(002)

Bury me. Like that letter I gave you three years ago, in the tin that your grandmother once carried, containing everything in the world that mattered to her. I want to be the only thing that matters when the house we once called home burns to the ground. I want to be the fire that devours your heart and I want to be the balm you use to soothe the pain.

I want to be the letter you leave your daughter in her lunchbox that says that I hope you do not hurt, and I want to be the monster that drives it all away. I want to live in the cracks in the pavement that you still skip when you walk to work, and I want to be the skip in your step as you feel the first sun of springtime on your neck.

I want mine to be the neck you kiss goodnight to, the night that wraps around you like a dark blanket, and I want to be the morning that awakes to greet you.

When you look up at the sky shining through the atmosphere, I want to be the light from the stars that has travelled billions of years to dance with your eyes. I want to be the space between letters, the silence between words. I want to be the air you inhale and music you exhale when you sing in the shower. I want to hold yourself in the box of myself, like the tin that holds the only thing that matters to me: you.

The Tropic of Cancer

For a long time, scientists had puzzled over the ways in which elephants communicate. E.S.P. was suggested as a reasonable mode of communication: the only plausible way in which these majestic animals could possibly communicate so silently over long distances. Of course, when these learned men and women found the truth, E.S.P. seemed not only ridiculous but more along the lines of thought that men of old used to suggest that the earth was flat and all else revolved around it. At the time, however, E.S.P. appeared to be logical, as who really can understand the mysterious instinct of animals with their assumed sub-par intelligence. As time progressed, however, the idea of a lesser intelligence designated for animals faltered as men found that sparrows are finely tuned to the gravitational patterns of the planet; and in the same line found that the elephants had not been communicating through E.S.P. but through sound frequencies too low for the human ear to pick up.

Like elephants, the mountains also have long been communicating through this low rumble for millions of years. Across the great expanses of ocean and land, mountains have been rumbling, grounded by the weight of all the words they are made to pass on.

Suppose this method of communicating: that of echoes and travelling sound was not merely something for elephants and mountains and the bigger creatures of the world. Suppose then that our early ancestors also communicated through the calling out of ones feelings, as we emulate now through our own open mouths.  Sound, being both a means and a signal gives us the one tool that we can use to share with another being the thoughts that we ourselves have. Like mountains and elephants, we too transmit our thoughts through echoes and resonances.

Consider this: Dr. José Ganéa is no longer doctor, but hunter. The flesh that he will one day come to repair is atonement for the flesh that sharpened stone and spear now tears. José, although he knows that his own self is not the self of another, has no name, for names can only mean something if there is someone to designate meaning. Therefore, José, being far closer to being José than the man next to him, is still further from being José than he will ever be again. For now, he is Hurghk. Hurghk faces the same challenge that each of his descendants will face: he sees in his view an attractive woman. For all his lives of ripping apart and sewing together flesh, the most human and animal of qualities, Hurghk knows nothing of how to show this woman what he wants: that being herself.

This woman is Anaïs Gentileschi, but far removed from the Anaïs that at sixteen gave herself away to the most alluring, Anaïs at this present moment is hardened, a strong woman who wholly deserves the term ‘woman’ in a way that each generation values for its meaning in the same primordial sense. Anaïs, like José, will not yet know the name of Anaïs. Now, Anaïs is Ayglk. Ayglk is a hunter as much as Hurghk, her long fingers are strong and her eyes are fierce.

It could be Ayglk’s fierce eyes that call Hurghk to her, or it could be the shape of her legs, the length of her fingers, or the resonance of her voice. However, this connection could also go back much further, to a time where Anaïs and José meet for the umpteenth first time in a park outside a laboratory, a time where the moon and the ocean first fall in love, a time where two particles meet to make the first hydrogen atom.

In this age, Hurghk follows instinctually what all men have done since the beginning. He begins to woo Ayglk, at first with his own merits, a transaction for her attention not shared with any other. Once gained, Hurghk, like José will not stop. He finds the branches that burn the longest; he finds the sweetest smelling things; the brightest, most colourful objects. He carves for her ornate stones, for her and the rest of humanity to admire. He brings to her the best foods; paints for her the vivid portraits of the world he wants to give her, the world that men will admire for millennia as a mark of each persons history. But before it belonged to anyone else, this history belonged to just two.

