Home Becomes Wild and Wild Becomes Home
Introduction: Auto Thesis
This house has history, automatically. Two years in the making, this house looks like wonky walls supporting a corrugated tin roof with holes. There are no right angles, like lightening never striking twice in the same place. A bamboo staff here, a rusted pipe there, and a 2x4 staked in the ground. These things remind me of a sock drawer without pairs…or, everything is a pair in this pluralistic home. It is a post-structuralist structure. Two years in the making, I embrace the wonky walls and tin roof…just to keep them together.
If I have committed to this precarious sculpture, auto thesis is the pieces that have fallen off. All I have to do is pick them up. If this sculpture starts shedding its scales, then it has become alive. It has become a creature. Auto thesis is the tail.
Room for the Living
I’ll begin in the room I was raised in: the womb, the manger, the homeland, the no land, the nomad land, the desert. 25 years in Tucson, Arizona. 18 in a suburban middle class bubble. There is an arid smell of dry dust coming in contact with a clean force field. Dust bunnies hump the atmosphere, diffusing light, and they’re multiplying! Come alive by cracking the dome, not cleaning it. These words fall like snowflakes in a snow globe, silently.
The living room is laid out like this. The ground is covered with white carpet, wall to wall. Its elegance is peppered with light beiges and accented with decorative baseboards. It sits like freshly fallen snow, framed and untouched. You take your shoes off at the door and don’t leave a print. Exist like you’re not even there. The snow will help; it’s laid out like a mute blanket. It’s a cool carpet too thick to feel the pulse of the ground beneath. It’s like an oven mitt between you and the earth’s core. Snow angels hover over holy ground. Everything keeps quiet.
Up from this pure plain, a mountain rises in the shape of a sofa. It’s elegant, bulbous, and dusty white. From this soft floor rises matching furniture. It’s clean, cured, and inviting. From this nice white carpet rises a cushioned couch with cotton twill floral upholstery and curling armrests. This cradle is a monument to comfort-ability, longevity, and passivity. You walk your stalking feet up to it and sit down. Everything tired in you is absorbed. You leave no mark on the stain-resistant surface. It does its best to resist your smells and sweat. It marks its own territory by not letting you mark yours. It will have you like it wants you. Laid back. Head down.
The couch holds you like a womb. It contains you. It’s an L-shape cushion like two generous hands coming together, ready to cup your uninsured body. Softer than any sudden illness, conforming to any unexpected movement, absorbing all kicking and screaming. Put your feet up! I can feel it kicking. No you can’t. The couch provides an ottoman. You become an auto-man. Take form inside this bubble belly, and be fed.
From your position on the couch the rest of the room looks like angel food cake: a hole in the middle to contain the conversation, a donut of foam furniture holding people in the seated position. There is a square table discussion, with coaster marks to set your coffee. Remote utensils are laid out in ordered pairs. We are surrounded by glass shelves creating layered plateaus and chrome picture frames multiplying incandescent light. Everything is reflective. Everything is reflexive. The television returns our numbered commands. The glow of its screen speaks more than it listens. We see ourselves here, but only in a certain light.
Stasis
Dear sister, if he’s not giving you a voice than you need to speak up. You need to speak out. You need to throw up. You need to throw down. You need to kick out your chair and turn this table. Everything sitting on the table comes alive. Everything sitting behind the table comes alive. That’s you! Make room to move. Kick out your chair. Turn your table. Take your voice off the shelf. You don’t fit in a house like that. If the walls don’t bend when you breathe in then you can’t stay there sister. You can’t stay sis. You can’t stasis.
Stasis is life on a shelf. These shelves are a hierarchical system, an institution, a pyramid, a stack of bricks, I-beam floors, steel bars from floor to ceiling, a force field box. It’s a crystal clear lock and key. Everything on the shelf is held there. The shelf is the worst place in the house to be, and I’m ready for it to come down.
