BLUE NOTEBOOK

Blue Notebook

 

     Would I hope as much from nature if my cat's eyes had not been blue?  She was a Siamese.  Reflected small inside the dome of her lens I passed into the pacific.  A red thread of vein ran through her flat retina, I imagined it to be a river; I was six and the descent into her eyes was one of the first mysteries for me.  I didn't read until I was nine, but I could read maps.  There was an Atlas under the Webster unabridged.  I venerated the Webster.  It lay open at the "M".  The alphabet was the 26-letter name of God. I may have been ten before I could recite it, phonetically, like a foreign verse. I still can only locate a letter by reciting the links leading to it; I only know the quarter of the alphabet that is its neighborhood.  I am certain only of "A" through "D" the rest refract with more and more distortion, the letters at the end always at risk of trailing off into distance. 

     I was told the "M" stood for middle, and that is why the dictionary was left open at that page.  I believed this to be an edict.  The opened pages yellowed.  There was a picture of a lynx with tufted ears on the left page.  Later I saw that this parted the pages into equal reams, but at the time the book itself was magic, and the notion that "M" was at the middle of the alphabet, was a numerological oracle for me, the workings of fate.  I was literal, I had no idea yet of the fickleness of letters.  The books ability to have a middle conjured by a particular no man's land between the end of "L" and the start of "M" thus capable of evenly dividing a sum whose mid-point was a wobbling fulcrum spectral to the physical book, a point non-existent but prophetic, this actual place where the lynx was laying (a sleeping cat that was not a cat) was charged with the inviolate,  a place not a place, promised and ideal, an interface with dreams.

     For years I was afraid to close the book on my own, afraid not only of never recovering this spectral spot though I walked my fingers down the wee black steps marked with letters until I found "M", but afraid as well of releasing chaos, of the book conjuring nightmares if its lids were closed.  Years would pass before I reached those most distant strata where Webster's portrait rested chastely in state beneath a filmy tissue. 

     I could read an Atlas, and when later I could read letters-still grateful for the occasional picture to free me from the thickets of prose-I read text in the same way I looked at maps, as the page conjuring pictures and me diving into them.  I was made to anticipate this by the eyes of my cat. 

     Before I could read, the only timeless zone I knew was in her eyes.  A cat's retina fills the entire eye socket.  A cat swivels its ears, but it moves its whole head to follow motion, and the cornea is like a bell jar enclosing the entire visible eye, which is only retina.  Jewel bright this retina, because even in daylight it is illuminated by reflecting light, and at night burns red.  The pupil opens from a vertical line, not a point as ours, and in response to disturbance fills the entire eye.  A cat's ears open directly to the world, there is a direct line of sight to the inner ear, and the portal is at least a dozen times larger than ours.  A cat first recognizes people by their voice.  They can hear higher registers than we can, and so can divine a mouse in a room we never knew was there.  I could see my cat's pupils dilate and contract with the sound of my voice. 

     My mother read to me all those years when I could not read for myself.  She was a singer and her voice was strung to lift the feeling from a line.  I became a reader so rapidly that I suspect I faked illiteracy to keep her sitting on my bed.  I was afraid of the dark.  I slept with the covers pulled up to my ears.  I asked for a pocket watch, I was given a little brass wind up alarm clock.  I kept it under the covers with me and fell asleep after looking at its glowing hands and numbers. I was often afraid to close my eyes because of what I would see. There was ferment behind my lids and faces emerged from these rippling curtains. Sleep would push me behind them, but meanwhile I built a closed eye under the covers that was cozy and safe.

     I could read time if I followed the motto, "When the big hand points to...and the little hand points to...  It was my first microcosm.   I had nothing more than a metaphysical intuition of time.  The clock face was a zodiac with each glowing number a constellation having its own voodoo. I believe I intuited contingency from them and an antidote for it. The positions taken by the hands made letters, the equivalent of runes.  The hands fit themselves into a letter whose form was commanded by the number. This creation sectioned off infinity; captured in the pincers was everything emanating from seven, everything, like me, that fit within the widely stretched hands at that hour: the nicotine colored light through my pull-down window shades, my Hudson bay blanket with its three stripes, the cowboys on the Castro bed where I slept, the wallpaper left by former tenants whose pattern was martini glasses and an elegant couple dancing, traffic swooshing on the boulevard on the other side of the parking lot across the alley behind our scruffy backyard, the black roof of our garage, everything from one eyed panda bear to percolating coffee, and especially me, pointed to and brought back in one piece from the dark quarter at three or the nearly snuffed out or absolutely infinite realm of twelve where the hands lost their grip, everything floated and time hung in the balance and  silverware was clanging at the corner drive-in, dishes running off with spoons, and shadow figures were leaving the bar across the quiet boulevard, and tarmac flooded the city with desolation.