As soon as Hurghk had won Ayglk’s devotion, he found once more a chasm separating them from becoming like the atom. Gesture, the first means of communication was falling short of everything Hurghk wished to say. In the same way, Ayglk found that silence, the great carrier of emotion was grossly inadequate. Together, they began to search with their hands and ears and eyes for the ways in which to tell another the things that only you may know.

Years may have passed, but perhaps it was days, or hours or centuries before they found the first seeds of conversation in the most primitive cries: sound that escaped one’s mouth when one felt too much.

Perhaps it was in one’s sleep that these first cries were found, or maybe it was the sound of the heart breaking through ones mouth as they observed the thing they cared most about being destroyed. Whatever it may have been, the first sound our ancestors made would have been weighted down with all the feeling of every being who had ever lived. And then it began. The first word to be spoken was ‘love’. For a time people would walk around pointing to the things they felt most strongly about, announcing ‘love’ as their name. Soon the world was filled with men and women naming love to the things that made them feel.

‘You’ was the next word, to give meaning to the things that were not themself. ‘You’, you are not I. You are separate from me, but you are now you, and valid because of that. The next words to follow were ‘Fire’, ‘Food’, ‘Look’, ‘Mother’, ‘Father’ and ‘Child’.  ‘Goodbye’ was said when the first person had to leave, ‘Hello’ was said as they came back. ‘Beautiful’ was said after ‘Why’, just as ‘Sorry’ followed ‘Hurt’. ‘Everything’ followed ‘Nothing’, which birthed ‘Make’, ‘treasure’ and ‘Destroy’. The last few words were ‘Them’, ‘Us’ and ‘I’. ‘I’ was one of the last words to be said, and only came about because men and women found that the names they gave things also gave weight, a reason to hold each object to itself, and the heavier other things became, the lighter they themselves felt. Thus, ‘I’ only came to ground each individual to the ground, and now ‘I’, the heaviest word of all, sinks people deeper than ever.

At this time, men still spoke with their hands as well as their mouth. They felt as though the words that they spoke could still be fallible, that some things may not be understood. Ayglk could be standing next to the flames cooking the meat and Hurghk may say ‘love’. For all Ayglk knows, Hurghk could be pointing to the flames, the bringer of heat and light, or the meat which would keep him alive, both of which seem a more likely object of his love than her, a desire yet no more necessary for his survival than the paintings on the wall. Without Hurghk pointing at her, Ayglk may never realise that each time Hurghk announces ‘love’, he is announcing her name, and thus naming all that he feels most strongly about as a testament to her.

Suppose then, that this was the birth of the spoken word. In the days of our ancestors, communication was valued for more than mere conversation. In the age of stone, of fire and of cave walls and gesture, the ability to use ones mouth, to shape and mould the sound as a sculptor does his clay, was of an importance that we fail to understand now. In a time where men spoke as mountains, the ability to say things was easily shared. The things that one man would shout would be echoed by all those who heard it.

Thus, if a man: Hurghk was to go away hunting and miss the chance to say something to his love: Ayglk, he could simply yell out  ‘I love you’, and know with all certainty that it would reach her ears. But just as ‘I love you’ would reach her ears, it would reach many others. As one man shouts his love, all who hear it would repeat it, each man standing as a mountain from which the sound would bounce off. Soon, a whole expanse of land could be covered with the echoes of ‘I love you’, and each who heard it would feel as if it was especially for them, and lock a piece of it away in their hearts before echoing it onwards.

In the days of mountains, men understood the importance of things said in the same way that they understood the importance of stone weaponry and the importance of art. In an age of telephones, of daily newspapers and disposable love, we seem to have forgotten the significance of permanence. Like the cave paintings and weapons of our ancestors, the words that they once shouted over savannah and plain still reverberate to this day in the hearts of mountains, still echo in the rumbling of elephants.

