THE STORY OF MY LIFE

Before I learned against my will how to astral project into deep time, my father searched for a dinosaur for me in a set of his father’s antique encyclopedias, but found only a black-and-white photograph of the fossilized giant dragonfly native to the Carboniferous coal swamps, Meganeura. The letters of the words on the page flickered like flames, more akin to the luminous Hebrew alphabet than Latin characters, glowing with sacred fervour. Mercifully, with the years that passed I forgot everything else about that period of my life, only the colours of the dazzling forest that bisected me, that cleaved me open from mouth to vulva to give me a single long lip. For the rest of my life all the silver busks and wool buttons in the world fascinated endlessly anyone who caught my eye.

I instead remembered the future, when I would work in the X-ray department of the hospital. I was in fact an unknowing adept clairvoyante, and the array of medical instruments constituted an extremely technically advanced geological observatory built to peer within the hollow Earth and study its inner recesses. I would modify one of the X-ray machines to create a new device that would allow you to see into the eons of Earth’s prehistory, that would ensnare light from distant stars to automatically envelop bones in the ghost of living sinew. In the beginning, it was a discovery made by chance, an unremarkable procedure performed upon a gentleman who I later learned was Baron Cuvier himself. “Would you believe that there are entire tectonic plates hidden underneath my shoulder blades?” he asked me, daring me to imagine twirling elephants and seismic revolutions, disappeared worlds that preceded our own. When I processed the images that night, the chemical bath became an ocean of flying horses, aurochs, rhinoceroses, reindeer, lions, and hyenas with transparent scales making the steppe sparkle like wedding diamonds, gliding through one another’s bodies like lanternfish and rippling like rain. They were pirouetting into the centre of the Earth like the circus ponies of a primitive experimental film strip. Thus unfolded my sexual initiation into the nascent science of extra-orbital sight, replenishing and satiating as the vivid, stigmatic palette of any bird of paradise.

The latter was a subject graphically introduced to me by the sorry condition of Mr. Wallace, returning from New Guinea. He had fallen victim to the climax of the reproductive maturation of a being simultaneously floral and avian (such is denoted by the term “bird of paradise”). His unwitting assailant was still in the middle of engorging herself when they wheeled him in, stamen-plumes flaring and striped like infrared bands, and until that day I had never met the gaze of a creature exactly like myself in all that mattered. Something of the forest had entered inside, and each night I dreamed the most vivid dreams of its entire life cycle, its pitcher plants and star-shaped birds, half a century of subarctic daylight piercing the canopy branches like the minute hand of a clock. I recall the days when I’d dare myself to push my bare breasts against the window of my apartment, causing the narrow cat’s pupil the length of my torso to dilate. This engendered in me the most nondescriptly pleasurable sensation.

***

And yet in all the stirrings of the hoarfrost, in all the apparitions that escaped the archons who prowled the sewers and factories to shut the passages into the hollow Earth, to keep the fossils from fleeing, there was a sense of another life I lived, or will live, a life that had wings. The reindeer calves showed me the way on the morning the parhelion hung in the clouds.

There, the underside of the pack ice surges with miles of undulating fur, and the deep field of fur velvets the ocean floor. That is where Urvogel, brooding in the mane, saw me in the overgrown dining room of the Erebus, where my erotic seizure was to be carved and served up on New Year’s Eve in the belly of the beast. But that was the price I had to pay the captain for permission to dive in the ruins night after night, to retrieve from his cabin the locked box containing rudimentary daguerreotypes that preserved images from lives and memories I had lost. And there was one among them I believed to be the master key, the true miracle, the rose I would have laid down my life searching for: a double-sided picture, twirled on a string, of a being falling, trapped in her flight, arrested in her metamorphosis between bird and saint. In the encrusted mirror, my now lipless mouth, opaque eyes, and black teeth blended into all her vanes and feuilles; around my head darted sea molluscs pierced by anemometers. And now the wreck capsizes, the ship is an Egyptian funeral barge and everything turns on its head, the world is in miniature, the colliding petal of ice is in fact a rubrum lily from Linnaeus’ bloom clock and the frozen bodies cling to it like microscopic amphibians.