Three green edged pieces of glass stratify the wall. They are pristine. Old dust has been wiped off without a trace that it was ever there. You have no history. New dust avoids the glassy layers with static intimidation. It stares down the predictable future. On the top shelf rests a clear glass vase. It holds nothing but its place on the shelf. A family of fine china accompanies it, holding a potential for fine dining and formal dinners. They hold each other to keep company. They hold no food. They hold nothing. They hold their place on the shelf. They sit like cylindrical porcelain clouds that shade the shelf below, which holds together with some porcelain of its own. On the left side sits a porcelain poodle, not perched, not pensive, just painted. It’s glossy and unpettable. You can’t comb that coat. It pants next to a chrome clock that’s not ticking. It’s never used so it’s never wound. Time is frozen. Improvisation dies in a fourth dimensional freeze. I hope it can be thawed. I see a picture of this possible future. At the end of a block of musak there is a CD called Soul Story. Melted ice is breaking through two hands not trying to hold it. It looks like glass. The shelves get the picture and follow suit. Stratified glass breaks in on itself. The vase balances. The fine china is broken out. The bottom shelf holds it like a levee, but bends like it wants to break.
Vibration
This thing will bow to gravity or it will vibrate. It will undulate, swell, ebb and flow. It is the difference between standing and running water. Standing water sits in the earth’s cupped cage while gravity keeps it at bay. It exists as a pool of stasis while time turns all its substance into sediment. You have stayed sis. Please reconnect to other bodies of water. Running water has curves. It caresses rocks and is gregarious with the elements. It moves and is moved. It has compassion! Running water, you are alive; standing, you are survived.
A muddy puddle reminds me of a polished mahogany dining table. I look down at a reflective wood grain surface and see myself in shades of brown. It’s a symmetrical glassy sea positioned directly in the middle of the dining room. I stare into the seductive tabletop and watch myself in its reflective pool; meanwhile my brother is in the next room watching Jurassic Park in surround sound. Our worlds collide. Every time a T-Rex takes a step I see a ripple in my own reflection. Every time a bell rings an angle gets its wings. Every time a T-Rex steps on an angle ringing a bell I come in for dinner.
The polished mahogany table is piled with fine china. Every place setting that sat silently on the shelf has now been brought center stage: dinner plates, serving dishes, bowls, saucers, silverware, wine glasses. Rising up out of the mahogany sea is a layered ridge. This is refinement. Brilliant porcelain heaps are lined with gold trim. They compete with the shine of the silverware like an infinite mirrored reflection making glittery iridescent sparkles appear in midair. The stage is set, but the city’s surrounded.
In place of plates are inset sub-woofers, five black holes in front of invisible people. They are infinite black vacuums in a tug of war with white monoliths of articulation. Soft black woofers versus hard white plates, feels like tension. Vital lines are less like tight ropes and more like veins. Speaker wires feed signals from an amplified pulse. It is the ground beneath us. It is moving, active, interactive, like a snow globe, like its macrocosm.
If you want to see this world in motion all you need to do is move it. Shake the globe like you know how. Shake what your mama gave you! She gave you a picture of the world, a life-size diorama. It looked like a glassy sea and purple mountain majesties, painted white. It looked like all the good things, on crack, right? But you saw an untouched snow globe with white pieces of plastic that had settled to the bottom, like sediment. Now it’s time to move. The fine china is taken off the shelf and placed center stage. Stacks of dishes rise up to the sky, gloriously up to heaven. I’m still confused as to whether it’s a tower of Babel or a finger of Adam. Porcelain towers are surrounded by speaker sinkholes. White fingers are stuck down black throats and we see their contrast begin to vibrate.
Deterritorialization
The living room is a landscape. Its floor is a sandwich of soft layers atop a thick concrete foundation, sufficient enough to build something of an articulate nature. This is a story of middle class couches lying in drywall cubes, soaking up the radiance of a satellite wired down from the roof. A remote control sits next to a reading lamp on an end table that holds a latte. Its radiant heat steams up a chrome picture frame around the family. Matching pictures in matching frames fill white walls and line the mantel. The hole below holds fake logs and the potential for gas fire. I saw a spark, but I also saw a closed damper, the mantle, and rising smoke in front of a mirror. If anything happens I’ll tell you. Morning paper and evening news, I worship you. This is the way of my fathers. I’m just a dog trying to follow a scent. My domesticated instincts fail me. My nose is cold. I smell gas, mark territory, and return to vomit. I lay my head on this foundation. This stone. Home sweet home.