(001)

I once told my brother I was a herbivore. It feels more right than saying I can’t eat the flesh of something that once lived. He said it sounded like I could be a dinosaur. I said I was a dragon in another life and he agreed. I didn’t tell him that my skin burns with all the lives that could have been, and my stomach aches with the hollow echo of loss.

At night when I call out in my sleep it is like all my past lives are trying to live through me once more. My room holds the choirs of everywhere I’ve ever been and when I wake up, my presence makes it empty. I walk through the empty rooms I’ve wrapped myself with and I wonder if every life has been this way, and one day I’ll be crying out through my sleeping mouth at myself as a king, or an elephant, begging them: this time, please live.

My mother tells me that I stay up too late and rise too early. I asked her if she knew the feeling of drifting off to sleep and jolting awake with the feeling of falling. She said yes and I told her that this was nothing like that. The reasons why people can never sleep are never the same, yet everyone in the world knows them intimately.

Sometimes I feel so much that my fingertips burn. They say that the solar corona around the sun can reach millions of degrees higher than the surface. I feel that if I let them, my hands could get that hot. And one day, I will have to put a sign around my neck, saying “please, don’t touch me” because I’ll be too afraid to burn anyone. And even the notes that I put into my children’s lunch-boxes, saying “I hope you do not hurt” will be singed around the edges.

I cry so much these days that I’ve stopped noticing. I could be looking at the sky or talking to a friend and someone will ask me why I have tears streaming down my face, to which I must truthfully answer, ‘I don’t know.’ Sometimes I think it’s just because life is too beautiful, but then I look at all the scars people carve into the forests of our lives and wonder if it really is.

Anaïs Gentileschi.

On the day when Anaïs Gentileschi was born, her father looked into her face and saw that it was full of stars. He held her in his arms as her mother drew her last breaths, and he promised he would do anything so she would not hurt.

Although Anaïs never quite realised it, her father did the best job at this that he knew how. But no matter how well a father can act out his good intentions, there comes an age, usually around the adolescent period, that a girl begins to notice the attention of boys, and will willingly give the parts of herself away that will hurt the most when she misses them.

Anaïs was sixteen when she met her first suitor. Although she had had flings with the other boys at her school, she chose to keep this affair a secret from her father, mainly because it was exactly that: an affair. The man in question was a thirty-nine year old mathematics professor at the local university. Married to a sweet, unassuming woman, Prof. Eduardo Malchensi had become increasingly bored with his lot in life, and had taken to exploring other avenues. As a mathematician and a man, he found it reasonably easy to show a sufficient amount of affection to convince Anaïs of his interest, yet could remain clinical enough to not arouse suspicion at home.

As a sixteen year old girl is still on the cusp of girlhood, Anaïs knew no better than the truths that Eduardo Malchensi told her. She offered up the softest shapes of hers in a sickly transaction for his shallow affection, and Eduardo received them. He taught her of the shapes a man and a woman can make between themselves and the sky, and she in turn learnt of the ease in which these shapes can be forged and torn down by the power of ones mind. Eventually, Anaïs learned the power of intimacy in breaking down a man, and Prof. Eduardo Malchensi discovered the intense shapes that love can form within ones ribs.

I would like to tell you that this relationship was discovered, that Anaïs’ father found out and demanded that Prof. Eduardo Malchensi take heed of his despicable actions and leave. I would even have pleasure in telling you that Eduardo’s wife found that she was with child, and with that stroke of reality, he pushed himself back into a respectable lifestyle. However, this did not happen. Luckily for the decreasing moral standards of those involved, youth played it’s last and strongest card: boredom.

Anaïs was now seventeen. For her birthday Prof. Eduardo Malchensi had showered her with gifts that, though well-meaning, reflected very much his age. What use Anaïs had for silk stockings and perfume when the shapes of herself were still too young to fully appreciate them. Instead of reading these communicable gifts as the shape of Eduardo’s burgeoning love for her, she found them clinical, functional over sentimental, and most of all, boring. Two weeks later, she found a boy her own age. And, as the cheater becomes cheated on, Anaïs found herself in a more suitable relationship of love-notes, coy glances and other youthful tendencies that two young teenagers should experience in their first clumsy relationships.

