Gossamurmur (7 page)

she did imitations of the Original Anne

she billed herself Anne

she went public all over the world

with all the attributes and the albatross of Original Anne

she had some high notes

she could sing in a queer falsetto

and occasionally some deep tones like Tibetan monks which Original Anne had so perfected

deep tones that reverberated with the earthy guttural sounds of Original Anne

she claimed to have read and know all the books read and studied by the Original Anne

because they were of the same historical time frame she would attach signifying herself to the signs and sighs of the Original Anne

eidolons of Original Anne

she mounted her telescope to the coordinating points and frequencies of Original Anne

the other Anne knew that if there were debt it could never be paid in full

to the Original Anne

the other Anne was enjoying her fame and wealth

she scattered gold coins in the paths of her followers

she would stop and turn then toss the coins

and the followers no longer noticed Original Anne

coins dropped from the other Anne with a genuine-sounding sound

a powerful sound of empty value

money would replace Original Anne

…sculpting of Jupiter’s gossamer rings by its shadow…this was another reach in her investigation of the nature of gossamer, light-years away…

…as dust near Jupiter is produced when interplanetary impactors collide energetically with small inner moons and dust is organized into a main ring, an inner halo, and two fainter and more distant double gossamer rings…

…as when dust grains alternately charge and discharge when traversing shadow boundaries, allowing the planet’s powerful magnetic light to excite orbital eccentricities and inclinations as well…

…as when dust in the gossamer rings originates essentially in the same way as that in the main ring and halo. Its sources are the inner Jovian moons Amalthea and Thebe. High-velocity impacts by projectiles coming from outside the Jovian system eject dust particles from their surfaces. These particles initially retain the same orbits as their moons but then gradually spiral inward by Poynting-Robertson drag. The thickness of the gossamer rings is determined by vertical excursions of the moons due to their nonzero orbital inclination…

Observable properties of the rings: rectangular cross section, decreases of thickness in the direction of Jupiter, and brightening of the top and bottom edges of the rings.

Some properties go unexplained. Like the Thebe extension, which may be due to unseen bodies outside Thebe’s orbit, and structures visible in the
back-scattered light. One possible explanation of the Thebe extension is the influence of the electromagnetic forces from the Jovian magnetosphere.

There could be two particle populations in the gossamer rings; one slowly drifts in the direction of Jupiter while another remains near a source moon trapped in 1:1 resonance with it.

…“back-scattered light” is the light scattered at an angle close to 180° relative to solar light…

Observable properties of the effect of gossamer rings on consciousness

moving in parallel circles and may never embrace.

in the treasure trove of Mnemsyne

a movie of your spiraling memory

After the taking of the castle turning it to a prison through antics of deception and dream there had been some change in their selves, in the twinned psychological weather. There had been a shift whether
she she
would respond violently or
she she
would be serene or metabolically charged to move about, and we saw them, moving about with a kind of joy.…No, begin again.…

Had you heard why did you hear and what did you hear or what did they let you hear? That one Decider was a creationist, that another was a misogynist.

That the Deciders may imprison one of you. I was already that one.

There was something there. The twins in our lives. A twitter about the doubles in our lives and imprisonment. And using one to conquer the other and steal her magic.

They might confuse themselves
in the Decider Device of Double Annes
And the care to the students that would not be given And the care to Archive that would not be proffered

Breath quickens, arms flail…there were warnings. How
she she
would appear suddenly at mealtime in a wrench of remorse, mumbling about aviary sightings and how a wing might be a portent of doom if slightly askew. And
she she
would also be fine looking up at the stars from the fortress tower. Portents from light-years away.

Arrived and not quite arrived.

Auguries of mixed-message victory.

Or studying birds and the entrails of birds.

And the reading of the entrails was such that Original Anne would survive but struggle and she would have to escape to a place to hide her cache in a place they called “Diamond Vault” or “Inside Wings of Butterflies.”

In the meantime…crouch and wait, small binoculars in hand. Walk the prison yard. A special dispensation to her scientific obsession. A fleet swallow. Pika sightings too—skittish, you remember, on the tundra. Dusk. Then you want to get down and pray up here, someone was overheard saying. And that she did get down in front of a form, the form of a Madonna, an elderly woman who seemed, as her car license indicated, from Nebraska, I always observed where they were from. Up again brushing the matter, glacial middens from knees. Twins are happier on the open road. Yes, twins are happier on the folksy road. She thought of the dark castellum and how relieved to be almost free of that unhappy mind.

Liberated from a strange and compromised nightmare.

She was a founder, had they forgotten?
The other was riding her coattails through the labyrinths of Samsara.

Wizened stooped Original Anne would crouch down.
How could you not keep company with death in such a world?
she’d say.

The other Anne:
It’s early on in the century and we’ll look back at our folly and be amused
. She, youthful other, clone of sister, twin in phobias and wayward plans.

Original Anne who was one with the constant lustrations, a devotee in practice of cleansing, she was wearing a heart on a sleeve a tourniquet on a sleeve a house on a sleeve a survival tome on sleeve. It will not be amusing.

She she
was one to remark upon this at length as
she she
said it the problems of
our new and early century
as if that would obviate desire and put a fine point on it all. And eschew a totality of responsibility.

Where are you from?

The void, both
shes
would say.

Speak of cold storage, speak of the delicate plants, the Indian paintbrush just one, close to the Divide.

The Divide between Deciders of ego and malice and ignorance, and those who do not chose to pluck this humble flower.

