Dolorosus
By Dominic Mettin
She drew my eye from the scattered writings, printed paintings and opened books to the upper corner of her office, “Crucifixus Dolorosus.”
Taken aback at the new instance of religious imagery and uneasy at the crackling in her voice after she had been so uncomfortably earnest, I was slow to see what analogy she was making.
“I could see that.” I said after a long time.
We stared together at it for a while, then suddenly the geometry of walls and ceiling reversed, and the corner was pointed at us.
It scares and surprises me to remember this now (she had been scared then too). I stop myself from thinking of it because the memory feels like a spotlight that could erase forever what it doesn’t show me now, and more imminent dread, like the ground above bearing down upon my fallen body, is urging my every nerve to try and make sense of the present. I see the shadow of a tree around me, flat and starkly abstract, and hear ancient language hissing from the abrasion of air and flora. What has happened?
I remember sitting, beginning to read, and two dogs started barking inside of my skull, their throats tearing, their clapping heads displacing my brain, crushing bone and cartilage into collapsing sinuses, so violently shaking my senses I could not read her words before me.
“—so human, nearly imperceptible against white walls in sunlight—”
I remember my hands, head shaking, my eyes not shutting but flooding me with sickening color, holding the screen, the cracking, the clamor inside me.
“—I have witnessed God’s nakedness—”
I could not focus on her words.
“—bodiless, branching—”
Then, memory stopped forming altogether, now I am here, looking down at the prayer beads Dr. Everett had given me once when I saw her in person, in a time now lost to my rot and nauseous attention, but the beads look cheap and plastic out here. Is this foul breath of sunlight degrading them? In my periphery I can see all their stupid, surreptitious faces turning quickly when I try to meet their eyes. All wrong, like everything, yet I try counting them, unaware of other prayers. Only three pass through my fingers over and over and over and numbers cannot rise up out of my mumbling. They wobble with laughter dangling from my twitching fingers.
I need water but I don’t know where it is. I want, pathetically, to watch a movie, to read a book, to move like spirit through a solid mass, but my eyes are swollen and throb at the thought of staring, feeling thin. I want to shut them now, but recollection strains, inflames the vagueness strangling my body and conceals from me the crystalizing past, until I am suddenly surrounded by it again. The only memory that comes with regular clarity comes like an addict’s shameful craving, having hollowed me out to live inside me.
When the university’s library flooded, we went together to mitigate the damage. In the basement, Dr. Everett’s fingers, too long and far from her face, pouring over the carpet under water, divined crisp, hesitating exegeses on Broederlam and Popova from the rising filth. Her words unbeautiful music in my memory, stripped of excitement and epiphany. Nothing lovely seems to find permanence in me. I only hear rising water and see the thin hair on her scalp and her eyes shut so tightly that her eyelashes are buried in folds of skin. I feel what I once remembered was her sadness at the loss around her, at what that loss signified to her, that we were the only ones here. No mental evidence remains to me to justify this impression of explicable and reasonable emotion at this mundane though terrible event, and it is probably only a lingering fabrication. The shredding texture of time has left only the fleshless nerves of memory fit to make me bear witness to what I could not see then: the restless spirits borne of submerged libraries, the souls of drowned books, prosaic passages, biographical sketches, commentary and analysis and soul-wrenching poieses, all the frustrated efforts of people like her and I who had tried to make beauty-being-forgotten endure, all bubbling up through the mouth of the rapidly vanishing doctor.
While reliving this vivid moment I sense darkly the usual sensation that accompanies it, far off in the distant present: myself, shaking myself with the desperation of a father calling his daughter from a coma. Yet I stand in a lake of ink stained paper, mere audience, or guest, to the shifting hosts before me, not shaking the doctor, not even trying to call her back. I have faith in the truth of the memory because I cannot imagine.
As the memory obscures again I return slowly to the present and a pervasive, gentle fear of unreality, like I have just woken from a disturbed but fading dream, or, like I’m in shock and languishing in vulnerability. I reason that I may be hiding as I begin to take stock of myself and my surroundings.
The fear turns sharply to a physical insanity in my heart, “I lost the bracelet.” I suddenly feel like I have murdered a child in the irrevocable sight of all society. I’m being shaken by my own gasping. God’s only child. But then I see a glinting at my feet, on the ground below my hand, and as I bend, my hand unfurls and there the bracelet rests in madly sweating indentations, dull and plastic. Wrong still, but I’m somehow so relieved it’s here in hand.
I mean to look back into the grass, but I hear, then see through the weather-blinded greenhouse windows into my rooms, the two dogs, there in human strides and dreadful harmony, opening doors, drawers and cabinets, pulling out alternate books and movies, every facet that can be expanded, being expanded. They walk through my home in thudding syncopation plotting out a ritual of forced respiration. Are they bringing my house to life? Will they drown it too? My fist tightens and I feel small uneven teeth and grinning muscles moving up and against the spiral of my fingers and palm, rippling against my skin like coarse velvet cloth being pulled vindictively from my grip and sending me plummeting.
