I have all these weird headscapes (just realized that scape and space are anagrammatic) that are somewhere between hallucination, dream and synesthesia. How do I describe it? They are places, in my mind, I think, but they have their own mood, their own sense of history transmitted by their structure and patinas, and I can feel their dimensionality. They are not, as it were, projections in the screen of my mind. They are more like dynamic full-scale models, which is to say indistinguishable from real places except for the obvious difference that I enter them without going anywhere.
One of the first weird headscapes was an empty black expanse in which a sphere of everyday objectsâcars, trees, small structures like retaining walls and iron gates, with smaller things, blenders, one of those old mcdonaldâs styrofoam soda cups, used clothing, stuffed into the gapsâfloated just some two feet off the ground or so.
There was a wooden door with two concrete steps and a tiny stoop warped into the outer curve of the sphere, and as the great mass, maybe a hundred feet in diameter, rotated so the door passed me, I could open it and walk in.
But I never got very far. I never had the concentration, and it was dark anyway. It became a maze of foreshortening tunnels, and as I looked down the winding passages I might catch sight of the odd street lamp bending around and silhouetting a stuffed and mounted bison head, or having passed someway down another passage would emerge into a hall of knick knacks and mattresses under which half a â57 chevyâs headlight would pierce through an old scarf to glitter off the porcelain clowns and theater jewelry.
The place had its own special type of confusion. At once it was the heart of security, like being under thick blankets on a car ride home late at night, when youâre a kid and your dad thinks your asleep, back before we had cars with good heaters, or maybe he just liked the windows downâbut at the same time it remained foreign, clustered, helplessly unstable, inconsistent and on the verge of collapse.
Thatâs all I want to write for the moment, but I also want to try to fix this headscape I can feel right now. Itâs very, very old, for me. Itâs a world that belongs to childhood. Somehow remembering an elder Latina lady who used to babysit me helped bring it back (I looked up her name online, and it means refugee, and this all fits). Somehow, this space is like an open hall that circles a tropical garden, but it has old rooms branching radially away from the center, and though it is night in the garden and hall it might be anytime at all inside the rooms.
There are alters with candles. Something about the place signals Los Angeles. Roses are red and dogs are black. Someone eternally sweats out heroin withdrawal there. Remedios and Refugios are two brothers looking either way like the twin faces of Janus there.Â
Anyway, this is how I write. This is how I have always been able to write. I donât know why I gave it up. I guess I lost touch with it. My heart, that is.Â
Something about that headscape echoes a presentiment, as though I knew then without understanding what it was to try to keep a fire going in the rain so many years later.Â
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