In Fertile In-Between Places

Alma Tetto
July 2022, Mexico City
Published in Jane, Issue 12

I had a vision in which I made love with the world.
The form of my being, indistinguishable
from all else, married to atmospheric particle,
vibrated in cosmic intensities, quaked
as a great mountain. I visited plateaus
of whole-body pleasure and pain, a trillion
years old, tied up in the archaic and endless
Gordian knot of life.

What is body and mind but continuity?
What is this boundless and incessant unfolding
of relation—of fertile pollination via crossing paths
of thought being mixed and separated and claimed
as our own?

My words are not mine.
I inherited a language that has molded
my ideas and sight into a particular form.
The thoughts and feelings that pass through me
arise from a perpetual untold stream
as deep and unfathomable as time.

I feel this region of being as me.
I feel these words as original.
I feel that I am singular, a being
in motion through the landscape
of family, of history, of social cues.

I am not linear. I am tied up in chaotic
mass below the surface of the earth.
I am a conflation belonging to it all.

I arrive at a place where history
becomes histories, her stories, their stories:
we are a multiplicity; each of us are many.
Together, we make a raucous crowd.

I look out not from the same set of eyes
but eyes that are constantly replaced.
Each scene I encounter, every height
and valley mixed with depth of inner
feeling, desire stirred with memory,¹
produces in me a new instrument
of seeing: I look upon the world
with a thousand eyes.

Each event pollinates in me a new child:
I am birthing the world again and again.

Yet how often I am raped. How often
the world throws daggers that rip apart
body and throw mind into dense
black fissure of earth where I dissolve into
the mouth of mycelium and worm, stretched
out and deformed to be reformed
and emerge with a hundred new eyes.

Nothing gets erased.
Everything is sacred.

The map that is my body is alive.
There are hidden pathways, darkened
caverns with doors that reveal themselves only
when our sun is in particular angle to
earth and moon—each door with its season,
every window perceiving the curve of light
in onward, ever-unfolding times of day.

The landscape is always in motion.
There is no developing world.

I am a dynamic holding together,
a landing place of chalk and limestone,
the sedimentary material of
earth’s long accumulation of itself.
I am a place for you to settle
as you flow through the dark estuary of Isis
where the transparent tide meets the stream.

I am the mouth and the mother,
the shallow waters that softly conceal
earth’s core under a surface just visible.

I am a harbor to load and unload
your ships as you journey through
the darkness of Thames, where the river
is braided with uncountable headstreams.

Try to separate the water
once it’s been joined. Try to untangle
what is yours and what is mine.

Gravity and groundwater are given by our moon;
the landscape is always in motion.
There is no developing world.
There is no end.

Each end is a beginning, each point
part of the circle in which I am not the center
but the outline in motion.

I am disparate elements working to be in relation.
Sometimes I feel as though I do not belong.

I am the product of the wasp and the wind,
pollen spreading out across strange distances
beyond home and root systems
to become a rhizome.

The root is already a tree.
The tree is already the world.²

We make maps to make contact with the real.
What is real but the places we overlap?
Where are the doors that invert the graph
and take us within? The passing-through
places and in-betweens, the in vivo knowledge³
of the trans spaces that hold the tension
between the two to produce a third?

I live my life in widening circles.⁴
My words are not my own.

Can we trace the lines that connect
each moment, every life/form without getting lost
in the knots of a deep web, drawing their reach
beyond a life, in the undergrowth
tangle of root, radicle, and embryonic stem
that first grows downward, further,
further below sight?
What evades us?

Life, it seems, itself is a rhizome:
the truth of it is invisible, hidden underground.⁵
I flower only for a season, and then I fall
to be swallowed by earth
and made again.

What conceals us (that which is concealed?)?

I am the product of the wasp and the wind,
traceable only in precise calculation of curve
and uncertainty.

How many splitting cells,
cloned and then divided
across vast time and vast distances,
joined to create the image I call me?

I am a contradiction.
I am a movement through time:

Nothing gets erased.
Everything is sacred.

One does not become two, at least
not simply.

What is said in the unsaid,
in the long spaces of silence and ellipse and in-betweens?
What seeds are softly, invisibly taking root
with determined force to know
more of their possibility?

One does not become two, at least
not simply. It is not enough
to say, ‘Long live the multiple.’
No, the multiple must be made.⁶

The only way to belong to this world
is to subtract oneself, to find out what the world is
before you and after, what is beyond you.
So you carve out your edges to make clear
and define yourself, forgetting the arbitrary nature
of any border and boundary, the calling out
and naming of a thing to establish its it-ness.

n+1 is redundant;
n-1 is particularity, perhaps even essence.