Fossils are anesthesiacs, the great somnambulists. The brush parts, a bifurcated deer with two sinuous necks terminating in a single head startles Urvogel. Who is Urvogel (singular here, although, most likely, totally unremarkable—for the modern paleo-sciences have demonstrated there are not one but several Urvögel, not one but several deep times; therefore, one supposes, a different Urvogel for every variation of deep time)? Urvogel is a gigantic paramorphous flying fox of antiquity, a syringe-beak with teeth, only a handful of fossilized aunts and uncles removed from me. She kills a dragonfly, which causes her to become flooded and satiated, and her ensuing dream is a serrated downturned rainbow full of transparent teeth. The temperature of her blood is a tidal pool lined with cloisonné. Untold years of perfectly-preserved shadow puppetry of circulating fluids, of intracranial interstices where type specimens of light are stretched thin. A liquid writhing; a flowering axial tilt. Her form—a pair of embroidery scissors in the forest loom, where anywhere leads to everywhere.

Urvogel is a knife, but she is also a colour, a colour all her own. Like today’s birds, half of her cerebral apparatus remains awake while she sleeps to enable flight, and she lives in half-sleep, sleep-flying, life spent in the thrill of being able to dream while flying: a buoyant dream that breathes. Her spotted feathers fade into the spotted leaves and pine needles, and across the forest floor weaves a herd of mummified dinosaurs. A gift for Urvogel: she can pluck the hieroglyph-insects from their bandages and decorate her midden with their glittering carapaces and her glass beads.

***

I lived on top of the mourning emporium in those days, and numerous passersby felt overcome by the urge to confirm what they believed they might have seen in the world enclosed by my drapery. What lay deeper in the wild promenade of black-dyed corsets, camisoles, slips and petticoats, umbrellas, ostrich feathers, a crape jungle with deliquescent jaguars sewn out of silk gloves… I was visited by plenty of men, a lesser but far from underwhelming number of ladies, and several who defied classification. The memory of one woman in particular continues to mesmerize me. She undid the vegetal snap-traps and slid my sheer stockings down my legs, onto the floor one by one, where each became a little ermine and scurried away, kissing stray hairs and threadbare satin. My tongue bled when I spoke her name. That putrid name that never stops bleeding! She lifted my tongue, my tongue that concealed a horrific scene like the boudoir curtain in the gorgeous set of one of the chief examiner’s photographs. As for the anal reflexes, I believe I once heard from a wonderful sage that they are the most highly refined of all human languages. They’re even engraved on the Rosetta Stone, imagine that… When she had removed all her clothes, her warm thighs sprawled on my bed, I witnessed something miraculous emerge from inside her—a tiny creature, somewhat like a soft mole, who crawled up a rivulet of blond hair that extended the length between her groin and breasts, who she kept close to her heart as she slept. And, all through the night, sweet beneath the waves, the secret clay bird in my dresser drawer whispered of the fragments of love carried in the brash ice of the Circumpolar Current.

Later the matter of the hour turned to my most alluring physical asset, the strange aperture that had divided me bilaterally in some manner of primordial sacrifice; to me it had always been there, I hardly remembered when it wasn’t there. She suggested to me the possibility I had arrived from someplace else. For, in the city, there are unguarded manholes strewn along the ley lines, connecting dot-to-dot the graves of revolutionaries and the writers of sacred books. And everyone who goes in the forest knows that nobody leaves it without bites. Having nothing to do the following afternoon, we idled in the gallery of Roman antiquities. There I saw a dead Gaul pulled from a silent, ancient place in the wild country, a reclining wave of black ore with blood-coloured hair, transformed entirely to a different substance by immersion in the profound secrets of the Earth.

