On Seeing the Country
By Emily Conner
Mammoth Caves, KY
We would crawl down into these holes in the ground when we were kids, the guide says, explore the caves all summer long. He bellows down the aisle and steadies himself against the lurching tour bus. White-nose syndrome has been a problem for the local bats, he says, and the bus shudders to a stop. You take this chance to record his accent in your handmade journal, then follow the vacating mass to a bleach mat meant to disinfect your soles.
It’s hot. The vines are everywhere. You pass through a hole in a massive rockface.
On the descent, everyone pauses at a massive stalactite formation. People from other countries, people from four states over, even the rowdy children: all humans acknowledging what’s special. You try to understand something even more special, something about the history of this cave tour, how slaves were the first guides, how this particular curve in the trail is recent, funded by a grant from a coal mining company. But all that’s on the website, and you can’t imagine how to describe these colors in any but the most obvious ways.
At the bottom, the guide calls this the largest hall in the longest underground cave known to man. Couples take selfies on benches, kids hang wildly from grandparents’ arms, and you perch at the edge of the group. Have you ever seen complete darkness, the guide says, and together everyone imagines their darkest moment. He says, I will show you complete darkness, and the ceiling lights blink off and the path lights go invisible, and three, two, one, the last light goes out and it’s blackness. A thick underwater darkness. Your eyeballs are suddenly huge. You can hear them moving inside your head, feel them rub against the pink inside of their sockets as they roll left, right, up, out, straining, with no satisfaction, no result, blinking at the wind from someone’s breath.
And then the guide lights a small wooden match whose tip fills the whole room, the ceiling and cave walls, limestone swirls, the knees of all the people on this national park vacation tour: everything is lit, and everyone gasps at the breath of one tiny light, which the guide brings to a tea candle, unbelievably small and bright. Unbelievable. Everyone is thinking it.
Back above ground, the driver waits in the bus, idling loud, a/c blasting. It’s hot and the sun glares. The children yell and chase one another, and the adults slowly corral them. You linger by some trees, watching the scene with your fountain pen in hand. A rabble of butterflies fucks on some rot nearby. The sentence, as it forms on the page, comforts you.
95 Theses
By Hannah Matheson
I am always embarrassed to be telling this story.
When I tell this story, I am always embarrassed.
I am always embarrassed;
I am always telling this story.
My boyfriend pointed that out once, the cockled ulna of this narrative that elbows its way to the front, jovial crowd be damned.
We had gotten beers for my birthday.
Day off, late afternoon, before dinner.
Maybe I had had too many.“We were just having a nice day with my sister,” he said, “it was weird.”
I don’t think I disagree with that. So I couldn’t figure out why it hurt me.Let’s put aside the subtext of selfishness. The premise, acknowledged, might have looked like “non-sequitur = irrelevance.”
But clearly we had different starting places. Because to talk about relevance, he would have to know — they would all have to make themselves capable of recognizing — that even when I don’t narrate it, the story is told.
The story tells itself. Remember:
When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, “Repent” (Mt 4:17), he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.
This word cannot be understood as the sacrament of penance, because of course the soul itself does not repent.
We make of the mind a hot place
(a conflagration)
then roast the soul upon repentance like meat on a spit. (Constantly revolving; relevant.)
Bleeding heart, that other man had called me. Might as well have said, little lamb. Those were not my name — though I turned at the sound they made. (Constantly revolving, my back-glancing face a repeated decimal. A beckoning.)
So I can admit that there’s awkwardness, delicacy, to the things I say. That I do not need to say them all the time, to everyone.
And if we look at salvation as a blueprint, you might take martyrdom seriously. Not seek it out, per se — but listen to the creak of a son felled, and come to love the groan of that giving tree. And the songs sung at the sky after. The water cycle of willingness.
