most expertly the sand off of a defined greyish mound. He tunnels his hands, one to each side, bringing up a lumpy grey loaf of bread.
“This is how the man eats,” Malik interprets. “In the morning he buries the dough with coals and by noon or when he is hungry, the bread is ready. It is very good bread.”
The man passes the hot loaf to Malik who rips off a piece for himself and Valerie. Malik does not take too much knowing the man does not have much. Valerie offers up a gesture of thanks and a gesture of tastiness after having taken the first bite.
As the three slowly chew their lunch the two men break off in a low toned conversation allowing Valerie to drift above the guttural sounds of their language and to linger around the sheer pleasantries of this situation. That the old man lived long in the desert, lived and lives and refuses to go away and to give up the one life that is the dearest to him, a life that has made him and is all he knows, is a stubborn simplicity.
Valerie would be very bitter at a world without desert nomads and unseen jungle tribes. These hidden quiet ones are the ones that balance the fast-paced gluttony of our missed virtues. This man has never, will never, desire that which he does not have and that my friends, is the great key to contemporary survival. It may be that this is only because the desert nomad inextricably escapes the bombardment of have-nots that make up each contemporary person’s platform for comparison and that once he gives in and submits to the greater societal life he may be first in line for the brand new Ikea kitchen… but yet, I don’t think so and either does Valerie. It is no magic spell, no instantaneous flash from above that makes one immune to the false base our world has become and others as susceptible as rats are to a flute. It is a procured way of life, a trimmed-down way of looking at things, discipline and a connection with something greater, more powerful and omnipresent than our short human lives. Without these things we are always only what we want and never in fact what we actually are.
What are we? As Valerie sees it, sitting as a point in a small triangle before a patch of grey smoking sand, we are constantly between being lifted up to the sky and lowered down to the bowels of the earth, between some divine presence and base animal behavior, we are an experiment in the chaotic laboratory of Nature and we certainly should not be taking ourselves so seriously.
To ‘enjoy or endure’ as John Cowper Powys puts it, is more than the simple words can convey, for to come face to face with our worst situation is to come face to face with the horror of ourselves and the truth of our being. There is the tendency to cover the ugliness up with want, pouring an identity into stuff owned and labels acquired; but that is only a perpetuation. We can only truly become more when we set down ourselves and walk away from the mirror.
This is all cause for the desert nomad wrenching a place in Valerie’s being; he leaves so much to be desired, for this man’s mind must work like the smooth cog of older, more simpler machines, simply. Hunger: eat; sky: blue, grey-cloudy, beautiful; sand: home. There is still the tendency to call simple stupid even though that was one of the main principles that should have gone out with colonization; simple thoughts are lush with the complexity that is akin to the great flux of nature. The mind of the man who has lived in the desert his whole life is invariably more rich than the mind of any ‘cultured’ genius, anyone trained in universities with degrees, anyone who adds a title to their name. If we really want to learn something we have to go back; back down to life’s original and very simple scale.
When Valerie walks through the primeval forests, which is any forest, she meets up with primeval men and women, soul-people, that reside there. Through these probable personas she is soothed and lulled into an understanding that reality begins only when one dares enough to look deeper; and the deeper one gets the more diffused one becomes, so that the ego becomes a shell waving from up on the surface. To identify with more than just the confined Space of our physical body one jettisons the tangible features of our world back into their true liquid properties. When in the primeval forest of liquescence there is only an unthinking awareness, simpler than simplicity for within it there are not even words.
Valerie goes to the forest. Malik and the desert nomad go to the sand. Where they meet is the same.
Bracciano Italy
July 2008
Eid-ul Adha
30 June 2008
[Taken from the current draft of The Body’s Long Madness. See supplement SEX in this same chapter.]
The Islamic holiday of Eid-ul Adha coincides with the day before Valerie’s planned departure from Nabeul.
Valerie wakes that morning, an outsider to what seems to her like a gruesome holiday. She is the only one staying at the hostel, she has been but for the night a large group of German bikers passed through, and was invited by the family to partake in their festivities. But that morning, waking up to smoking sheep flesh and black sheep head and bloody sheep skin, the darling fluffy sheep seen tied to a stake the day before, Valerie keeps her distance and smiles and waves at the group and again shakes her head, no, she’s not going over there. Anyway, she’s been invited to Fouad’s much later past the killing.
Fouad had warned her the day before that all the cute fuzzy sheep seen in every yard tied to a stake would in the morning be slaughtered by the man of the family, skinned and cooked. But that it would actually happen? If anything, Valerie supposes, it brings the family closer to the food.
She did not expect, after passing some time on the grey-watered beach, walking through the silent daytime streets, that the gutters would flow with blood and that blood would trickle under every doorway to join the larger river of blood stagnant and pungent in the shallow ditch. Valerie tries to imagine Americans pulling this holiday off, the slaughtering of the golden calf let’s say, but the picture deforms on contact: a suburban dad holding a knife to an animal’s throat, a suburban dad wading through a puddle of blood spilled by his own making.
Americans like things neat, they like things tidy; they would rather be poisoned than to gain real knowledge of what is actually going on with the food they eat everyday. Here in Tunisia it is streets rippling with blood, it’s the knife tearing between muscle and skin, the knife severing the head as the family stands on watching, proud, this blood is spilled so that we can eat, from you and for you. Maybe that’s the difference, pride. What pride does the suburban dad have but the gas-guzzling SUV sitting in the driveway and the house at the end of it; mere constructs of false desire that scream out, “I must be saved!”
As Valerie sees it, as the light changes through a thin cloud cover, slowly passing into none, the current of blood so wrought with the sour smell of death, is preferable to any American amenity, microwaves, immaculate autoways, florescent cereals and shiny straight white teeth, aisles and aisles upon aisles of plastic wrapped meat, plastic wrapped sheep and cows and pigs. The blood and the thought of the knife which initially caused the spasm of vomit to rise is preferable to what Valerie believes the ‘American Dream’ to be selling.
Inside Valerie is something like a barometer; in absence of weather conditions to be measured the barometer’s needle jumps to zenith when sensing what is ‘real.’ Real is Valerie’s watchdog, it’s all that she ever expects from herself; real has to do with timelessness and real mercilessly excommunicates that which is not real. Valerie knows what is real and not real by the instinct with which the needle jumps.
Valerie backtracks to the old Arabic coffee shop where Fouad and her had an espresso that first morning and where Fouad is to meet her now. She wonders if part-root to her fervent criticism of The States is the backwash of one’s own country so forcefully disavowed. That she is in an Arabic country at the same pivotal moment in time as another Arabic country feels the horrendous devastation of the younger Bush’s grave politics; that she has met friends and their families similar to other friends and other families that power-mongering country has slaughtered and bled all for the sake of another cliche, freedom? Perhaps this is part cause for her barometer to skip a beat while walking along the blood soaked road… but what if this blood standing in the shallow ditch was Fouad’s blood and the country that had screamed out “War!” was her own? That thought is pain seared by fire as the sheep’s muscle and the sheep’s flesh are seared; and she wonders what it would take to burn off the label of American from her name; she wonders at the limit of pain her sensitive soul can endure.
Bracciano Italy
June 2008