That romance lasted for years, and through it all I never spoke her name again. Summer in Pompeii, covered in kudzu. The flying buttresses were lost to the volcanic sands, foxes began to nest inside the artificial stone dinosaurs. We pushed our fingers into wounds predating our memories, inflicted by the creatures of deep time, their golden irises brimming fearsome and noble and proud as they gazed out upon their invisible territory. Now they dwell in the chambers of the mummified zoo of Saqqara, and we entered the dens where they lie but dreaming, filling our puncture holes with their fine linens. I met Max Ernst on the ferry from Venice to Alexandria, and he led me to the sunken horticultural station of Heracleion where he showed me the long-necked, towering sphinx in her fold. White cotton fanned around my body like the wings of a medusa in the Prussian green. I swam in the nightmare vegetation of prehistory, with forms I had only ever seen cultivated before in the hospital garden, the place where I came for the first time, aroused beyond measure: legible plants, plants that weep tassels of human hair, plants with supple breasts in place of petals. In that floral laboratory I also saw a communicating vessel made of two birds connected by their beaks via a kind of stem or cannula, demonstrating the symmetry of thought. I believed it to be an iteration of the well-known experiment involving a bird in an air pump. I was thoroughly possessed by the image of these cannulated birds.

***

Now I will tell you what happened to the director of the X-ray department. He inevitably took ill and spent the rest of his life rotting on a jacquard pillow in the surgical ward, surrounded by the synthetic forest that grew there, furtively grazed on by Palaeotherium and Anoplotherium… In time, each of his limbs palsied, petrified, and fell onto the floor tiles in a half-decayed heap, leaving in its place the slender birds’ beaks that sprouted erratically all over him like the quills of a sea urchin. I would attempt to distract him by relating my voyages elsewhere, the remote seeing carried out with a kind of stereoscope viewer. He drearily asked me my thoughts concerning certain diseases of the nervous system, enquiring about the seances, the shamanic contortions, if they were all indeed real… Of course they were, I said, hysteria is a beautiful pinprick of light that shines in the darkness of the Seine. I remembered what Cuvier had told me about his shoulder blades. My sternum, which is by now wholly imaginary like so much of my body, is a weathered piece of driftwood grazed by Florida panthers, great blue herons, and Key deer. The hollows of the trees there seep tears. To glimpse the jubilation of fossils through the silver birches, I think, must pose the greatest threat to every stultified vision. The child’s eye, the eye of Polyphemus, retracts into its cocoon.

I had recently become caught up in a passing craze concerning finding the location of Franklin’s grave. In my most recent dream, an enormous grey-haired polar bear, stuffed and mounted, occupied an upper room of Freud’s house from floor to ceiling. I asked the director of the X-ray department why, whenever I thought of love, the image that came to my mind was always the icefields of the far north. He told me a story he had heard, a long time ago, of a little girl who had lost her father on that ill-fated expedition. He had departed in the month of May when she was very small, and all he had left her was the understanding that where he was going and what he was searching for had to do with things unseen and ineffable, and something to do with love. But the little girl learned to reach with her thoughts and glide like the Arctic tern along the invisible waves recorded by peculiar writing machines, and in the end she found him, she found him and the tiny snow bunting she held in her palm helped lead her.

Before my eyes I see that, one hundred or one hundred and fifty years from now, a hunter will still know the place where Franklin is interred. Maybe the dogs will growl in fear when they draw close. And someone will take him back to London, or maybe here first, and the trembling of a photographic shock will make his entire skeleton radiant like all the candles that paint the night in the Davis Strait. And then after they’re done they’ll hushedly seal his phantasmatic anatomy under a stone slab in Westminster with some miserable rituals, not knowing that he had forgotten everything except the glaciers streaked with antlers of blood, the white wolves who tussle with human bones.