Like, my whole life, I thought I would be saved from suffering by outsmarting separation. I thought I could win everyone over through goodness. I thought, if I endure this pain with grace and kindness and resilience and forgiveness, someone will see it and think, wow, she’s good, and then they’d want me, and nothing would hurt.I didn’t know I thought this.
Once I realized I thought this, it seemed as if I had played a part. I was not honest. And why would a liar deserve a bail out?
And even if my charade had won love, that love wouldn’t have been for me.
And so relief could only come from goodness, from turning your heart good. (Constantly turning; forging the soul in flames to reverse its forgery, its transparent desire.)
And so you had to suffer. You had to suffer to not suffer anymore.
And so whether or not I knew it, I understood that telling was a kind of selfishness, a greed.But I got confused.
And to understand better I spoke, so that I could be spoken to.
(Mortification of the flesh requires a public; the audience was already there, and louder than me.
(That might not be true. I went crazy, sometimes, in the silence of no one addressing me. Eating cabot cheese slices at midnight; sweating in my polyester sheets; waking at 2pm, after the house had been empty for hours, when my room clogged with afternoon sun and the thick pulse of cricket scratch and beetle wings. (I mortified myself.)))All this contortionist logic; . Compulsive, acrobatic, what the brain will do with a thought. Wiggling the loose tooth of it till it breaks, the psyche like a socket pooling blood from the root.
Eventually, I had to agree with me on this: a secret kept to the self does no good.
A secret even and especially keeps itself from you. After all, no one can confirm what it is you think you know. Your secret is secret to you. Seeing as you’re outside your secret, the self has evicted you.
A secret, then, is privacy.
When I am private, I am godless,
entirely alone.
That summer, he gave me a secret — what he took from me was private.
When I am godless, I am just a girl, no greater than the sum of my parts.
My private parts, people say. Isn’t that awful?
For logistical reasons, a just society requires proof.
Lacking evidence, we only have hearsay and plain sight.
And you can understand how it looks.
How it looks convinces me I am secretive. How can I explain what happened and admit that afterward I still thought of his hair sweat-curled to his forehead, how when he laughed deep the force threw his head back till the base of his skull touched the top of his spine?
Impossible to omit me.
How can I explain what happened when half of what happened I don’t remember?
The bottle, the darkness, the bed I left next morning omit me.
I was a whole half of it. Ergo
A secret is a crime one does to oneself, because.
I said, “I feel like I told you my boundaries and you’re not listening.”
He said, “It sounds like you’re enjoying yourself, and you just like changing the rules.”
This shocked me so much that I remember it, so I doubt I took what I said back.
(I doubt.
I took.
I said.
I went back.)Even if I didn’t recant, what would you call the fact that I kept kissing him? A bargain? A second draft?
God and I share such few lines, but here’s one we both know.
I’d like to start over now.Let’s begin again here: “I am always embarrassed to be telling this story.”
This is a social calculus.
Once I’ve demonstrated self-awareness of my faux pas (foisting discomfort, insisting on recursion, conceding to solipsism), I may proceed to the telling.I give disclaimers because it’s in my nature.
I give disclaimers because I am a good student. I have learned the circumlocutions of the guilty subject.
I give disclaimers because it’s more than he gave me.
Though there were signs.
In those days my gut was faulty. It misfired. Or, it fired all the time. You know the consumer’s dilemma? Where you’re paralyzed by indecision because you have infinite options and scant means of differentiation? It was a little like that — when every man made me uneasy, one was as good as the next. As low as the upcoming, the former. Take-it-or-leave-it not to be left.
Long story short, the lion’s den didn’t look so bad.
Or everywhere looked bad so what’s the difference.
Maybe my vision wasn’t quite right.
But –
It wasn’t easy being easy.
I never made it easy.
All those hairpin turns — letting hands get below my waistband before saying no, thank you, no.
His bedroom toggled between mouthfuls of Jim Beam and my mouth, full of excuses.
His choreography of reversals easily rescinded sweetness.