The sky is a white circle, close and suffocating. The house in front and I are circumscribed by wind rattling leaves in deft but artless mechanical flexion. Noticing calms me even if it cannot retract the nightmare, even if every detail sloughs into parts of me dead and lost to memory.
If my neighbors were home I could use their phone to call my house and apologize, if wind had then become concomitant with the new complexities of its inner volume and given rise to patterns that responsiveness and pain could supervene upon, then I could apologize that it has to breathe this vicious air, that it now has to come to know itself in all the wrongness of the world.
The dogs stop, and their eyes are searching like desperate old men through the scratched plastic window and the gasping hallway. I fall below their sight but feel them coming, roll onto my knees to look for an unreachable place in the garden now spread wide and open in spiteful offering of no refuge. I see the glinting again, closer, and my eyes water searching for it, blurring everything. They will burst and brain will spill forth like the contents of the rotting gourds in the greenhouse. The grass, hard and sharp, cuts my nostrils, cheeks, temples and chin. Blood drips into my vision over a shape, black and brilliant. I try to blink the liquid out but the lights stretch in the beading tears and blood like pitchforks beneath my eyelids, prying them open, stabbing my hands away from the wobbling, glinting shape so close to me.
“This is better” I hear myself say again, fingers digging as the void of life opens and expands behind me. “better that we left it there and not gone further.” I suddenly see Dr. Everett in my mind, in her home, in a strange and closing snare of fingers and limbs. “It would have driven us to distraction.”
I see in red-honeyed vision, my finger tearing through the ragged topsoil, a long and shaking line. They have brought me back inside. To wait. I feel a feverish lucidity and reality seems to quaver like the blood and tears had flooded the innermost chambers of my consciousness.
The entire outside world is pressed against the surface of my windows in flaming purple, but filling the room with dark and pale orange light. A screen glowing green displays her words, partially readable between the cracks.
“We thought we knew what we had seen but we were wrong.”
And I remember whole days, weeks and maybe months.
We were entranced by the depths we plumbed, always hitting walls, but the doctor had learned to see where walls came together. Day after day following the converging of planes around us, we began to map the edges of the crystal in which we worked and brilliantly unthreaded the obscurity of art and nature by unthreading our own minds, reason being the cost of insight into divine meaning.
As this passion of revelatory and elusive truth consumed us, we were led into the place where convergency met convergency and convergency. We would often look into each others’ faces, fearfully, uncertain and then laugh in our confusion, feeling as though we had just been shaken out of hyperbolic space in which everything that made us was broken.
I think at one time these junctures were only mundane to me, dull points; the limits of another petty and human framework. But what we came to see was rapturous and terrible beauty, the serenity of nature, where human hands failed perfection, and the overwhelming power of abstraction forced human souls to reckon with the inscrutable deep forms of reality.
Every one of them (but there is only one of them) were like suns, growing brighter as our research deepened, but without light, without heat, burning us slowly.
The colors in the room give way to blue and black as my lucidity senses its own diminishing, and the finality of its diminishing. The cracked screen spills a projection onto the wall, a movie, a longing articulation, I suppose, of the disconnected gleanings of its brief, naïve and doomed mind. I feel sharp remorse for this living architecture too. In the movie, Dr. Everett appears to be God, staring from behind a trellis at humanity in Eden, terrified at their nakedness under the tree. It has the pacing of a comedy, but her fear is dreadful. It upends me to think of God so fretful and disturbed.
Beneath this flickering image, the dogs now walk in the dimension of the texture of the walls, the shuddering alveoli of my house. So sad to see these creatures that sprung from me now so confined, hands outstretched before them, tremulously searching, yet stiffly orant in fearful reverence, as though they are in heaven and spiritually blind, carefully groping for some landmark or guidance from God that they could just sit down and have brief respite from the urgency of their disorientation and fear of expulsion. Their flat eyes turn all around them toward the dendritic limbs imperceptibly ensconced in and along the corners between walls. The doctor had tried to tell me something about it, but her words have been adapted into an absurd stage play. I recognize the limbs as the three severe, narrow rays of the suns which had scorched so much of the reason from my life, but the doctor saw the limbs of a harvestman, bodiless and branching, holding Length, Width and Depth apart, as though to keep them from snapping together into singular unity.
I look into the sun and see a point, infinitely sharp, but absolutely infinitesimal.
Domenic Mettin is a sculptor and writer currently living in Ephrata, Washington. His solo exhibition Windless Earth is on display at the Open Window Gallery, now closed indefinitely.