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Kate Schapira
enters now sweeping, now pounding, whether anyone ever agreed to it or used it to decide, to be so mistaken in reading another: a throw with intent to indicate or wound remotely, to extend the reach.
1.
To assume that what you’re seeing is the case, or to doubt it, you must first see it around heavy restraining blocks stained with the wrist and neck sweat of many dangerous women. I can’t do this. Terms are what players decide together or one decides and the other acquiesces or feels coerced. Conditions that occasion echo aren’t always equal to duration, nature, density; echos don’t always equate or oppose. One proposes, the other leaps back, voice dispersed by changes in terms, including tears.
Responsibility: I will answer the angle of incidence.
The angle without interference: if she’s really blind, how judge what she gives back where she occurs, deflects, balances, lashes, every motion in exact answer to some other within a circle of rules setting her like a trap. If she isn’t, the next source of sound is known to her as the angle of her secret lover’s throw. Look, a beaded headband, trailing motion, indirection. The main motion whips through the shoulder, delivers enough warning, leveling intention.
Interposition of secret terms, hidden conditions.
I know those words but that question makes no sense. Attempted rape choreographed to a lurch of emotion and flutter of hands. Caress in a character’s voice as he demonstrates an instrument of torture like a lover: how am I supposed to respond? Suppose I wait patiently for all to be revealed, rescued, tormented, protected, convoluted. Rules bend skin and flesh directly; there’s peril and there’s coming out of peril, you said. There’s the director, whose choices we see.
For there to be an echo there has to be a sound.
Listening, is this better? Calculate space by relative distances, my response, yours, escalation, answering withdrawal. Really blind, I couldn’t see your language, only hear you moving into silence. Sound keeps going, but diminishes over half-distances, travels disguised as helpless unless it meets an obstacle and answers.
To answer me versus to answer to me: it’s not an interrogation.
If I keep talking, the echo will come out to meet me: as long as I believe this, feigning blindness. Pretending she doesn’t want a caress she really does want, pretending she really does want it, and the other—poised to decide, to attend—shudders, halts, requires another take. Formal exchanges of control like a hostage, of roles like safe-conduct tokens, maintaining, unevenly, what’s staked out: freedom of motion, the ability to act accordingly.
Roles protect themselves even when the people who fill them change.
Sitting around the station waiting to treat or be treated or to make a great leap out of the next move. Trees sparse enough to fight in, thinnest gray pretext to lose the trail and drink water normally together the next day, as if nothing had startled the players with its vehemence.
Patterns, positions, summon, fabric divides the air.
Peril and its echo, coming out of peril, versus the twist in the body like a special set of knives with a long history, wielded simply because they’re facing out. No one wanted to hurt me versus I couldn’t stand to see it. Assume you know the direction of my next leap but you’re sword blind, bean blind and I’m wood blind, grease blind as if alone in the house, listening hands forced into an awkward position. The character, whoever it’s really happening to, upright in the frame; the behavior, the figure, a fixture.
The movie isn’t but the response is real.
Don’t hear but feel it. So that what’s audible seems natural we hear echo and continuation rather than initial sound. What follows answers something we never heard and don’t say. Reason backward from impact. Dodge, too late. Head and hangs in the grip of attention, foregone conclusion. Worn leather to maneuver horses, lances, damage—what loosed these is part of the secret flinging out the convolution of a sleeve, forest of sound we have to navigate or lose.
2. Real questions for the movies
Where’s the next sound coming from? Who’s doing the wanting in seeing? What can a lover do to make another recognize the shape of love cut into air by projectiles, by brocades, lost in a panic induced by certain sounds, unable to guide or be guided, and remain a lover? How am I supposed to respond? If someone attempts to rape me as long as I escape, if I say something to wound as long as you don’t notice, what is the nature and relative location of damage? Should you have decided against it? Can we recognize one who treats, the other who’s treated, as love? What fraction of balance does it take to change?
3.
