…how deeply we are mired in the Great Derangement: our lives and our choices are enframed in a pattern of history that seems to leave us nowhere to turn but towards our self-annihilation.
—Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement
The delirium perishes when a patient is persuaded that things are only such as they are imagined. A radical recovery should be promised.
—Denis Diderot, “Melancholia,” The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d’Alembert, Collaborative Translation Project
* * *
the first sign of trouble: time hardens like ambrite. ugly signs at national parks meant to rough joy. time hardens with the heat. time hardens with the brainweathers. you still think in full thoughts even when the sky stinks with scum sun. wretched heat. your brain frame-dragging on spacetime.
hardened gneiss you once saw a peewee perched in a birch tree by the edge of the lake.
weyoo you called out to the bird.
bird’s eye an open casket.
* * *
time also hardens syntax and sick bodies slick with surplus flesh. the first sign of trouble: everything changed but not everything changes. nouns cycle with thermal kinesis of the ghostclimate within your chest.
your neighbour jan says the climate is always putting on new clothes.
coffee cups envelop joyless hands. on the porch you are both unwitting beasts. on the porch six stones. on the porch saccharin mineralises your tongue while you count thousands of years in cicadas. jan has cataracts in her left eye. yours are in the right. what do you both fail to see? rumination zombies your zero-calorie language. repetition moulds your matter into unfamiliar shapes.
black bile pools in your empty stomach. sometimes your anatomy embarrasses you. the roundness of your cheeks. the shallowness of your eggs. manes hide in your marrow. you hunger for everything and consume nothing but unlabelled metaphor.
orchid everything is fine.
fiction is sitcom but only the meteorologists are not laughing. nouns magnetise into strange pairings. birddrones in glasssky brick sun and transconfusions. even the squirrels are puzzled. too many melancholic winters have denuded the birch tree into an awkward skeleton. gregory bateson’s distorted syllogisms litter the grey garden: men die. grass dies. men are grass. you and jan watch the birds alight on the feed tray. light on their feet they eat. they eat. they eat. they leave seed carcasses on the ground.
* * *
the first sign of trouble: slimification.
verbs condense into fundamental states of matter with a tendency toward cold flow. first the trinititesky creeprains safetyyellow gel although they warned no one of this strange force on the radio. rainfall at 11. you take foul pills to calm yourself. you wash off the sickness of their blue with sparkling water. your poor brainengine coughs like a broken radiator. still your body is light although you wrap poundage around your stomach. is this true? you wonder. at times reality suffers suspicion of its mirrors.
you slide from the entrance onto the porch as if you own this crackled body. this morning you sit on the bottom step. five stones three quaters on the calcifying timber. you read diderot’s encyclopédie like a metaphor. too close to your face you can smell the weathered pages. too engrossed to notice the brittling of air until a sudden lightning strike fossilises on the window. berylliumsky skips but so far you remain uncracking. the brownness of the thunder oozes with astonishment. then it happens: big glops of aerogel hit your head and make burlaps of your gross hair. now you are terrified. the stuck air issues its injunction. you skry indoors from this viscous disaster. the elasticity of the gelrain leaves temporary deformations on porch surfaces. soon everything is slimy with fell: the grass, the trees, the empty pots with the rot of last summer’s flowers. the peewee at the bird feeder bends delicately under the weight of thickened gravity. opening its wings, it topples over the railing. you repeat the sound of the rain until you experience semantic satiation: nice nice nice nice nice nice nice nice.
how can you describe the scene?
how do you apprehend this alien knowledge of your body?
you are not patient.
diderot describes a patient who believed he had legs of glass and made no movement. for now your body flows like gallium even if syntax has the consistency of pitch. soon description tars your mouth. you watch the strange thickening outside your window. it covers the dirt with hunger. it covers the dirt. it covers. horrified, the encyclopédie slips from your hand. you are an impossible object. paranoia gains a pronoun.
