by Amy Letter
paths forking project ongoing media mixed structure branching often recursive boundaries untimed limits unspaced rules optional rules followed Only 3
04. Archive for paralinear Access
05. Random to jump from branch to branch
Picture your mother. No, a statue of your mother.
A statue of your mother made of gummi bears: every cell
of your mother’s body represented by a single gummi bear.
There are six million gummi bears making up her eye, alone.
There are one hundred and fifty billion gummi bears in her brain –
mostly those creepy colorless ones that don’t have any flavor,
and some red. She is made of so many gummi bears that
if you can tell it’s her face, if you can see that it’s her, you can’t tell
that she’s made of gummi bears at all. And since a gummi bear
is 2000 times the size of the average human cell, this statue
of your mother is 2000 times her size, it is 11,000 feet tall, it is
the height of Mount Etna, the largest active volcano in Europe,
although she would still be smaller than Mount Etna, because
your mother is not that wide. But still, this statue of your mother
is really, really tall, and accurate to the cellular level,
so that if gummi bears could transmit potassium ions and
oxygen, and house mitochondria, and thrum an electric charge,
this statue of your mother made of gummi bears 11,000 feet high
could come alive and walk the earth in search of you, her baby,
destroying towns and causing tidal waves and crushing everything
in her path. And tears made of gummi bears would pour
down her face made of gummi bears as cornsyrup-scented air
passed from lungs made of gummi bears into vocal chords
made of gummi bears and her lips made of gummi bears
formed the sounds of the name she gave you the day you were born.
And I would still want to eat her. That’s how much I like gummi bears.
1. 2,000
2. 11,000
3. Mother
Babies [ of …. ] . Souls swept
togther from [ ….
after Nagasaki. [ …. ] of cities,
snake-handlers [ ….
cathode ray tubes. Genetic
spoils [ ….
spoiled by [ …. ], turned
against itself like a [ ….
split in two (brother against
…. ] guardsman, hippie,
draftee, dodger, President, or
…. ], but still the meat
processed-product of hope.
Hope born of holocaust.
1. Black & White
2. Doctor-Recommended
He wished for the power to grant his own wishes, which, contrary to popular belief, there is no rule prohibiting, so the genie rolled his eyes and gave him that power, then asked if there would be anything else.
“I get two more, now, don’t I?”
And the genie stared at him a while before saying, “yes, you do.” Then the genie granted him a lifetime supply of MGD and “a 12 inch wiener,” which was actually a hot dog (with mustard and relish). The boy stared at the foot-long and wondered how the genie had gotten it so wrong, but by the time he turned to ask him, the genie was gone.
“I guess I’ll make my wishes, then,” he said. And he set about making improvements to his body, home, and life. A few days later his sister came to visit, and she was amazed.
“Look at you, golly,” she said, “you’re a totally new man, fantastic mansion, awesome cars, you’ve really got it all!”
And he laughed and scratched and conjured a pizza with extra garlic butter sauce, and they played GTA for hours. It was a fun night, but it was her last. She disappeared after suggesting to him, “hey, you know what? You should wish yourself the smartest man in the world!”
Because even though he couldn’t remember what it was like, those few minutes of the first day, when he was the smartest man in the world, even though he couldn’t remember the specific thoughts that were in his head when he knew and realized and understood and “got it” more than anyone in the world, he could remember the fear and the terror and the screaming and how quickly he wished himself stupid again — and when she suggested it he’d nearly pissed his pants, and he couldn’t let her be around if she was going to say stupid shit like that.
1. Three Wishes
2. Grand Theft Auto
3. Get it?
At long last they have killed her, those people she came to despise after she wanted to help them after she spent a lifetime calling them vermin, the rat-sheep of communism.
But the hatred of people whose little-in-the-world is snatched by an overweight American is slow to boil. First she said she would employ them, and they preferred this to hanging her from her neck from the 2nd storey window that showered her with green mountain sunlight mornings as a girl. They waited: they learned her habits of words, smelled the sting of her ringing contempt, so much like the smell of pig’s blood.
Finally they agreed: she did not hire us out of guilt for her own misdeeds, but pity.
Ileana’s death looked very different from the inside, for her eyes were damaged by salt during the boatlift, and she could only see immaterial things. Instead of a fat woman dragged by seven hungry hands to a barn where the best machete had been sharpened to the point of mercy, Ileana saw the golden figure of liberty dragged before God and Mary with arms open wide, and Castro was there looking well-abashed, and Elian, still young and unmade, nodded to her, and she got a smile from Ronald Reagan whose head was on the shirtless body of handsome Ernesto who used to wash the car a donkey now drags through cobblestone streets — and the donkey was there, stomping his hooves, and the car winked a long-dead headlight, and the chickens clapped and garbled, and an old woman with dust in the lines of her face, still beautiful in a bright flowered dress, danced a dance no one remembers the name of, and laughed.
1. Communism
2. Guilt
3. Desires
Metonymy in darkness searched the cramped storage room. She sniffed as she felt along the seamless walls of cardboard. Dry and dust.
“Where is my…” she started, then growled loud. “Where is the name for it?”
Nothing, nothing, nothing.
She pulled a lighter from her pocket, held it flush to the wall, flesh protecting it from breezes, flesh testing the heat of the flame. No light.
