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The
image of me is made up of thousands of tiny dots: liquid crystal
particles of information with one face. I can see only one face
because that is all there is. On the screen I am simple. Me, I
exist in all realities, with all choices made, all paths taken,
all at once, now.
With
the sound turned off I can watch the world as it appears through
a closed window: soundproof, emotion-proof, analyzable from a distance.
Detached from me, I know I am being watched; my back feels myself
watching, watching myself watching, analyzing my analysis of this
video version of reality. But if I am watching me, who is the other?
Who is the concurrent me feeling my watching as if my back were
a highly tuned sensory organ, as if I were another and not myself
at all?
Some
faces are more prevalent, more haunting, more imbedded in the strata
of my current situation(s). They shape my perception of me and my
simpler half. Sometimes I think I'm the simpler one, less detailed
than my other, composed of blurry dots as opposed to his hard edges.
When I'm afraid and think I want someone, want him, want to be him,
I know he's there. Underneath and above. Next to. He's my Siamese
twin.
It's
OK. I can turn him off. Erase him, fast-forward. But he's still
there, really. If I could turn my emotions on I would know how much
I want him, want to be him, and I sometimes remember I already am,
with one face peering out over the landscape, tiny dots pressed
against the glass. Sometimes I am grateful to forget, knowing that
this anesthesia is better than actually having to go through with
it all. That this silent channel-surfing is painless.
If trauma
causes bifurcation of the self, how much trauma are we talking about?
And how do we measure that from anything other than experience,
and when do we unconsciously determine that enough trauma has occurred
to warrant a splitting, a fracturing, a fragmentation toward a more
liquid state? Or are we always splitting? Wearing away like stone?
Evaporating like glaciers into something else?
I like
the sun, because it doesn't wear away at things like wind and water
do. In the sun I can connect with the fire inside me, the connecting
fire that bakes my history like flashburn onto my skin. Sun raises
maps on the planet's surface: scorched earth morphed into snakeskin,
each hexagonal entity a mirror of my brain's anatomy, my own individual
private moments and the space in between.
Is trauma
only two-dimensional, or does it extend along three axes, with depth,
volume, and distance? Am I at the intersection of these three planes?
X, Y, and Z? Do I separate from that union every time I bifurcate,
splitting further and further from what is essentially me? The essentials
of me; my essence at the apex? Is that why home seems so far away,
seeing it only in the distance, the collision of X, Y, and Z without
me?
Water
connects me to my mortality. We are born from water, from the source.
Eventually we find our way downstream into the basin toward which
all life perpetually spins. Me, I was always afraid of the ocean,
afraid of drowning and being pulled out to sea. Afraid of being
lost out there, even if I was drowned and bloated, because I can't
lose that control, can't lose all that. Something about the blueness
of it all, like the sky, so painfully beautiful and magnetic, but
empty and inhospitable. I have grown to think we will all be killed
by that which is most beautiful to us. I know I will be killed in
my search.
If I
am at the intersection of dimensionality, the world unfolds from
inside me. My point of view is the only point of view, my eyes 3-D
cameras of a world I scripted and inhabit. My bifurcations sharpen
my senses since seeing and moving through this plasma are more difficult
than it would be at my origin. But I hardly remember my origin now,
just snapshot memories, blurring away out of focus, overexposed
and crumbled like old paper.
One
image of me is swimming--treading water--and the other is in the
desert, crossing a ridge of dunes looking for something. Something
to drink? Or maybe some of that fire. I am on the boundary between
life and death, between here and not here, and I know that neither
way is the road for me; that I will always straddle these moments
of birth and death until I do give up and allow myself to cross
over. To somewhere else. I have always been afraid of living, it
occurs to me, of living too far from the ocean; Middle America and
its claustrophobia frightens me, all that Life.
I prefer
these dots mashed against the glass. Their fragmentation eases me.
Tiny dots of me. And nothing else.
Copyright
© 2000 Travis Jon Mader. All Rights Reserved.
Travis
Jon Mader: Electronic Publication in: Duct Tape Press, Outsider
Ink, 3AM Magazine, Red River Review; Print Publication in: Stanford
U. Masque, U. of Houston Virus Board, OutSmart Magazine; studied
playwriting with Edward Albee; currently resident dramaturg at
Alley Theatre, Houston, TX.
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