summoning green, a leprosy of the heart

When I write the lines it comes out in a child’s voice

And the child’s voice sounds like the mouth was stuffed with something— confetti, cotton, dust, sock, apple, duct tape, Stoffer’s, cranberries, fists, locusts, toilet paper, unsharpened pencils, pogs, kinetic sand, dry leaves, soil (wet or caked), feathers (obviously), mattress springs, tulle and tinsel, polymers and lead, Jupiter’s seventh moon, the cartographic remains of a failed vacation, its fold-up road atlas, corner of a month-old large supreme pizza box from Little Caesar’s, chalk dust from sidewalk hopscotch, three neon orange tyrannosaurus rex arranged in a tea party pattern on the edge of the neighbor’s roadside garden, 3 copies of Poetry magazine (still in plastic), a tiny ceramic cat that bears no resemblance to the real cat you miss and its attempt to fill that fur hole, one locust (real) hanging from a magnolia branch whose leaves occasion to a sunset color at the edges, and are plucked in the moment of attention drifted from the locust to the leaves, coffee coasters that might be bathroom tiles, the overwhelm of material detail, the shape of innocuous objects that try to fill that fur hole, fur, fur, and the murmurs of others...

The voice I think I am writing in is much more sophisticated, raspy even, the one that has succumb to the chemical world & inhales its sentencing to produce a sound too low to hear but can be felt as nausea, the innocuous appliance is a killer (this sound is a matter of time)

Curlie-cues of throaty resignation that come out in-audible and supplicating so that the air confuses it for gratitude

But I am not grateful, I think

it as ambient as air and innocuous as air that seems breathable enough

Or nice enough, like bubbles and desk fans blowing directly into your eyeballs on hot afternoons, balloons and butterflies, whatever

can’t remember the kicker so it goes like ( )

Need to spit

As a dream without memory is a waste of time

Permanent dream permanent dream

When I wake up I watch Marguerite Duras’ India Song and I write down one line that seems to have hit reviewers at the time it goes “lepers burst like sacks of dust”

But the reviewer or the translator of the film got it wrong—the reviewer said “like sacks of grain,” and I wonder about the difference

In the first the leper is more like dust

In the second the leper is more like the sack—I have never heard of a sack of dust, but it’s easier to imagine it bursting

A leper standing for a someone too porous to keep to herself when the world got in her particulate matter spattering all over the nearest solid container

Or outward as solar diffusion that cute poets like to write about twirling in the rays coming in through the morning’s window

One day you burst like a sack of dust

Other days the grain spills out and it is a waste of a harvest hoarded for a future hurtled toward but easefully ignored

The technofuturist pours hot pink dye all over your head to coordinate with hot pink sweatpants and the pink shirt with a cute pink bra

Hello to all my fans! you say, I love you, I love my fans...

In India Song, the camera pans over her red wig, her jewelry, the piano and an incessant gesture of incense—too-long shots of the Palais Rothschild painted everywhere in a sick green, and I wonder if it is Paris Green, the color of Napoleon’s wallpaper that killed him by slow inhalation in his sleep

I think of this in the context of household toxins and what it means to keep a house virus-free and to what extent a surface is shared if its reality isn’t—the line between dream and not, virus and loved ones, sickness and health, Napoleon withering by breathing green wallpaper or Napoleon figure of colonial power, the evil of stillness or the evil of movement

When he dreamt did he dream of winning the Napoleonic wars and rising through the military ranks after the French Revolution to be a general at age 24

Did he dream his luscious colonies’ return to slavery?

Did he dream of the detail of the Louisiana Territory?

Did he dream of the mouths of Saint-Dominigue that spat him out like a symptom of respiratory droplets?

Spat him like tobacco, sugarcane, unripe banana etc.?

Spat him like he spat arsenic, orgeat syrup, potassium tartrate, calomel, copper in the wallpaper and household items of the Longwood house, where he spent his exile in the clutches of Britain's East India Company?