     It would be years before I saw time as a social covenant; back then I thought the clock made time, like a fan makes wind.  I was depending on its engine to pull my bed into morning. The solar system of a clock, this inscription of orbit that for me is still the most lyrical and succinct embodiment of the amorous soul inside of math, was not yet reduced to a metronome for habit.  It had my cat's eyes, the separate, transparent consciousness glowing behind its glass cornea.  Self-awareness was still mostly outside of me then, memories were prophetic, I had not yet bartered a past.  Dreams were inevitably scary; I peed in bed.  I called for my mother; she would come through the dark house.  It was a reprieve to see her arriving from the darkened den instead of the strangers and ghosts who took advantage of the theater of my closed lids being extended into the black house to pour in from the wings.  No wonder I kept her reading to me; she was admitted into my dreams through the same door opened by story telling, and there she would retrieve me.   

     Occasionally my mother would sing after I was supposedly asleep, and I would hear her voice floating in from the living room. These songs were her private archive only sung late at night, and they were my lullaby. All of them are tuned to tragedy and even the few in English that talked of death and betrayal would require a lifetime to translate, and yet, these songs could still the waters. For me, nostalgia arrived before the knowledge of death. There is a backward motion in grief. It has taken a lifetime not to translate the words but the melodies. They are the stuff that my dreams are made of, grief seeking retribution in peace.     

     I had lived outside myself since the time I had woken up. It strikes me that the most terrifying aspect when looking back at the inner world after the first separation is your transience. Prescience reigns back there, the already happened, the prepared. The mind is already ancient with roots in silence and darkness-a genealogy it shares with the universe-and what will not recognize you in daylight is within their tide.

     Salome, my cat.  Though day to day she was "Sally", that was just a pet name. She was Sally at times of greatest affection laying in my lap, and when she rubbed against my ankle when being fed, but she is pure Salome as the ordaining positions of the clock's hands when she was first to show me what every cat may do-consent to return to the first molding of cat from night and grace, laying with her front paws ahead as Sphinx, haunches bunched, tail curled around, or sitting up, cat amphorae, all those covenants of being, indifferently received by each cat directly from the first silence. 

     Salome was always as she had been proposed, balanced between twin nights, only snobbishly acknowledging her days from under half closed lids, floating on the palanquin of a continuous doze.

     The sun printed doorways and windows on the carpet, or draped a couch with limber linen, and Salome would doze there, only compelled awake by her toilettes-self-absorbed and ballerina-like, or manic, when a flea was in her britches.  When I was finally able to read, I looked down through the page, as if through the hull of the glass bottomed boat coasting above windrow columns of kelp in the coves of Catalina where Garibaldi glint-a boat I once rode with my parents during my pre-literate years. Catalina not really conceivable to me then or now, forever disappearing in smog and humidity; island, voyage, legend, never solid ground to me, but once, first and always synonymous with its name in every aspect and sharing its ghostly nature of being.  After “Catalina”, rising out of the sea as lightly as the moon, comes “Garibaldi”, big gold fish talismanic of a realized fairy tale-a treasure fish with a riddle in its name.  The finally literate illiterate later cast himself onto couches, the book suspended on the floor, a skin diver looking through his diving mask, while Salome floats next to him, sea worthy as a white gull on her square of sunlight, her eyes crystallized with the light, her fur charged with static electricity and magnetized to a hand passed within an inch, standing on end and crackling, a conjugation of the immaterial every bit as palpable as a story, reading for me to always remain casting with her cold, burning eyes into the inherited dream.

     A panther came to me in a nightmare.  I cannot forget him, though forty years have passed since I woke to see him sitting on the foot of my bed with his eyes glowing.  Back then my mother's face was still taut and beautiful, photos show, but I can only remember it once, brief and common, as she is smoking a cigarette at the dining room table, her cheeks hollow as she inhales a cigarette.  It is the panther I cast auguries for each time I go to sleep, his image still burning, not my young mother, whose presence, unbelievable as my own, is a passing spell with borrowed nativity.

     All the cats are at home where I sleep, behind their eyes, passing through many dreams that one complete night which we only have the privilege of glimpsing before we are tossed out.  How completely clear that night is, we can see through it, the room unchanged, undreamed; we can even see that the shirt tossed on the chair has a shadow that exists here in the cat's starry night.  Do they see like this at night, the way we see in a nightmare, stark, axiomatic, the soul literal?  Those lucky enough to die in bed surrounded by family probably do not close their eyes on those strained, bored faces as their last sight, but open them in the dark to a coven of animals.  My mother will be there too, perhaps, maybe with the face she wore looking into the crib.  But, certainly, Black Lightning, will sit again on the foot of the bed.  He has arrived after sliding down the cliff through an endless night folded inside the book my mother read me in bed and then folded into my deepest dreams.  I hope Salome will be there, too.  All those creatures that could already navigate that darkening dream which enters with memory.  The geese too, not Mother Goose with her insane rhymes, but the four geese I watched fledge, and their parents, who have never awoken from the oceanic night and hear with perfect pitch the music of this sphere.    

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