All the beaks begin to clamour in pain from my dear friend’s fever and dehydration, and I feed them drops of water from a syringe. “Why don’t you dissect the sky, then; what do you think you’ll find there?” he asks me. But in me there is a polar veldtland, with its prehensile nunataks and sky-blanched moraines, I want to cross it alone. Before me stretch out fjords, eskers, hummocks, bearberry pastures I have never seen. On the pillow now lies the rime-silken face of John Torrington, the tusk of a dream, which fills me with speechless tenderness. I lift the shroud, and the dark veins of the young man swirl with scrimshaw of the spiritual abominations of the Luttrell Psalter. I was told they had to bury his shadow in the soil because the tundra would not receive him.

In the pattern of winding bristlecones, of mammoth wool, there are furrows of inestimable depth in his arms, his chest, his genitals. Methuselah, I think. He reveals to me the devastating arcanum, hidden inside: not all who travelled under the command of Franklin perished of exposure and dessicated; some burned. The palpating snows are fire without illumination, without visibility; the frozen ocean is a white flame that consumes you like a wick, and the burning is love.

That’s perhaps what he sought on this ice prairie. To be alien on Earth, to be alien in your own body.

A two million-year-old child fondles a toy whittled from her own father’s jaw. Dry rainstorm on the veldt, there’s nothing here except a clutch of ostrich eggshells transmitting cryptic telegrams to the parts of the body. A silent operation.

***

The day before, I came across this advertisement in the street, but was unsure of what it could mean.

On the night following my twenty-seventh birthday, after I had been bedbound for some time, I awoke to find that I had secreted an aurora borealis in my sleep. The ribbon hovered over my body like a silk scarf outstretched between my bedposts, a glistening hand heavy with jewellery under the ceiling, low enough to bend down and stroke my indecently spread legs. Its phosphor glowed brightly through the drapes, and I noticed that a small crowd had formed outside.

I understood why, in the regions where the mysteries of the woods give no respite and swallow all, in the regions where once a snowshoe rabbit crossed my path to save my life, it is said that sometimes a lone wanderer will see the aurora lower its streamer of pearls into a clearing and touch the earth.

***

The walls of my bedroom are painted the colour of pale thoughts. Somewhere beyond the rosy flesh of my eyelids there runs an enchanted wolf whose body I know must harbour John Torrington’s soul. The curled smoke signal of his tail, rising from Doctor Dee’s furnace, disappears like an argent flash among the cairns that map the blood vessels of my dream. I must have never played with dolls much, I played house with wolves.

In my dream, I see Baron Cuvier shipwrecked on Elephant Island with Shackleton’s party. The shelf that rises indefinitely toward the pole is an inundated electric lamp finding its path between my thighs and sliding down into my throat. It’s beautiful there, I want to bathe in the light of my dream.

My dream is the dream that Urvogel emanates from her hands to beguile her mate. Closing the innumerable eyes of diverse shapes and shades enfolded along the length of her wingspan, she stitches together a tapestry of Pleistocene equines from the twigs of her nest. Neither of them know quite what to make of it. Delighted enough, they copulate, and shortly afterward Urvogel lays a heavy seed containing within it the secret of consciousness, which her spouse will peck open. A single limestone feather slices through the catalepsy of time.

The window of my dream unfastens and I am floating over the city, over its forges, valves, and cemeteries, the moon-stained hills that linger outside it, and they are transformed. The tenements have all dissipated, replaced by coiled mazes, wreaths of cyclopean birds the colours of many languages, a flushed latticework of birds desiring colour, cavorting, scraping the burnished dimness of the understory with their strange repetitions, unfurling fernlike spectra of passion, a tessellating mirror of love that only spilled over and over in its luxuriance and never ran dry, until one day—one day—colour translated into flight…

And there was a little bird who could only quiver with satisfaction at the still unnamed thing that had taken place within her.