(I want to know: is anything truly arbitrary?)

The essence of our time is, yet, still
the waste land, where the poet offers
to show you something other than

Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust. ⁷

Or, as the lover asked Isolde before he loved her:

Fresh blows the wind
For home; My child,
Where do you tarry? ⁸

(Does the wind blow us homeward
in this heap of broken images?)

Last night I dreamt of the hyacinth,
the color of lapis (a metamorphic
tone of rare, immense depth). The hyacinth
appears to dot my nocturnal life often
these days.

(These days
are blending together in such a way that it’s difficult
to determine if I have been dreaming of hyacinths
for a week now, or a month, or has it been many?)

(And, are they multiple hyacinths or just one?)

I think now it was a field; the hyacinths
were lapis blue, and my arms were not full
and my hair was not wet because it was not raining,
and I did not pick the flowers because I feared
if I did they would be uprooted, and there I would be,
carrying the flowers with bulbous roots covered in wet earth,
and I would not know what do with them.

I may have blushed, for the bulb is swollen, rotund
like the earth herself. Iris, narcissus,
allium and crocus: sisters and daughters,
all fleshy and rhizomatic, their bulbous parts rising
up to flash (sensually) their asexual (read: non) needs.

(The bulb allows certain species to survive
in adverse conditions, such as a waste land,
so they may grow when the time is right.)⁹

When I lived in California, I saw the way the earth
was scorched to ash—it happened at a time
when I was grieving and it amplified
my own ashy realm with its parts: of bone (my lover)
joined with earth (my home); all that held me.
Sometimes I would put my hands
into the box of ashes that was once my lover
and remember when they were still warm.

I dreamt at that time that I started a fire
outside my house in the canyon. I hid
in the shadow of night so the neighbor
wouldn’t see and raise alarm, or worse,
stamp it out. I watched myself
from the window out across the street,
looking over my shoulder and back again
at the oak (or was it pine?)
to nurture a small but growing flame.

I came back to myself at the window
and remained there until daybreak
to protect that inferno engulfing one tree
I felt growing both within and beyond me.

The root is already a tree.
The tree is already the world.¹⁰

The next morning the power had been cut
and I woke to a knock from the neighbor
with news that the canyon next to ours had erupted
in a great, wild fury. I saw the way the earth
was scorched to ash.

My grief took seed and flowered
like the mortal lover of Apollo whose fragrant
blood seeped into the earth to take root again
in blossom. The youth’s fate, as it were,
was to reach forever toward his beloved
(perhaps a strange form of perpetuity).

The sun burns brightly these days though
its flame seems as eternal as ever (even
the stars will die, they say, even ours).
The sun burns brightly these days because
our skin has grown thin (yet we disguise this).

Each end is a beginning, each point
part of the circle in which I am not the center
but the outline in motion.

The singular hyacinth, far from simply
blue, blossomed into field, each flower
possessing the eternal, the universal, the singular,
and the flux. The sorrows that are one
with our great loves and lacks that manifest
as vast stretches of sterile, stripped earth
always transform in strange and confounding ways
as fertile. There are seeds, roots, and radicles
buried deep in the earth and carried in the wind,
and the mother rebirths herself
again and again.

Here, still the start of a century,
and time feels like it’s running out. Time
bleeds into itself so that one moment
is indistinguishable from the next,
and all we have is now. We are surprised
by each season, every summer
the rain.

We are always in between.
Each beginning is some point
in the center, a loop in a spiral
that spins through the void of being
to produce the proliferating world.

My mother tongue is unknowable
(like the real), yet still I am the mother:
each moment I am born and give birth
to a hundred new eyes.

I call upon the world as lover
—whether bulb, or wind, or wasp.

__

Footnotes

¹ A reference to the poem ‘The Waste Land’ by T.S. Eliot

² From Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1987).

3 In vivo knowledge is a new kind of knowledge concerned with the relation between the external object and internal subject, proposed by Romanian theoretical physicist Basarab Nicolescu in ‘In Vitro and In Vivo Knowledge: Methodology of Transdisciplinarity’ in Transdisciplinarity: Theory and Practice, ed. Basarab Nicolescu (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2008), 1–22.

⁴ Quoted from the poem ‘Widening Circles’ by Rainer Maria Rilke.

⁵ ‘Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away—an ephemeral apparition.’ C.G. Jung in Memories, Dreams, Reflections (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 16.

⁶A reference to Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus.

⁷Quoted from ‘The Waste Land’ by T.S. Eliot.

⁸Modified from Act 1, Verses 5–8 of Tristan und Isolde by Richard Wagner.

⁹Modified from an entry on various forms of asexual plant reproduction from Encyclopaedia Britannica.

¹⁰Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus.