Claudia La Rocco
Later in the House of God, 2016
text fragments, w/assists from a&k

*

This work was commissioned by Danspace Project,
where it was rendered on February 23
as a four-hour audio loop
during a one-night installation with Paul Chan’s sculptures
& Eiko Otake’s performance & video
in response to PLATFORM 2016: A Body in Places.

It’s dedicated, with love, gratitude & respect,
to Eiko, Paul & Judy Hussie-Taylor:
what a pleasure to spend time & space with you three

It’s also for Alex & Kristen,
who I adore,
& who might once have been the same person

*

{NB: A few lines are cannibalized
by previous recent works of mine, others are my responses
to video footage provided by Eiko;
“the artist” line represents a quote (or maybe misquote)
of one of Paul’s lines; the Sheehy line comes from a NYT article
from 1/29/16; & found language comes from Alex & Kristen.
The mistakes & bad lines are all mine.}

*

Thank you.

clr.
2/24/16
Brooklyn

*

 

Prelude.

 

There’s always trash
There’s always a one-night stand

My gravestone was broken into many small parts.

There was caution tape in the trees. My requiem for you could only ever be a token of my grief for the world. I had a slice of pizza, and tried to write a letter to someone.

I guess I was feeling pretty abject
I thrust my hand out against the broken metal post, the rusted razor wire
Nothing here to protect

 

Begin.

 

The bride read a long time ago that the ancient Greeks believed hysteria was caused by a woman’s womb going unused for too long, thereby causing it to roam around in her body, wreaking havoc. Also that emotions were something outside that same body, imposed upon her by the gods.

In expressing ambivalence about Hillary Clinton, Gail Sheehy described Gennifer Flowers as a lounge singer with slot-machine eyes.

Quit staggering around, old girl
The woman on the dunes gives you alien eyes
She is looking for her womb

Ophelia didn’t drown, in the end. She had a slice of pizza, and tried to write H. a letter. She expressed a big desire to take to the open seas. There was time and no time.

Later, she went out on the veranda and had a smoke. Stared at the world.

 

Begin.
Begin Again.

 

The people were all around the dying sea creature, looking nervously
Maybe it wasn’t dying after all
Were those tubes venomous?
It took them awhile to realize the creature was a bride

The tourist buses
The movement fast to the gatekeeper keymaster

You can read this any way you want.
The bride has seal eyes
She runs away
Dog with a bone
The city loses itself in a haze and the red flag whips beyond the yellow afternoon moon

Now the crowd had Ophelia cornered and she knew it
Her entrails spilled out
We lost interest

Now she no longer would move slowly
And the lights of the city came on
The monster heaved itself onto the boardwalk
And the bride stood with upraised arms.

 

Begin.

 

Last night at the ballet, the retiring star climbed the impossibly tall, thin ladder
She stood on the tiny platform far above the crowd, her legs offering their usual splendidly dependable geometries
Aphrodite Kallipugos couldn’t look away. She knew the ballerina would jump

You write things, you take away their power
An investigation is pending
She fell like it was nothing at all, her death

Everything is ruined
A body can be anywhere
It can fall

The memory of this dream remained with Aphrodite Kallipugos like an impossible thing

The shivering secret excitement of knowing before the others
She was at the top of her powers, in the tower with room only for one

 

*

 

The vines came down
They strangled what had been native, what had been there first

A woman who is also not human, who is also not free.

It was early morning. Ophelia hated her servant’s hangdog face, how abject she was. Her faith in the goodness of her actions.

(Appendix 1. Chart 45: At night the ship hums effortlessly. The territory hurtles forward, held in time.)

Somehow, the prospect of an avatar seemed necessary.
How in novels when they say her face darkened.

Because they didn’t feel … they                              Because they didn’t feel … they

Everything lies still now.

Dear Betty, the avatar whispers, The thing they don’t understand is, we had to go back. That’s where our spaceship was. One’s senses are attenuated anew, the artist told me. But I am not Odysseus.

The spaceship by year three began to develop its own intelligences, these running quietly and undetected by the skeleton support crew.

Now Ophelia can see she is moving further away. She practices jettisoning her favorite belongings through the escape pod hatch. She tries to draw the curtains, but they won’t close. Things outside move restlessly. Her meager allotment of courage goes on a pilgrimage & never comes back. She makes smaller & smaller movements with her hands.

I could go back on television, it’s true, Ophelia thinks to herself. But now I am just waiting.

(Appendix 4, Chart 72: Now I am waiting for her to tell me which way to go next.

 

Begin.

 

“My eyes won’t make focus,” the ghost explained. In the dream there were fleshy, flower-like growths erupting slowly from her palms. She bit them off at the base, the action both painful and satisfying.

St. Paul sits with the sword of the spirit, which is also the word of god. The ghost shakes her head and keeps walking. Everything becomes radioactive, she mutters. Water stains, water damage. Her long sleeves dragging in the mud and dust.