I wake in my dream and the angel visits. Urvogel is perched on the frame of my bed. I want to dwell in the ivory scotoma behind her pupils. Her breast is such a rich, lambent black that nothing at all can enter or exit. I sit up in my bed and smooth its feathers, a motion that makes them crackle with the sound of the aurora borealis, and she bites the tips of my fingers—I cannot know whether a friendly gesture or one of unsentimental curiosity. My fingers salivate amber flame; it is like touching the innermost flesh of the heart, the flesh of my ecstasy, flesh of my spirit. A slit canvas in space that brings the adrift flowers over to this side of eternity, sailing the extrasolar current within her, adrift, adrift inside, brushing the black flowers of an infinite bird.

All my life I have attempted, through a glass darkly, to understand what vision is, is it love, preservation, the postponement of death, was fossilization the first form of sight… I wonder if we were always X-rays, if the first drawing anyone ever scrawled showed a landscape from a dream. Intraperitoneal shiver of a collapsed camera in a mistbound bomb vessel. A lost set of negatives of a line of icebergs shaped like visceral organs and framed against the haloed horizon, this one named the Sphinx, this one Karnak, this one the Necropolis, Maydum…

Urvogel spreads her wings and violently shakes the snowfall of another form of forest, as if emerging from an egg made of wind, and crows that she is a miracle, brought out and displayed before the awe of great men.

the sparrow sings forth
a soft electromagnetic wave
emitted from the forests far beyond Paris
genuflection
of words that don’t behave as words do
crystalline
violet discharge
when I was a bird

And in the bogland below in my dream, the dismembered king with the cracked-open skull emitting the colour of the sky bears a garland of fox fur woven in the flesh.

***

I have known for years since that the city rests transiently on top of a painted sea leaking lithified plumage, and one day the latter will reclaim us, covering the surface of the Earth in an impenetrable undergrowth of feathers and Venetian lace like a great celestial bird. My bathtub splashes into it with me still inside, sinking into the dream-darkness until I am tongue to tongue with pyrosomes and siphonophores coiling into all of me. Along the shore where it continuously erodes our city’s foundations, eventually leading to our damnation, there were summer sideshows with baths for the old and sick and ice cream for the children. I, an insect in a pink dress, perambulated with the two-headed calves, the mermaids, the four-legged girls… My solution to cities arrived in a dream, and with this proposal I won a contest to design the architecture of the last World Exhibition. I pictured a stratum somehow subterrane and preconscious to the city’s surface atmosphere that nevertheless did not lie underground. At my instruction, we built an undulating, cavernous barrier of opalescent, protoplasmic white tissue overhead and around us, which was neither roof nor wall. The subcutaneous fat that made up this structure swirled with blood vessels and organs, among them a very humanlike carmine heart. The bulging fat narrowed to thin, transparent membranes overhead for skylights, an homage to the glass and iron roofs of the arcades of Paris. Within this layer we installed a number of reconstructions of the creatures of the antediluvian world ranging from the colossal to the infinitely small, all revealed by my X-ray images. Interspersed with them stood representations of animals of the future, culled from my exhaustive memory.

I have vowed to live until the final time the artifice of flight evolves on this planet, whether those wings are made to carve through sky, water, or soil. Flight is merely another form of vision, as those creatures with eyes all over knew well. I’m sure there will be another Urvogel, another of those angels of prehistory, and it will be one of us, but I still don’t know if it will be you or I. Praise the disturbed sleep of the finch in the forest. Once there was a human body here; now there is only the horse-mane brush inside my cervix, painting my first dream on the veiled walls, my dream of the dappled bulls and mammoths and scintillating lions.

And now Urvogel begins her southward migration from Baffin Bay, all the way to Cape Horn, her unwrapped plumage is brilliant with iridium and salt, gunpowder. The bird in my bed, printing-stone bird, the bird whose shape is suggested by a cuneiform arrow in space. The emptiness preceding the first vowel of the highest alphabet—curvilinear static, an inscription written in vibrating silence

and her aerial sarcophagus
rides the rose suspended in rain
wheels over the grand ovary of Chartres
her first flight
efflorescent silt
blossoms Calamites
in me
in the room with the hand of glory
where the conifers spin toward their black sun
the missing letter of the script that resurrects lost forms