Carla Harryman

Scales from the Living

with video by Alan Sondheim

1.     Object of passage, a seated dream

I am thinking about where dreams sit.

Are you awake? Here’s some toast. Have a seat.

I’d like to place a dream on the seat and stand.

Why?

Because—

I prefer my cereal and toast sitting down.

—the daily menu is changing.

Fall fair.

I want to concretize something you can’t see without aid.

Hmmm, I thought we were going someplace else with this foliage.

We are going someplace, next week, to Paris.

It rains but the rain doesn’t make it to the ground.

Are you referring to an altered state of leaves, a general condition?

It’s a feeling about actual passage through rain at 36 thousand—

Milestones.

In the museum of our conversation, leaves commit treason against words.

Okay, so pull out the chair and put your dream on its seat. But I would like to finish my cereal as we observe its properties and comment on them as if we were skilled in describing falling, objectively.

Okay here it is, the dream.  I just pulled it out of thin air and it was cooperative.

It looks like a battered piece of blue plastic.

You have to let it settle, and then it will become more dimensional, part of a landscape.

It’s a scan of water that percolated up from the unconscious. Its environment is the totality of  earthly habitat but it’s context is our breakfast nook.

Alright. What else do you see?

Something bacterial stuck to its hardened edge, on the left.

2.     Dada

Those

Gouged signs

Naked, shine. You want me to see

What you are working on

Por nada

Voices teched and I’m transcribing

Them, the theme

Crumbles obsidian when Z

Licks it

To the stage of violence

Without even a threshold to cross

Alone in acousmatic elements

Of a book. But what about—

People? If the author’s experience is not yours—

It’s savored with coffee

It’s ready. I’ll wait

For night.

For tessellated eve.

A warped analogy

Suits you, I’m wearing it

With fire, then.

 3.     Post-surrealisms convocation

To the point of all things ist and ism and ists and isms, the folding of region into world and the distinguishing of difference across distributed networks.

To the point of identity and multiples of such and the holding of these within a live concept and a conceptual circuit board in which signals pulse weakly or strongly or alternatingly within given environments.

To the point to the point to the point.

To point at or out a region.

Environment or context.

To figure a subject within the nonfigurative, the circuit.

To de-figure the subject as if it has yet to be born.

As if it had been born here and there.

As if I were nowhere and regional at once.

As if historical time were a region folded into nowhere.

As if one could fly to France more safely than market around the corner from these Metro homes.

The homes of Armenians and Africans and Indians and Japanese and South Koreans and Syrians and Black and White folks born within the national boundary and the second generations of all these and more born within the national boundary.

To understand the distinction between surrealists in x or y above and below equatorial zones from the breakfast nook or the screen shared in the common room below.

Then knock on my neighbor’s door, which is not common.

And so I remained content where I am.

Note his leading two small dogs around to the back and imagine behind the flame tree border his devotion to his mother.

& to note that the yellowing golden smoke tree turned witchy when a stallion nuzzled it.

And to note that the dwarf magnolia spikes out beyond its bunchy body at a moment of general shrinkage.

Magnolia and smoke are the neighbors in our yard to the flaming border in theirs.

While the general condition adapts to shrinkage.

Or incommensurate form.

To be enthralled by an image that passes through cold.

To place it on the seat you might have occupied.

There having been no reason to sit or stand or use it as a pedestal.

The thought of temperature.

Holds a future.

Of a morning’s Neolithic hum.

4.     Echo Sun

In memory Etel

There was to be an epiphany but it slipped out of my sun

It slipped through mine as well

Do you think it was the same sun

Each sun is a distinct sun there is no same sun

Even when they are both read

There will be an ellipsis

When they are red

And when they are missing?

It is not possible to possess the sun

A sun?

Singularity fades within the absolute

That sun is self-evident

I suppose you are referring to the word sun

An elliptical night

Slipped out

When the shadow it cast went unobserved

It  doubled the sky

A quadrangle distinguishes it

And a shadow followed a sun

And tangled in matter a word, next

It’s shadow striking an echo

Multiplied

And the vision slipped out of my sun

As well, what I can’t possess

As she makes her way

The epiphany or the sun

The heat from incisive colloquy

Of one

And another, shields

her along sending

among

—November 14-15, 2021

5.     Scales

Yes, if by nature you mean  independent sublimity of earthly phenomenon no matter how built-into its systems the world tries to make it, I would say I have a respect for nature that exceeds a fear of nature as long as I am not directly under attack by it. The love of nature, that’s of a different order. You are born into the binding.

Wait,  what happened at the beginning of the sentence?

Potential friends jogging in rearview.

I would like to establish the framework.

I would like what we call breakfast to have a wider girth.

Now, as we speak? Or in hindsight?

I can’t shake the feeling I am performing with monkeys in a barrel.

Something large looms through something small. The small thing can be either cruel or mysterious. In the mystery-case, it gets close to love.

I don’t think so.

Latch onto the picture for a while with the antennae you putt into the hole of your attention span and know that my butt is getting colder and colder while I stretch cat-like from big toes to neck until my head attains a regal quality forgotten on the slope of everyday life.

Slope appeals. To me.

Now speak the new language. What had caused erosion.

When?

Listen to what leads up to this moment.

Ramping.

Now you get it.

We could switch plates—

And you could hold the glacier.

I will draw your request after I close the gluten.

Fond is waiting.

An article is dropped on food.

News waits to be floor.

I heard you lost your red.

But isn’t it true.

An imperative is penciled.

This to end no, is there.