In this way, reality was a series of switchbacks.
I became suspicious of myself.
For example, why am I still talking about this?
Did anyone even ask?
Either I’m right that he hurt me, or he’s right that I’m emotionally dishonest.
This is my deepest shame:
Sadness is useful.
A little engine that runs on recriminations is nothing if no one hurts her first.
In high school, I became obsessed with Mary Ruefle’s poetics, how she articulates the immaculate conception of the moment. “We can go back to a nanosecond before the beginning,” she prefaces the clusterfuck of temporality…
One of the biggest problems with blame is that if I met me I’m not sure I’d like me either. The other is that I can’t decide if there is free will.
Often causality, like time, amounts to the epistemology of a wormhole.
“We can go back to a nanosecond before the beginning, before the universe burst into being, but we can’t go back to the precise beginning because that would precede knowledge, and we can’t ‘know’ anything before ‘knowing’ itself was born.”He began, my everlasting instant. Out of silent night, from stuttering obsidian, came the red breach of dawn, its speaking, irrevocable tongue raining light.
For him, what was the catalyst? What ferrous knowledge bloomed that licensed him to transgress? What makes a beginning begin?
It began badly. It didn’t end, because we never began. It began me. I started. I keep stopping. I can’t stop starting.
In college I wrote, “Eve’s water-
ing mouth pre-
meditating the fruit
she’d never tasted.
how can craving
come first? sometimes
a cell encircles thirst
and that is the only
answer your god
will give you.”You can’t develop your palette without encountering a flavor. What I mean is — we’re never going to know what really happened. God made appetite, right? I’ve just always been suspicious that she knew to want it.
Believers would probably say, “Well, that’s where the serpent comes in.”
That’s true. There was a serpent. Between you and love must inevitably lie a translator, a cartilaginous intermediary, who turns all facts to sibilance, slippage.
Facts: the fruit was poison, but it was I who reached for it.
Ok, but he wasn’t fruit. He was a man who made choices with his real, unmetaphorical hands that grasped my ankles when I tried to pull my legs away.
He stopped. For others, he didn’t stop.
Fuck apples. Fuck him.
Fuck the whole muthafucking thing.
I read Etheridge Knight’s “Feeling Fucked Up” the June after this man happened. In a subversion of Adam naming the animals, the speaker curses every identifiable phenomenon, every government and species, each earthly thing — even the tomatoes. He damns all but his beloved in an attempt to undo his loss. Raze the broken world, raze yourself, and clear the way for the antidote of your longing to return to you via that bulldozed corridor.Surprise, surprise! I took away the wrong thing. And I told myself this: that the soul still sings its diluvial song, that love is a kind of fury.
That love was a kind of fugue state. I cannot forgive myself for what I can’t figure out.
Instead I grow grateful for abstractions: their cotton-mouthed comprehension, their side-stepping mercy.
Hunger is an irrational number.
The brain is a bad computer when it comes to the irreducible, interminable.
An equation is a perpetual state of asking. An eroteme pries open a sentence that wanted to be over and done.
For example, I had a dream that I saw him back on campus (though he’s banned) and I smiled at him, reflexively. I wanted him to smile back. Even in my dream, after all this rearrangement, raising funds for self-worth to be more properly angry. And then, in this dream, where I must have invited him in, I spent the whole oneiric opportunity positioning myself oblique to the conversation to place him in my peripherals; so that I could not be seen transparently trying to see if he were looking at me. I woke up and felt
— I don’t know what I felt. Fraudulent. Defrauded.Indignation is the ashed end of a long-burning loneliness. When it falls away, I am a child asking
what did I do to make you treat me this way?
I wanted to be a sophisticate, but I’m as predictable as the rest.
I don’t trust anyone to love me.
I’m horribly demanding. I ask everyone to love me.
A serpent knows how to answer a question such as this.
It was my fault for asking, for having to ask.