Spat him like a locust spits as it covers the sky in swarms as a symptom of thoughtless human tearing up the topsoil, scraping the mantle-deep grasses that turned wheat into dust (too far West and ahead in time)?

The house bursts like a sack of grain but it dreams in imperial time

This is the message of the film it seems, we surround the afflicted with posthumous gossip

No one speaks they just loll around performing dull movements to this song while people gossip

At the beginning of the film it seems the voices are the ghosts, but then we realize their disembodiment is what’s alive in the film, their assumptions are what lives

While the figures move in time slow as an image

Anne-Marie, the “promiscuous wife of the French ambassador in India” is dead

She grew bored with the Empire and decided to die

In the film she moves through time as a gelatinous membrane

Mendicant because the beggar is described as her mirror Mendicant because no one moves that slow without desire for another time or timing

She can hold herself in the membrane

She can puncture it or herself with mendicant gestures that follow the banality of daily tasks and their absurd questions: “Does this dish belong on this shelf or that shelf?” “To turn the laundry machine on, do you press in the button or turn it?” “Is this towel used for the dishes or the body?” “How do I use the lawn mower?” “How much to pay the lawn mower guy?” “How many paper towels do we need?” “What brand of butter do you buy?” “Can disposable gloves be used twice?” “Do you happen to have any batteries?” “Is the milk old?” “Are the beans old?” “Is the Diet Dr. Pepper old?” “Where is the soap for the floor?” “Where is the soap for the dishes?” “Where is the soap for the body?”

If soap is what kills the lipid layers among lepers is it possible to live in a bubble?

Is it possible to wear soap gloves or to leave some soap on your hands so that if you share a surface that has the virus the leftover soap will fight it off?

If I drink bleach will I be cured of my dust?

Maybe it’s not a vaccine we need maybe it’s more bubbles, bubble parties for everyone

You daydream a scenario in which the Great Pacific Garbage Patch might be fashioned to create plastic bubbles for everyone to move around in like hazmat suits at a grocery store

Napoleonic ghosts figure the distance between this daydream and a vaccine, the Paris Green of malaria prevention

She is exhausted again, or dehydrated, and her child’s voice creeps out of the body imbued with killer paint colors

She thinks how grateful she is for such technicolor dreams

Everyone wants this experience! She thinks, They are jealous of me! The penetrating dreams that confuse reality with whatever else there is

The desire to belong to one or the other without jealousy

When asleep to remain asleep

When awake to remain awake

The dream in which someone recommends a little-known book by Lacan called Mechanics, in which psychoanalysis is applied to robots and puppets

There is an accompanying film called Imagination

But that is not real

What is real is long choreography through greening walls on the brink of decay [1]

All poets burst like sacks of grain

Wasting everyone’s foodstuffs with their holes

A long choreographed circulation of variables with unseeable consequence until!

A long choreography of holes,

A long choreography of fear of your holes, their leaking, the fur you shed and its parasites or lice and the what is it you are passing on as you pass through the park or the grocery store

Or before that, toxicities airborne and sprayed over the still ponds to kill the mosquitoes before they can bite humans, a larvaecide

Insecticide sprayed over the cotton fields

Insecticide leaking into a grain elevator full of rats that are already full of Hanta virus

Sometimes kids jump into the top of the grain elevator and fall through then suffocate under so much grain

Have you ever thought about that?

What does your sandwich taste like knowing there was a dead kid and hanta virus rats in the sack of grain that was a bumper crop because the government okayed a chemical yield?

