THE CITY OF LIGHTS

Hi.

Today, on the bus to downtown, I saw a woman praying with a rosary of beads.  Also found a very old email I wrote to you with the beginnings of my city of lights.  2004. Still my project for the long haul.

To Mark,

It is interesting how, over the years, I made you into a filter for me and my expressions in writing...  As long as you are fine with it, and we both enjoy it, I will continue to do it. (Lazy of me in a sense.)

The only danger I see is that, as my filter, I tend to expect you to react like me, as a filter, and give me feedback and distilled and filtered and clean water, always, as a result of being my filter...

Expectations, expectations!  Expectorants and cough suppressants - so what are the meanings of the "ations" now that we know what all the "expects" mean?

Anyway, this is my project for the long haul - a few years ago I got lost coming back from Saratoga Springs ( I can never say Skidmore again without pausing)

I crossed TapperSee and ended up on the Brooklyn Bridge, trying to find my way back toward the south and Maryland.  

That was my City of Lights - there was haze, perfect light, I was lost and then there was the Brooklyn Bridge. Brass bed stands abandoned and large bits and pieces of garbage.  It was such a threatening place, a dangerous and marvelous place - it was the promise of what was there, down below - that huge city running on lights and on possible sin!  Talk about the jungle, man.  You have it all inside the city that runs on lights.

So that is how this project got started. It is in the raw data stage.

Happy mowing!  I am tired of being a witch and am going out there in search of some pod costume.

The City of lights

by Erica Weick

Sometimes, when I enter the city of Dhorna at night, I feel an inexplicable fear that this is to be the last time.  As if I could only dare one more time to imagine such distant travels to a place in memory.  There, where I found the meaning, the answer, the irresistible lure of the low mud walls, there where I learned it was not necessary to understand.

The story does not want to be written from the riches

The city of lights had no visible vegetation, the only things I remember were the mud, the mud and the mud.

In earlier times, he had told me, “There were lushes and greens. Hibiscus lived next to Baptisia, that false indigo pea like flower, with bluish early blooms cascading down in long arches, heavy in racemes forcing the branches to bend. The flowers soon gone, replaced by long pods that mimicked the flowers, then turned brown and popped open in seeds that looked like the pods, in late autumn, before the snows.”

He had known all about those things, and what to do with the pods.  There was water then, and snow. Something called the seasons and milestones and benchmarks, life and transitions.

When is it that the smell of things becomes less of a trajectory of yeah and nay,

less of a pungent, more of a numbing of the olfactory senses?

when is it that the lack of smell is the best possible alternative to a preferred smell?

and the touch not essential – and the approach, one that is somewhat careful?

yet

the approach, once it reaches,

even now is an approach to the creation of mud

clay circus dark gypsies trapezes

clowns dressed for day and undressed and redressed as kings and queens for night.

But I never understood his approaches.  No clown by day, no trapeze, just this jester flying with no wings.

To this day I swear I will never understand his approaches. To anything!  Most of all, not to me. 

He fashions himself as some sort of a go at it alone type – some kind of shaman- for sure.  But those are not his words.  His words are words of process, then they are words of deep doubt, and of fear. 

His words, like mine, are not swords, yet they wound as if they were meant as weapons, in these precise times, as if they were meant as swords.

Our conversations are matter or fact, in their beginnings. 

They then acquire a weight I can only describe as the weight of a crystal. 

Our conversations pierce through layers and layers of dense material, to me, almost always material I do not “see”, it is material I sense, though, it is material I do not smell. 

What comes to mind is the material of non-matter, the enchanting chapter on black holes, the anti matter material of all dreams.  This material lacks in the clarity yet it is as clear as water in a clear creek of a pristine water in a brook in memory somewhere – the where I want to go to – with you, the one who reads me.

Where I imagined I wanted to go with him.  He seldom stayed with me, though, for more than a week.

Now he is longer available to me. His work took him away for most of the time when I was there. When he came back, there was a misunderstanding, that last time.  I did not meet him and I left without ever seeing him again.

After he/she left too

and for many years there after
she felt the world was no longer infinite

she lost her sheen

her words they too no longer spread like seeds in bloom

Within so many counted words, a contained reservoir,
they would end soon if she was not careful,

she ought not to squander them. 

And repetition then, became necessary,

During that time, she told stories over, and over again, in the dry telling days,

the days of no water.

Her words still came from her vast, yet contained repertoire, she felt compelled to repeat sentences.  Sentences like “when in full darker green of summer”, or when “the light was still catching”, she repeated the best words, as if they were finite and her world, a world that was ending forever. 

Sometimes the people of the village took her words and made necklaces out of them. Beaded necklaces and their beaded wood recited the words, the words of repetition from her finite repertoire.  They would add some of their words from their own finite repertoires. They would recite the words over, and over again, while they let the beads methodically, slowly fill in the spaces between the beads and tell the rest of what is in the telling.

Praying, wishing for him to appear, like a child sometimes wishes for magic to happen, from the clear like almost crystal but more like the silk weaving from the spiders, out from under the bed with the monsters, out with it! – that kind of magic that opens the door to the closets, the lock made out of rusty iron and bronze, and on to the lid to the treasures and the semi precious stones in agate and emeralds and pirates and Hungarian relatives and gypsies green with envy and early jade, and really true clear crystals and mirrors full jewels in memory! Easy dawns and sunsets revealed in jolts and in understandings.

As I waited, I wandered toward the mountain path, not far from where I always stayed down by the docks. I walked toward the mountain path…

When I met them I was not prepared. They were singing.

the children

they weaved around us like transparent structures, like the in between in the weave of rich textile sometimes, like ghosts in a grassy green park, dancing prancing swinging

when I remember them they look to me like raised thread, and I can touch them what they look like brown blond, yellow wool.

garrulous in the weaving is the word I am looking for – that is the word that describes them.