Key to the house of secret events: irreducible element rocketing back and forth across a ring of resonant obstacles. I have reasons, but my response is like the chamber of infinite retreat my tears set up for you. No matter what we know, what terms we set. Fighting about the rules instead of over the stakes, you said, but both are contained in the chamber of terms as victory is, and loss. Make it a real question: intention, loosed, continues till it’s acted on.
In a real house, figures would move dimly. Whatever was between them, daggers might rebound, might fall. In the strategic forest, plenty of room for aim to continue, for sound to fan out, to mislead or connect.
Surely the wind travels to this between dunes, between dumping its cargoes, tick-infested saltgrass ringing a bare dip into the plane. Like an uncracked sternum, not shelter. Better it’s plainly too shallow than falsely safe, a deep cover snagged upward.
Expectation knots into the first things you do after you get out. Be flip, say being human’s something none of us. Or show a character, yourself, navigating survival, implying she shouldn’t have, insisting she might not have. Something to care about as medicine, responsible use of gristle and unpredictable smells. “I survived” and then a space on blue cotton.
The needle’s single vision. Each pore an erectile crater. I come in, I want to draw to the tip of this hair, paling where it joins but doesn’t stop, the amount of pain caught between fingernails and pulling—it’s not convincing. It doesn’t bring water that isn’t exactly tears. Not tears because, tears escape, the reason’s in the word: there must have been something to make it escape, not just departure.
Why not be more specific? Doesn’t purge, doesn’t enrich the weakened keratin. Fine down. Gold, dark. Survival of our monkey days, ideas of progress springing from every pore, darkening as they hit. Great swathes on a small scale, salt flats and chemical scars. Like New Jersey. —Watch where you’re going. When stakes were a wrong turn, maybe a fight, you could not imagine. And now you don’t have to imagine. In that sense, nothing has changed.
Simplifications fit like a lesion. In an attempt to match the parted edges, black knots like stories of women who hanged themselves with their own hair. Your flight was, is, specific; who could you tell? Only by comparison, an edge with no mate, hanging there.
The change in scale ensures you have plenty to worry about and you do, you do, you manage. Like a miracle fiber worries fit without having to suture. With your own hair by the barred light of your seamed mind: you will never again be free of qualifiers, of conditions. Cut without having, fit without checking, know without looking.
You will return to worrying about dishes, although the place you return to is not your place, where everyone is dead. When people say life goes on they mean this torque, gravity created by twisting your hair the other way, the ability of the truth itself to distort what really happened. This sounds glib but pulls as you continue to stir a pot of food you can’t say you want or like, any more than the pink and lumpy join of before and now.
From safe visibility I joke about floating heads and disconnected boots, as if the dressed parts really vanished against the wall. As if the broken lines were working, matching shirt with pants, hat, sneakers, with shrieks of control, entrenchments and refusals to leave the house without looking like this.
Neck-wobbling beauty. Pink camo, red camo, blue, monochrome, surroundings into which this blends. Fears you inhabit, must cross. No jokes about the urban jungle, please; camouflage was invented when the storm broke. Girls who run for cover in the weather stand when they feel threatened, disguised as too invisible to care. Your little sneers: it’s easy to feel tender when I can’t see them.
Rain wallops down disguised as fury. Like most things you’d want to hide from, it’s not personal. Camouflage only works if there’s a line of grudge to disrupt: assuming someone wants to hurt you as you, break your outline into shapes that refuse.
Writing about girls who disguise themselves as one another, belonging is a uniform that works both ways; so’s gender, race; so’s obligation, choice. The privilege of not really looking jokes through the middles of their bodies, slices off the tops of their heads, comments briefly. From their walking hide, their plain sight, what do they see? Looking out at what doesn’t have to care to do damage?
Combination of attack and climate reduces you to your uniform including the parts you chose and the parts you show. What you can control, what you should but don’t, can’t, what maybe you or somebody could’ve controlled once but now the best you can do is fling concealment brightly to all the change you can imagine as more ground to cross under fire. It isn’t personal, but flattening.
You become partial to the seeking eye. Compulsion to repeat what interrupts, what disperses you, so that inside and outside at least match. Rubbing the colors of your terrain all over face and limbs, into hair.
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