However much blinded by his love for Anaïs, Prof. Eduardo Malchensi still had eyes enough to see that the lines between himself and Anaïs were becoming weaker. In the evenings when he managed to procure time for them both, he found her increasingly distant. As he kissed her neck, she would stare out the window, or at the clock, or begin to bite the nail on her left thumb. On evening, irritated by her faded passion, he confronted her. Obviously, he wanted to know the truth, and he demanded it of her, standing over her bare legs as she looked dreamily out the window.

‘Well, what do you want to know, Eduardo?’ Anaïs mumbled, still looking away.

‘I want to know what is wrong with you’ Eduardo spat, his face becoming redder and redder at the fact that she still hadn’t looked at him.

‘Oh, many things I suppose. Mrs. Alendra says I don’t concentrate enough. My father says I’m too unfocussed. Gabriel says my socks are always unclean.’

‘Gabriel? Who is Gabriel?’ Eduardo hissed.

‘Oh, a boy.’

‘A boy. Ho! Since when did you talk to boys?’

‘Since when did you become my father?’ Anaïs demanded, standing up and staring into his face. “If I wanted questions I’d simply go home, and you know that.’

With these words, Prof. Eduardo Malchensi realised what Anaïs had been telling him for weeks, not with words but with the muted shapes of her body language, with the distracted lines that rarely connected with his. Seized with a desperate mans panic, he began to clamour towards her.

‘What is it Anaïs? What can I do? Is it my wife? I’ll leave her in an instant if you want me to.’

With this show of desperation, Anaïs found that she was disgusted by this ageing man and his grovelling, dishevelled appearance.

‘You, leave your wife?’ she hissed. ‘How dare you. How dare you think that your child should go without a parent. You make me sick. You have always made me sick.’ and she turned to gather all her things.

Eduardo was shocked, but remained silent. What more could he do, as her trail of clothes followed her out the door. In that second, he felt the pathway before him split as abruptly as once slices a vegetable in half. On one side, he would chase Anaïs. He would bombard her with gifts, he would leave his wife, he would woo her father. He would take the dishonourable road. On the other side, he would let her be. If he meant as much to her as he assumed, she would return. He would not leave his wife, her father would remain ignorant. This too was a cowardly route, but the one he much preferred to take. All that this decision balanced on was the fact that he was sure that Anaïs would not be able to live without him.

He was wrong.

The affair lasted eight months, the longest relationship Anaïs had ever had, but enough for her to guard what shapes she knew her body could make. She had seen that men were pathetic, were weak and were not in any way interesting, and therefore were not anything that she desired to have present in her own life. She lived on.

With the desire for male affection numbed, Anaïs grew into an intelligent woman. She felt no need to focus on her appearance, her mind was what mattered most. She began to study the sort of things that enlightened her. She saw the shaped that exist between atoms, the lines brawn between matter and non-matter. She studied the stars, drawing lines between constellations as the boys in her class drew lines between her freckles. At the end of her degree, she moved out of her fathers house for an apartment at the old Hotel de Palais. He had wanted her to move in with others, a friend or a colleague or someone, but she would have none of that. She was perfectly content on her own. Life had taught her enough to not want anything to do with other people.

Every now and then, she would notice men looking at her with a sort of curious look. It was in no way the sort of look that Eduardo would give her, nor was it the coy timidity of Gabriel. As she could not place it, she disregarded it as unimportant, and focussed her mind on more important matters. And although sometimes this strange look was accompanied by a blushing man asking for a date, she always declined, with no exceptions. After years of turning the few men who asked her down, she had grown to twenty-four before she finally gave in.

When Dr. José Ganéa finally found the courage to ask Anaïs Gentileschi on the date he had been planning for two months, she gave in. She did not tell him that this was not something that she did not do, nor did she tell him anything about herself. She simply said yes, and to pick her up from the old Hotel de Palais as 7pm tomorrow evening. That, she felt, was enough of her biography for now.