Laurie Blauner
From the inside of my parked car I peer briefly through someone’s far window. I see a prismatic electronic screen that hijacks my attention with its shifting, bright hues, a vision of reality that I quickly comprehend isn’t real. This is a stranger’s apartment but it resembles all the apartments around it. The image is a subterfuge of colors and shapes I don’t find coherent, a flotilla of pictures and unheard sound that ensnares my unconscious. It’s oddly soothing. Sometimes, at home, I use the television to fall asleep. My cell phone doesn’t relax me at all with its staccato news. Is the content or the presentation appealing or both? How does the brain interpret these signals? As clouds of light and noise or are these something primeval and directly linked to our emotions?
Our brains perceive only the colors an object reflects to us, not the ones it absorbs. The eye and brain collude together to decide on color and the ear transmits electrical signals to the brain. Vision influences hearing and vice versa. Senses blend directly into our memories and experiences, reviving those buried feelings. We create meaning from what we know. Because how many times have you seen eggs growing from trees or listened to your mirror sneeze and understood the image and noise to be exactly that?
I drive home, passing houses and apartments whose windows display other screens. I think about how we distract ourselves with our interests, or pursue those electronically too, like reading, traveling, bird watching, music, gardening, fishing. Those are generally our favorite pastimes. For a short while I enjoyed photography, trying to arrange shadows and light, the angles of objects I’d make look like other objects, portraits of family and friends, where I tried to find their seams. As if they were puzzles and, with the correct, strange assortment I could photograph what was inside them as well as their exteriors. Sometimes I cut the pictures up and arrayed them to make another person that might represent that person better.
I made jewelry for a while too, which felt more like assembling the various components, beads, stones, settings, chains, and various trinkets into something pleasing. Which was more impersonal. After I’d broken a bone in my foot and, while trying to use my crutches in the house, I knocked down some crockery as well as a large agate stone from my rock collection. I gathered all these materials and made a mosaic garden stepstone. I still have an extensive rock and mineral collection, long after leaving a local Rock Club. But it appears all my hobbies amount to reconfiguring objects and displaying them. Isn’t that what I do with characters and plots when I’m writing?
I do like watching people inside their homes as I’m curious how much we all share. Because doesn’t everyone’s life proceed according to pieces of time and is remembered by us intermittently and in a shifting order? Years, months, days, hours, and seconds are recalled by diaries, clocks, recorders, calendars, and our memories. The connections could be every pet of mine that has died or each time I was particularly wrong or right or each time I have seen a wheelbarrow or a poem about tomatoes. All these things are rallied and amalgamated from across time in my thoughts in order to create meaning.
Dismantle + assemble differently = problem solving
The Norse world was created from Ymir, sea and lakes came from his blood, clouds from his brain, trees from his hair, the earth arrived from his flesh, stones and rocks were from made from his bones or teeth.
When things are dissolving or need repair they fragment into their individual pieces. The pieces are inspected and bad ones are replaced. With my first husband I loved the parts of him that I didn’t fear, that held ungloved embraces and kisses, that repelled lies and secrets, and that wrapped jokes and entertainment around both of our shoulders. Because of his failing restaurant he couldn’t sleep at night, didn’t listen, forgot me. If only he could have been repaired.
I watch certain parts of my 94 year-old mother die and I’m unsure of their replacement, a walker or a cane for her legs, the loosened grip of her hands. Her stomach is a haunted house and, like a phantom, sleep eludes her.
Pointillism is a way of painting in which tiny colorful dots create the piece. Paul Signac and Georges Seurat began this technique, although all painting is a combination of shape, color, and form. Chuck Close made large photorealistic portraits from photographs into grids which the viewer often blends into a consistent image.
My second husband is an identical twin and was therefore split into two. I try to swirl both him and his brother’s resemblances around and on top of one another kaleidoscopically but they have grown different. They have the same way of walking, speaking, and using their hands. But one is spread wider into the world while the other, thinner and shorter, discovers insects in coiled, spidery bursts under leaves and rocks or is lost in his work’s computer language. One has watched a wife’s mind teeter down a long hallway, disappearing, and the other has ended up with me. They fit together well and both of them adore music and musical instruments, fixing things, and each other. I think it would be nice to have someone like a mirror in each corner.
Some of the twins that surface in mythologies are also like a person split into two. My husband is very close to his brother like Pollux and Caster. Pollux yielded a portion of his immortality to be with Caster when he died. They became the Gemini constellation. My husband and his brother have the same mannerisms. Some twins are opposites, like Apollo, the sun, and Artemis, the moon, or the Roman Romulus, who killed his brother, Remus.
The natural world collects fragments and completes them, seeds into trees, trees into trunks, trunks into branches, branches into leaves. A total entity. When it breaks down it’s often in the same order, just reversed. Everything in the world is interdependent and evolving, one thing overlapping the other like twins who are different.
In Mary Shelley’s book Frankenstein, a complicated creature was created from various human parts. A whole new being was born, unselved, then reselved.
Unruly stars sit on a Montana lake’s surface one evening, later reconfiguring themselves.
The bird you buried was swallowed by earth and made into something else.
Letters on the eye doctor’s chart hang over one another, then scuttle back and forth.
Pentimento is a painting beneath another painting.
Watch and guess where the ball is in the Shell Game.
The elements of hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, sulfur, and phosphorus, in many different combinations, make up life.
Silhouettes lie over silhouettes lie over silhouettes . . .
A spiral is a pattern that doesn’t know where to end.
Arrange domino tiles so they all touch one another. Then push.
My emotions can resemble shards but I am all yours.
I am mesmerized by a kaleidoscope, how, like in life, patterns change. A blue shape overlays a red one, then everything slurs, my mind creates a face or a snowflake. The visual world is in flux. Is there a narrative? Maybe I’m making too much of this process. How we perceive the broken things around us that, like childhood, metamorphosize into something better or worse and occasionally into some kind of meaning. The kaleidoscope creates a colorful, exotic, dancing bird to entertain me. This reminds me of the real bird I saw once on a television nature show, peeking inside the window of a stranger’s house from the distance of a sidewalk.