“I am blind, then.”
Metonymy, ever patient, burned. Then she punched and slapped the darkness, ash and char dancing along her arm hairs.
Feeling around inside: “there you are my teddy, my piggy, my parrot, my pride.” She grabbed the hot edges of the new way in. “I have hands. Who needs eyes?”
1. Nothing, nothing, nothing.
2. Teddy, piggy, parrot, pride.
3. Eyes.
Some fictions live
in history books:
who dare remove
“a fine illustration
of the character
of early Rome,” whether or not
rapacious bachelors
really put on
a show (the play’s
the thing) to dazzle
parents [howling
cheers through wine-
stained lips under Apollo’s
(O, god of truth, how
does your) light (not reveal
the treachery of cunning
men?) to singers,
dancers (offered a bride
to perform this day, or
just too amused by the game
not to play?)] from several
Italian states, and“en-
rapture” their virgin
daughters like a god-hand?
And young ladies raped
had little hope but marriage
to the rapist (Deuteronomy
22:28 agrees, and adds
a bride price to the bargain),
or a shame-dodging suicide.
(Lucretia was not happy.)
Girls of eleven bought
their lives by plotting words
of love: self-preservation
wrapped in nobility,
rationalizations beyond
their years; they would make
good Roman mothers. And they
would live [to wage the war
between vir and femina (the Vestal
buried alive in a crypt, Ovid,
exiled for carmin et error,
the priestess of the bona dea, armed
with venoms to abort children,
or marriages [house-bonds
are strong, but mortal, at end],
warriors all, and cells in a body
of war, ever absorbing
its enemies whole, and when
the great Marcus Antonius
allowed the reverse, when he let
a part of the body of Rome
be devoured, it was the most
unRoman thing he could do
[but back home, secretly,
the feminae approved])].
1. Apollo
2. War
3. History
A woman wakes to the world, curious and alone. There is a man there, and he is angry, lonely, sad. She does what little she can to make him happy, but he does not seem to believe that she is quite as real, quite as human, as he is.
She learns about his world, his hobbies, and slowly he opens up to her. A connection grows between them. They are alone on an asteroid, but it doesn’t matter. They have each other. That is enough.
One day, a rocketship comes. The woman hides. She waits for the strangers to go away, but they don’t. The men are arguing. She knows. She hides behind small boulders and she knows.
Her love runs to her like doom: “Show them!” he says. He wants her to prove to the strangers that she’s a real person.
She opens her mouth, but nothing comes out. What can she say? How does she prove she’s a person? How can anyone?
It doesn’t matter: already the rocketship captain is reaching for his sidearm. She is overcome with grief. He pulls the trigger. Life, so pretty and so just-begun, is gone.
2. Doom
3. “We Can Work It Out”
Sometimes I think of a story as a next and a next: she stops at the threshold of trees, seeking the sound that is always changing. Grandfather unfolds his knife, crouches, cuts a four-foot square from the carpet: holding it says to the children, this is mine. A woman, barefoot and pregnant, stops on the platform and asks me, you have the same problem? then smiles and travels on. Cause and effect, the next and the next.
1. Sound
2. Square
3. Same
The word “Robot” comes from robota which refers, in Slavic languages, to the drudgery of serfdom. A Czech playwright, Karel Capek, made it mean something more. Men without souls walked off his stagecraft assembly line, fit for exploitation, in 1920. Since then, the concept has only grown stronger, wider, more present in our art and in our minds.
1. Drudgery
2. Assembly
3. Exploitation
The famous Twilight Zone episode where the man with “Time Enough at Last” breaks his glasses is not my favorite. My favorite is “The Lonely”: the prisoner lives on an asteroid. The rocketship captain who brings his supplies gives him something to pass the time: a robot woman. She thinks. She feels. She loves. She is, the instructions say, “for all intents and purposes, a real woman.” The next time the rocketship comes, the man is not miserable anymore. His moon is a paradise of love. But of course the rocketship captain comes with “good news”: the prisoner is free! All the asteroid-bound prisoners are free! The rocketship will take them all home. No, of course the robot woman can’t come. She’s too much weight! There’s no choice, really: if the prisoner stays on the asteroid, he’ll die. So the captain takes his gun and shoots the robot woman in the face.
1. I, Robot
2. Love
3. Loneliness
This is my theory about the effect of movies on novels: 1) bad because books are replaced by the movies made from them (eg: Midnight Cowboy. Who remembers it was a book?); 2) good because the books that resist replacement (no matter how hard the movies try) are the fit who survive the Darwinian trial, and reveal the most true and essential nature of fiction. Based on this theory, Alice in Wonderland is the purest fiction ever devised.
Alice in Wonderland has been made into a film no fewer than 23 times. Only the Disney version comes close to being “definitive,” largely because of that corporation’s significant reach and weight. Even it cannot replace the book, because the book is not a drama told, it is a fiction, the purest fiction. It’s not really about a girl named Alice and a rabbit hole and a potion; it’s about ideas. Alice is an idea. The rabbit hole is an idea. Perspective is an idea. Urgency, idleness, anger: ideas. The films can’t replace the book because they tell the story of Alice, not the ideas.
2. Wonderland
3. Ideas