“Don’t be such a Debbie Downer!” says a mom, and a child’s voice leaks out with toxic breath droplets like a split note from the raspy tone that gets all of these lovers and their ennui baggage, who flick their cigarettes on the Paris Green floor before green becomes the cure for malaria and the slow death of everyone else, or perhaps just the aristocracy, who had a penchant for green wallpaper and chandeliers

& whose cures for the plague included eating crushed diamonds instead of spoonfuls of sugar, in which case oh well

But there are also the wallpaper people in the factory making productive green swirls on the daily for a market that just really likes green

& people drinking unfiltered water from the marsh

& people eating sandwiches

& not-people soaking in the greens of not-technicolor dreams but ordinary grass that is not even mantle-deep

& the ordinary grass is an absurd question asked during the performance of banal tasks, combing the fur and the stains from one’s jeans which are a beautiful blue because of coal tar, nowadays

Even indigo is out of fashion

In a long choreography of real leaks, teeth on the brink of decay

Skin with such huge pores they might as well be holes

Swollen up with garbage—ordinary primitive accumulation

Lepers don’t feel anything insists the ennui woman in Duras’s film, dancing boringly to the India Song

“Don’t suffer? No, don’t feel anything”

She means that Mycobacterium leprae results in “lesions [that] usually do not itch or hurt; they lack sensation to heat, touch, and pain,” [2]

Where humans and armadillos are the only reservoirs;

they pass it along through respiratory droplets

The off-camera gossipers infer that the ennui woman identifies strongly with the lepers, their physical toxicity is in analog to the toxicity of her heart

When she rejects the Vice-Counsul (who seems to be the only man she rejects) (he is a big baby) he goes howling into the night to everyone’s great embarrassment

Howling her Venetian name

As a virgin he claims she is the only woman he’s ever loved

She’s been with so many others he insists why not him

He screams about this into the night

To her great ennui — kindness is an expense of injustice — she writes off: “In China, the war went on. The Japanese were still advancing. In Spain, they were still fighting. In Russia, the Revolution was betrayed. The Congress of Nuremberg has just taken place.”

As off-camera gossipers we infer these references mean to common historical distinction by the montage of their intent,

the facts of matters across time and space that make surfaces shared but eschew the facts of complex interiors wallpapered with technicolor realities

Long choreographies long epidemologies transgressing boundaries

THERE ARE WARS PPL ARE DYING THERE ARE VIRUSES LURKING IN ALL OUR LIPID LAYERS

As off-camera gossipers we infer this is what the ennui woman is thinking as she lies down on the green rug in the green palace meant to protect her from these other greens of contaminated grass while she breathes the green of copper-arsenic and gargoyles and pillars pose a threat to those outside the palace walls

She lies down on the rug

Everyone tries so hard at not spitting up these internalized systemic droplets N-95 mask or no

Don’t they? the woman cannot feel anything, the reviewer writes, she suffers “leprosy of the heart” she bursts like a sack of dust

I do not know how to spell leprosy and it comes out as le-porous-y

Breathe the leper air breathed outside the Paris Green walls (further West and ahead in time) Without speaking

What leaks out is the voice of a kid who breathed in the grain and dust

(Something gets pushed to the island of attention and is forgotten about)

A life is garbage and holes and refrains of ordinariness that become munched dreams

Then gossip kills a figure by slow consensus

[1]Wikipedia tells me the Rothschild building was condemned and its interior chandeliers sold for far below their value; also, Napoleon’s Longwood house was so damaged by termites that contemporary curators only preserved the original stone stairwell.

[2]“Leprosy (Hansen’s Disease).” 2019. Communicable Disease Management Protocol. Accessed April 2020. www.manitoba.ca/health/publichealth/cdc/protocol/leprosy.pdf

Appearances ::

All images from Wikimedia Commons or screenshots from Marguerite Duras’ India Song

Edmond, R. (2006). Leprosy and Empire: A Medical and Cultural History (Cambridge Social and Cultural Histories). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511497285

Gachelin, G., Garner, P., Ferroni, E., Verhave, J. P., & Opinel, A (2018). “Evidence and strategies for malaria prevention and control: a historical analysis.” Malaria Journal. 17(1), 96. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12936-018-2244-2

Loayza, Beatrice. “Close-Up on Marguerite Duras's ‘India Song.’” MUBI, 4 Apr. 2020, mubi.com/notebook/posts/close-up-on-marguerite-duras-s-india-song