27 Bundle
(ns meme-constructor.speculative.story-4-bundle)A short story of Part VI (speculative). Fiction. It explores two ideas from post S1: that the self is a concept that is always on, which tells nothing apart but to which everything attaches, and that a strand of experience, and with it memory, begins only when this self and enough words are there to attach experience to. Before that there is a bundle of weakly defined worlds. The story is written in the present tense until it cannot be.
Yellow.
Yellow and wet and the noise of it on the hood. There is a yellow. There is a wet. There is the drumming, and the drumming is also the yellow, and the wet is on the hands and then it is not the hands, it is the puddle, it is the big face above, it is warm.
Big face says a sound. The sound has a shape. The shape is round at the start and falls at the end.
Big face is warm and big face is the sound and the sound is warm.
There is a dog.
The dog is in several places.
It is at the gate, where it always is, and it is barking. It is also in the wet, bright and loud, and it is also in the warm, where the big face is, and it is also a smell, which is not in any place, which is everywhere the dog is. All the dogs are the dog. None of them has to be the only one.
The world here is not one. It is many that lie on top of each other, like leaves in the gutter, the yellow ones and the brown ones, all wet, all pressed together, and you can see through one to the next. The gate is here and not here. The drumming is on the hood and in the chest. Nothing has to choose.
This is not confusing. There is nothing yet for it to be confusing to.
There are things that come back.
The big face comes back. It is not the same each time. Sometimes it is high up, sometimes it is close, sometimes it is only a voice from the other room. But there is something under it that comes back. A pull. A shape the world falls into when the big face is there. The world falls into it the way water falls into the low place in the path.
The dog comes back. The gate. The round sound that falls at the end.
The things that come back are like stones in a stream. The water goes round them. The water is everything else, and it goes, and does not come back, and is not missed.
Sounds.
The round falling sound is for big face. Another sound is for the dog, and it is short, and it barks. Another sound is for the wet: it is splashy, it goes up. There are many sounds and some of them are for things and some of them are just sounds.
Then there is a sound that is for the sounds.
Big face points and says a sound, and then waits. There is a waiting in the waiting. The waiting wants a sound back. What sound? The mouth tries. The mouth tries the dog sound. Big face laughs and it is warm and says: no. Points. Waits.
Tries again.
The waiting is different after that. There are more sounds, and more stones in the stream, and the stones are getting closer together. Some days the stream is almost all stones.
There is a thing in the bathroom.
It is flat and bright and there is a small face in it. The small face is sometimes there and sometimes not there. When big face lifts, the small face is there. The small face has a red on it. On the nose. Big face put the red there with a finger. The small face in the flat bright thing has a red on its nose.
Hand goes up.
Hand touches nose.
The red is here.
Big face makes the loudest warm sound, and claps, and says a sound that is for the small face in the flat bright thing and for the hand and for the nose and for the red, all at once.
The sound is the round sound that big face uses for the small face. The name.
The small face in the flat thing and the hand on the nose and the red and the name: all one.
That is new.
Since the bathroom, there is a stone that is in every stream.
It does not come back, because it never goes away. It is there when the dog barks. It is there in the yellow. It is there at night when the stream is dark. It says nothing. It does not point at the dog or the gate or the wet. It is only there, under all of it, and everything else lands on it.
Things land on it and stay.
Big face says: Do you want your raincoat?
And there are words now. Many. Raincoat. Want. Yellow. Out. Rain. Dog. Mama. They are stones too, but they are different stones. They fit together. Mama and yellow and raincoat go together into a thing, and the thing is not a stone and not the stream but a path across the stream from stone to stone.
And the stone that is always there is at the end of every path.
My raincoat.
I want.
It was raining. I was wearing my yellow raincoat, the one with the hood that came down over my eyes, and I was standing in the big puddle at the end of our road by the gate, and the neighbour’s dog was barking, and my mother was laughing and telling me not to jump and I jumped.
I remember the water going up in a sheet, brown and silver, and coming down on both of us.
I remember that I was three.
That is my first memory. I have told it so often that I no longer know how much of it is the memory and how much is the telling. My mother says it was the neighbour’s dog, a spaniel called Fritz, and that I could not have known his name because we had only just moved there. That is true. I did not know his name. But I knew the gate, and I knew the dog, and I knew the yellow, and I knew that it was me in it.
I have tried, sometimes, to remember what came before. The months before the puddle. There must have been rain before. There must have been yellow. My mother has photographs: me at two, on a beach I have no memory of, in a sun hat, laughing. The child in the photograph is certainly having a time of it. The sand is certainly hot. Something is certainly happening to someone.
But when I look at the photograph I cannot find a way in. It is like looking at a room through a window that has been painted on the wall. I know it is me. The word me is right there, written under the picture in my mother’s handwriting. But the girl on the beach did not yet have the word to hang it on. Whatever she lived, she lived it all at once and in many places, the sea and the sun and the sand and her mother all lying on top of one another like wet leaves. None of it landed anywhere. None of it stayed.
I think of her sometimes, not quite as me. More like a sister I was very close to, once, before I could speak, whom I have never been able to thank.
source: book2/notebooks/meme_constructor/speculative/story_4_bundle.clj