In her memoir, Some Memories of a Long Life, 1854-1911, Malvina Shanklin Harlan gives an account of a slave girl whose clothes caught fire after she fell asleep while working near a candle. Harlan writes: “Unconscious, at first, of the heat that would have quickly awakened one of another race, she lay twisting and turning in her sleep.” Harlan is important to history because she was a wife. Her husband was the Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan, who gave the lone dissenting opinion in Plessy v Ferguson, the case endorsing separate but equal segregation.

Begin Again.

Lock her in for the night. She mutters. For eternity. The kumquats are over ripe.

The plants were so lush, you couldn’t tell the world was dying.
The ghost was troubled by this, and did a weird little dance to indicate her discontent.

The piano lay on its side in the rubble. The insects buzzed and hummed incessantly. The whistler. The knave. The girl at the bottom of the sea.

The monster when she opened her wings was the palest, most beautiful of reds. What you might say was saffron. She was sexually insatiable. She was immortal. She was cursed.

The ghost could only keep walking. “I’m not sure I entirely understand parentheticals,” she whispered.

Penetrated by the thing that is you also. A deep, impossibly sensuous problem.

In her novel, The Bondwoman’s Narrative, thought to date from the 1850s, Hannah Crafts writes, “Slaves generally are far preferable to wives in husbands’ eyes.” Crafts is important to history because she was a fugitive slave, recently escaped from North Carolina. She was discovered in 2001 by a man, Henry Louis Gates, Jr.; in 2013, her identity was verified by another man, Gregg Hecimovich. Her name became Hannah Bond.

The fiberglass hull was broken like a child’s thing. Finally, the ghost sat along the ruined edge and cried. The ground was soon covered with small white feathers.

 

Begin.

 

It’s late here. It’s hushed. The ship’s systems whirring on and off, indeterminately. Malvina is poolside in her one-piece, the water lapping incandescently under dark lights far overhead. She sips listlessly at her Moscow Mule.

The bride’s face is obscured by vines
She has lain for so long now in her bower
The prince is waiting far, far away, in Soho—or, not waiting, exactly, but alert

Now the trains do not come here anymore
Dry grasses obscure the tracks
The man I would be with has fallen away, the bride whispers,

Now I can never go home
The station is closed
The yellow center line runs on forever: I can no longer offer you a defense of art.

 

Begin Again.

 

Aphrodite Kallipugos was sitting in the empty lot behind her apartment building
Drinking beer out of bottles and smoking cigarettes
She set her iPod on shuffle, and looked toward the stars

Everyone was too far away
Ophelia was down in the dumps again
And so Aphrodite Kallipugos had been sending her asemic emojis
Everything was bad, Ophelia texted back
Aphrodite Kallipugos thought to say “make it worse” but she kept that to herself
Also that asemic emojis were code for love

Youth is wasted on the young, Aphrodite Kallipugos said to no one in particular,
Shaking her head and taking a swig from her present bottle of beer
This saying was a favorite of her father’s.
It had taken her a long time to really understand it.

More texts were coming in
Zipping back and forth from Oakland to Seattle.
Ophelia found Aphrodite Kallipugos’ full name cumbersome, and so often resorted to Aphro K, or even AKA.

Ophelia could be incredibly dense sometimes.

 

Begin.

 

“Ballerina dives to her death”

There it was, Aphrodite Kallipugos’ dream, an above-the-fold headline

Or was it the bride’s dream?

She had to take a break and stare out the window at the flowering plum tree

What could this mean.

The bride sipped her coffee from the bright red mug with white polka dots

Last night there had been a single seashell pink band of cloud shot through the baby blue sky.

Red sky at night, sailors’ delight … she whispered the words like a chant

Begin Again.

Aphrodite Kallipugos thought, and not for the first time, how strange it was to be the loveliest woman in the world, to actually be Aphrodite of the fine ass, and to be so lonely
There was something exquisite about it.

The problem with Ophelia, also, Aphrodite Kallipugos decided, was her addiction to luxury
She opened another bottle, and searched for Juana Molina on her device
Endless repeat was the thing
The stars made a few necessary updates, now that she wasn’t looking

 

Begin.

 

There was the relentless wind
The industrial windmills
The chickens scratching around beneath the eucalyptus bushes

The ghost’s husband was losing his mind
Each night, she got into her sleeping bag and waited for the tree frogs
Anything that was useless, she wanted it so badly

There was nothing on tv

The memory of pain and the taste of blood and nothing she could feel
A rough thumb moving softly against her cheek

St. Paul had advised she should think soberly
These men were all the same`

The signal was scrambled.
The high tribunal sat in front of their laptops.

The ghost decided to move into the present tense

That is, the ghost decides.

The kids run up and down the block, laughing and screaming Marco Polo
And the pop stars sing about inscrutable things

There is one feeling, a feeling of feeling everything that goes away as soon as she tries to get close to it
What’s to do
The ghost worries over her newly planted succulents
Brushing her hands over them, against them, through them until they shiver

as if in understanding
as if in keeping with the sentiment

End.