I sit on the couch and don’t move at all. My body longs for consistent movement and this is how I know. I am lounging on the couch with pillows propped behind my back. The flatscreen casts chiaroscuro characters across my face. My arm rides across the highest plateau of the backrest. It thinks of going numb and tingles with sleep. The blood slows to a crawl. These are baby steps, backward. This is my arm. The tingling turns into vibration. But this couch is meant to absorb everything unusual. It’s an airbag for insecurity. It’s like the way a mother’s womb contains kicking. You’ve been had. No! You haven’t been. That’s what’s happening. What would it look like to let this old bag give you birth?
The luminance is no longer plugged into the wall; it hovers in midair. The walls no longer form right angles; they bend around a tree. The couch is no longer sitting pretty; it’s perched with potential energy. The room is planned for possibilities. It’s planned for improvisation. It is a deterritorialized version of its previous landscape. It is every material levee about to break. Stand up and see for yourself. The walls bend when you breathe in!
A flatscreen displays an illuminant full moon falling toward us like a diagonal slot machine of lunar monotony. Over and over we are blessed with shiny coins dropping from the night sky. The sky is a black hole, or infinite pocket turned upside down. Moonlight is used as currency, finally. Each new moon falls first on a drywall saguaro begging for its spotlight. It has taken the room’s whitewall endoskeleton and worn it out. You made the inside out?! No shit! I gave the boundary a high five and it wrapped itself around me. The couch no longer has walls to rest against and I can see it adapting. An arm pushes up like an elbow. Plywood boards tear the fabric to follow its movement. Strips of foam hang on like fragile ligaments. Cushions move like tectonic plates creating new continents and new shapes. The wooden frame is bending and breaking. Splintering plies are forming lines of flight. The noises of material in motion grind like an animal cry. This creature is coughing itself into existence. A couch that was once asleep is now choking on its own yawn. Every utterance becomes one, like freeze frame motion finally catching up with itself. This is the sound of a vacuum moving forward. This is caught everywhere in between. Beyond the everyman, the couch calls out as the everyanimal. Its stuttering and stammering sounds like a monstrous coyote cry. Its silhouette looks up at a full moon halo behind the head of a saguaro, its vocal cords are fucked with cursing and celebration.
Every utterance rings out across the deterritorialized landscape. Our probe-head is sent out: the spherical moon, the cactus top, the animal head. Our resonate echo is out there somewhere. It is out there everywhere. It is the sound return of everything that is made. Sound pushes physical air. It moves us. The deterritorialized landscape is formed from the matter of the old. We vibrate between their contrast. We never stop moving. We are still, full of motionless voyage. We never stop moving.
Conclusion: Energy
Diaspora is a desert. We pray for water to return to hands not trying to hold it. This is water that never stops running. This is water that has no home, always at home, not. You are what you drink. Domesticated water builds potty-trained complicity. Tap water builds character. Well water is out of reach. The stream is dry. The desert is deserted, but still roamed by cursed animals, alive.
A cobra hovering in mid air floats slowly from side to side and circular. It can taste the future moment with its forked tongue. It takes a biopsy of the suspended air. My fingertips feel the future moment contiguously. Everything is within reach. The domestic landscape becomes the wild and the wild becomes the domestic. Man’s moans are an animal cry. His body is breaking bread. Bones are made of muscle. Drummers’ hands make a rhythm without noise. Their resonate echo has no character, class, no correspondence. This is the no sound of a piano in a cage. Piano becomes couch becomes coyote becomes snake. The everyanimal slithers out.
Man coils his body like a serpent. It works like copper wire. Man moves his body next to this rare earth magnet. The magnet is connected to a cone. Electrical charges run through the man spool. Positive and negative charges penetrate and vibrate as one. The magnet is moved. The cone cries out like an everyanimal towards the reverse wiring of the moon’s crater-woofers. If we got this right they’ll work like crude microphones. Physical movement makes sound. Man recoils and does it again.
Everything straight is a snake; everything coiled is a serpent. Together we’ll penetrate the house of our body, the wall of our skin, the glass of our eyes. Together we’ll vibrate our differences. Together we’ll move on. Diversity is still. We are talking about diversity’s diversity, and so on. Our home becomes the wild and the wild becomes our home. We are leaving this place, but not for a new state, motionless voyage. Never stop moving. Have you ever wanted to see a snake’s legs? Throw it in a fire. Then you’ll see its legs.
Chair legs become Snake legs.
Home becomes Wild.