* * *
the first sign of trouble: solidification.
you begin to stiffen into stone.
the slimerain surged for several days, shoved everyone into troubled silence. you held your climate behind your ribs but in front of your slowing heart. you digested anxious thoughts in your barren stomach. but now the waterlight from your body seems composed of solid particles. magnetised by attraction, words are first agitated by quick action, then violently cohere without predicative expression. when the rain finally stops everyone is noticeably harder. is this real?you wonder. solid principles form a basis for contrary truths. how many stones do you have today on the rotten wood of your porch?
the indoorness of your living room burdens the existence of the outdoorness of your body. you have had enough. you need air and fluid motion. you leave carefully from the front entrance. you lock your door. your mass a dense assemblage of continuous parts but you breathe desire in the gestalt of rigidifying air. everything feels alkalotic: the porch, the road, your car, the flies, the ants. a greasy biofilm coats the trees and sticks birds to the branches.
you shuffle cautiously to the lakefront, swing one leg out in a circle then the other because you cannot bend your knees. it takes two hours to walk the straight mile. your aggregate’s imperfection always lies in material defect. when you reach the beach you search the shoreline: it is quieter today. a woman bending low to pick shells. a girl pulling her hand with a flat stone into a slow-motion throw. a fisherman on the wharf osseously casts his line to the water. you watch it bounce on the spongey surface.
you watch. you watch. you watch.
you heave an arm to wave but it reaches only to your waist. you don’t want to appear rude although the beachgoers already ignore you. you remind yourself as jan once did that you are too nice to your hateful neighbours. nice nice nice nice nice nice nice. on your tenth watch your brainpitch has yet to drop.
you are not curious. when you reach the lake’s edge you put your foot on the viscid surface. it deforms gently under the weight. your aggregate is not homogenous with this strange water. the surface tension resists your force; striations form on the fluid skin. your foot cannot break the solidifying water even if the pressure applied is positive. the climatic heat causes an adhesion or cohesion that further increases the resistance.
how do you provide end-of-life care for an entire species?
how deranged are you yet?
* * *
time hardens like lechatelierite forged by line arcing. you retreat from the shore’s spiny edge. the woman is now clutching her shell. her ashlar body resetting. the girl is ready to fling her stony flying wing. the fisherman is still but his eyes follow you as if you are a weak element of knowledge. the carbonsky solidifies with each step. each movement and hand gesture you make cuts the agony of your stones. slowly you retire back to your house.
you walk. you walk. you walk.
you greet yourself when you return.
* * *
the bitumen is alive.
the first sign of trouble: thick deposits appeared in the valley one night but no one ever saw them move. each night they have inched closer to your street. this morning they have finally surrounded your neighbours’ houses. they have blocked the roads with their oily murmurations.
there is a colony at the bottom of your driveway. you have already stared at them for an hour hoping to catch their migrations. you don’t want to miss this pitch drop. you shift your eyes only for a second but when you return your gaze the black rocks have rolled up the incline and barricaded your garage. no one however seems particularly concerned. jan claims that she has hardly noticed them. you have. they burrow into your brain like biddybids. it is only a small increment of crack extension. a driving affection for solids, your eyes can only blink in anger.
* * *
the first sign of trouble: the lake has completely hardened.
time striates like gneiss. jan tells you over the phone. she is sure that it is nothing orchid. how’s the teaching? you transform under high pressure. each crack yields to another. the radio is mostly silent now. it went off-air sometime the week prior. even its static has tonnage.
when you try to fill your kettle the faucet gargles dried light. bands have now appeared on your arms. they alternate between dark and light. you conduct a geological survey of your body. what you find is metamorphic. what is crazier? climate or madness? the absence of your lungs insist that you are not eligible for humanity. your brain petrifies with ire. you are critically unresolved. you are after all a scratch test. still you hunger for your laughter.