They exchanged places for a cryptic moment

Original Anne felt the dead pulse of the Deciders’ Anne

Then a hurricane then humming then humility

Joke about the tides in our bodies, the monthly motion and dip in mood, impressions in failure etched, affinities, delineations of going down

Down where?

Dear Original Anne: I will tell you this in writing and you may respond. More memos for the mind, begging response in the middle of the night, flaming e-mails by the light of a pallid moon…

The sadness from the other side of the wall…

I imagined the room

Bare, but of essentials made…

The writing book, a ledger star-crossed, archival items that find home here

A legend

I imagined a tomb for your holdings, a pyramid, a sepulchre, a vault

I can track your every move

I am your virus or your inventor

I see your thoughts you will travel as you desire where to go, move through walls

I could breathe love into you a perfect fabrication

A competition?

I could breath now

A foil

Who is most controlling and vile in our overworked world?

Original Anne kept silent but nurtured her own counsel:

I’m studying the tundra now, as a diamond tomb

Its subtle form its very chill environment might contain, condense, preserve…

a line of poetry brings language again to language

startling in its brevity

magic on the head of a pin

microdots of inwardly spiraling space and time

How small things survive under harsh conditions, a metaphor for all your paranoia will be answered. Investigate storms and the tempest of ice high on this shelf at the end of the world. Conflagrations set by angry insouciant campers. How often will the sun bake your thoughts to hardened clay? How will you be broken and fight back?

In this brief digital age, never destroy the original singularities, voice recognitions that might haunt your sleep. How do they hibernate through coming millennia, how translate into your own thought forms so you have access to a time when what gathered in your brain emulated the progress of a voice over time, its poetry and desire, and when the images still held power of what was now waning

How might I get there, how may I go there. What might I accomplish there? How does the chemical in my brain translate to this hibernation which is in itself a sign of barren ground

Elegies must not be cynical and poets must travel

She and her double walked through the souk down the path, put her arm out toward one of the Deciders (in white and gold djellaba), as if to point him out, expose him, and crouched down…Deciders were everywhere now…across the globe…a powerful Archive could have portal to the stars…the known universe.…a megatheater of sound

“across wounded galaxies…”

“belly of our reward…”

She and her shadow crouched…

as disembodied voices of Archive sent jolts of consciousness through the megasphere…

“…a sweeping revision…”

“…embers of the rain…”

“the judge was the wind let the old things take over…”

“Truancy of will where she let it fall”

“Door unlocked after the wounding…”

“Thinking is not worrying…”

“I made this book of sonnets…”

“I, an island, sail…”

“I’m so in love with art that it will get me into the next world…”

Ceramic day, as if djinns activated the sound waves

The child indicated…joy in the vibrating atmosphere

“first there were the FIRST PEOPLE…”

…something there—sod…no…turn it over…something odd and human

A tessera a shatter a glove a fragment, old shoe

“Where human feet can squish the daylights out of cowering anemone…”

“People are so like what they wear…especially on their…
exteriors…?”

She and her double looked at the child who said this, version of herselves too young to understand what she was saying, bound in her little souk world, but it wasn’t so important, although she made effort.
The child was deaf
, her nursemaid said…

They stopped putting a few coins in the Amazigh musician’s cloth as he played the gambri…

What do you sing of?

…subtle difference between loss…life…custom.…

loss…mourning

“I met Death—he was a sportsman…”

His partner under her veil was fully absorbed in the music, synchronous with every lilt and turn

“the beauties of the Levant when we had them”

“…not all the works of Mozart worth one human life…”

“a place so hip even the rats doing the hustle…”

A child could not hear but felt rhythm of the night and throng of bodies crossing, recrossing in public space

What I found
, she said…reaching down holding it up,
what I found
—
cassette!
—they were still familiar items in the old market. Obviously the child knew…she wanted to hear it play
but she was deaf,
her nursemaid said…

She smiled instead and looked away…sentences were not located in time for her…

“think of what needs to be what needs to be”

Anne Anne the Escaped said something as she tried to explain, and then Anne Anne the Escaped ran into the riad down the alley

toward her shelter…a small cell of reticulation…

she
and
she
entered the place of volumes of books, beautifully bound in Moroccan leather
she
and
she
had been referring to in endless investigation escaping toward Tundra. Unfinished pages and notes, notes, all useless…looking into calibrations…but from where and toward what…how long do you measure desire or worrying accoutrements of the archival desk.…I, Original Anne,
hate all this!

Original Anne thought of Ashurbanipal,
his
library. The civilized Gilgamesh and wild Enkidu. The ancient astronauts and the out-of-place artifacts. It was 10,000 BCE. She thought of Marduk and his fifty names, a lot of identity to keep track of…

She thought of all the Deciders in a Free-Market World. How they relegated the Archive as if in a metaphor of car-dealing or house shares…

all the muscles toward this moment to explode

feeling herself to…implode…touch herself in poetry…

to implode

rend the veil

crack the mirror

in this wilderness of stone…

a salty poet-tear fell on a page—were both troubled?

who of them was allowed to cry? when would she be released?

watch the droplet morph with ink and then blur with her imagination

of that

shift…water to matter

to e.phem.e.ra—
le point ephémère
…

where things begin and end

and die

   and continue.

dot in space

uncontrollably into something…the Original Anne cried out—

why doesn’t everyone
…
just bug off?

Anne the Only now rose to prominence in her further “self” deception

Original went into retreat but I’ll be back she said…