Archive for the ‘Authors’ Category
the emily dickinson hour
Tuesday, June 9th, 2009
I’m studying the telltales on one of my hovering cameras when Daisy O’Neill touches me lightly on the forearm. “Will I get copies of what you’re recording?”
“The whole world will,” I say. It’s in the contract when you’re chosen by the Pastime Foundation to have your mind squirted back for a ridealong with some historical figure.
“Not just what you choose to release to the net,” says Daisy. “I’d like copies of all of your feeds.” She’s a cinematographer. A brilliant one, according to the Foundation nabobs.
I nod. “I’ll give you the online password.”
Technicians move about doing techie things. A switch here, a knob there, and Daisy’s ready to make the leap from her skull into a poet a century and a half gone.
There’s something about the elasticity of spacetime that means we can only rip it enough to send somebody back a few times a year, and only for about an hour. The Foundation awards trips to those it deems worthy. Recipients pick from a list of historical figures for whom we’ve found DNA.
Who did Daisy choose? Not Orson Welles, not Hitchcock, Griffith, or Godard. She speaks of ‘negative space’ in Dickinson’s poetry, of ‘slant rhymes’ and an obsession with death. “Did you know,” she says, “that every poem of hers contained a body, a bed, or a coffin?”
This scene will go into the final cut.
“I memorized all of them,” she says. “I try to convert them to images.” She looks away from me, and it is in that instant that the lead technician throws his final switch. Her body is turned off while Daisy’s mind wings its way back to some time between 1830 and 1886. We can fine-tune it no more; she will have her hour some time during Emily Dickinson’s life. May it not be when the poet is asleep or in her mother’s womb.
The techs bustle about, keeping Daisy’s body breathing, monitoring their esoteric equipment, never paying her more attention than any other machine in the room. Only I and my cameras are watching when her eyes open earlier than expected. She sits up, shedding monitor pads.
“Hello Daisy,” I say. “Welcome back.”
“Daisy?” She stares around at the machinery, the institutionally drab walls. “The daisy follows soft the sun.”
The Queen’s Eyepatch
Monday, June 8th, 2009
It was said of the queen’s eyepatch that beaver-bees wove it, meshing the finest and most pliant twigs — more like hair than kindling — and fastening them into that characteristic square with honey.
It was said, occasionally, that a man with an ocean in his belly removed it from a fish’s jaw and delivered it by rainfall into the queen’s private orchid garden.
It was said by many in the city that a lone merchant appeared out of the desert, bearing a stilted house on her back, and from it withdrew all manner of artifacts in the palatial square to woo the young, half-blind queen. The eyepatch, golden-white and strung on minute beads of jade — so small that only close examination revealed that it was not a soft green thread — secured the merchant’s place in the young queen’s bed. Their heirs fluttered out on ruby wings.
One disgruntled suitor commonly muttered that the rear side of the eyepatch, when pressed to the queen’s empty socket, each day showed a different breathtaking panorama from the merchant’s wandering years. In this way the merchant secretly taunted her lover. That barbed foreigner!
The merchant’s name was Lixhi and her eyes, amber-orange, reminded everyone of her unknown origins.
The city loved its queen nonetheless. Eventually, the sensible men said, she would stop knitting ruby bird-girls with her womb and take a man to bed, producing the regular four-limbed boy-children of the land. The merchant-woman would wander again.
It was said that if the queen removed the eyepatch, the merchant-woman would forget their heady lovemaking.
It was said that the queen made it herself, from the wonders gifted to her temple, to woo the exotic visitor unloading fine merchandise in the palatial square.
To speed this along, an attendant was bribed.
The scissors snipped, the string snapped, the tiny jade beads rattled into cracks on the floor. The empty socket, exposed, made the queen cry. She hated the feel of air against it.
“Men are idiots,” the merchant-woman said, kissing that ruined hole, after shouting at guards to capture the fleeing attendant. “I’ll make you a new one, if you want? I found beads made of parrot beaks, fabrics made of seal-silk.”
“And I’ll make a boy-heir for them: seven-winged and beaked, jade-feathered, in love with tigers,” the queen said, embracing her lover. “Can you imagine their faces when we all step out tomorrow?”