* * *
time hardens like fulgurites. different kinds of solids appear alongside the bitumen. the papers hold a competition to name them. the prizes are the verbs that slowly disintegrate from a communal vocabulary.
cardinalode.
catignite (jan suggested catode).
spleenwortock.
lichenode.
coyotenite.
chinkapinock.
bushcloverite.
bearite.
paperstone.
celltone.
deerite.
squirrium.
dogite.
sparrowine.
lightose.
roseshale.
blightine.
buttonbusharl.
oakate.
your favourite: humanite. it vibrates gently in the darkness.
* * *
the first sign of trouble: the bitumen has taken over the classroom.
it now takes you two days to arrive on campus since the gasoline in your car has returned to the memory of its plankton. when you arrive for your 8:10 freshman seminar you find a lump of bitumen already at the front of the room. you don’t permit electronics but the bitumen has allowed your students to use their cell phones and computers. their gneiss fingers smash heavily their keyboards. a calcified copy of Allison Cobb’s Plastic has collapsed the front table. you assume the bitumen is teaching “Infinity” since that chapter is today’s assigned reading. you are an uncomfortable object. even the carbon in your cells is ringing.
you cannot understand the bitumen’s language if it has one. you listen. you listen. you listen. only your lump hums. when you try to approach the lectern you feel time like waterglass. evidentiality has become uncertain. your circumstantial body slumps onto the floor like pitch. did you miss this drop? you wonder.
the students do not seem to care. they are watching videos on their cell phones.
* * *
time hardens like shotcrete. the birds are falling from the sky. their bodies shatter schist on the greying ground.
jan and the other neighbours attempted to leave the valley this morning. you watched her from the window. she made it to the end of her driveway before she gneissed upon the concrete.
she lies supine among other stony bodies. what is this detailed explanation of the system of human knowledge? you stare. you stare. you stare. you are still waiting for the tenth drop. four and a half stones lie on the porch. you hold their poundage by the weight.
the neighbours have left their doors open and now the bitumen can enter their houses. soon they will drive their cars. they will leave for their jobs in the morning. they will return in the evenings. bags of groceries in the popped car boots. pitch children will exit school buses. already they play hopscotch in the street although you never see them move. you miss them no matter how intently you watch from the window. you think they even wave at you after they land on number five.
* * *
time sinters into heterodiamonds. the bitumen has completely overwhelmed the community. a lump entered your home when you forgot to lock the door. it sleeps in your bed while you must sleep on the floor. it cooks pasta on the stove. you never see the pitch in motion but you find warm meals on the kitchen counter. by now the bitumen has devoured your encyclopédie. a thick streak of carbon marks the carpet which you don’t bother to clean up.
you talk nonsense to the rock on your sofa but you are unsure if it replies. you are too nice for your own good jan once said. monsters are deviations of nature or history. when you turn away you can hear it changing tv channels. there is nothing on-air anymore. each channel displays bitumen in various scenarios: the news broadcast, a comedy show, a police drama, a medical soap opera. nice nice nice nice nice nice nice.
how can you describe this broken chain of knowledge?
are you incapable of all light and all instruction?
no one said you were a smart fluid, orchid. you are already a casualty. forget the pre- and post-, the mid-apocalypse is always boring. and here you are: still waiting for the next drop.
* * *
you do not buy food anymore. when you hunger you watch the pitch.
* * *
the first sign of trouble: twilight is a walking ghost.
you cannot stay here. heat has hardened brainspacetime.
nature always acts by the simplest means and time feels ceramic. you carry three stones from the porch. you slowly crawl from the bitumen’s house to the lake. it takes you all day to cover the full mile. prone, you drag your gneiss body. the leaverite on the wharf has completely hardened although his eyes still follow you as you move. both the woman and girl are cairns. the surface of the water is stone: hard and malicious. air bubbles surprised in a moment of bursting. they are trapped at the alien hardening. your gneiss body. your stone. peer down and you see fixed fish fossilised under the crust. you roll over. turn supine you weakly raise an arm. you split yourself against rock but never reach below inhuman surface.
how does this ontology emanate from nature?
what kind of geological record are you?
* * *
you have to move forward you think.
you have to keep watching.
* * *
weyoo said the bird as if a stone were in it.