Mei-mei Berssenbrugge

As usual, the first gate was modest. It is dilapidated. She can’t tell which bridge crossed the moat, which all cross sand now, disordered with footsteps. It’s a precise overlay of circles on squares, but she has trouble locating the main avenue and retraces her steps in intense heat for the correct entrance, which was intentionally blurred, the  way a round arch can give onto a red wall, far enough in back of the arch for sun to light. If being by yourself separates from your symmetry, which is the axis of your spine in the concrete sense, but becomes a suspension in your spine like a layer of sand under the paving stones of a courtyard or on a plain, you have to humbly seek out a person who can listen to you, on a street crowded with bicycles at night, their bells ringing. And any stick or straight line you hold can be your spine, like a map she is following in French of Tan Tien. She wants space to fall to each side of her like traction, not weight dispersed within a mirror. At any time, an echo of what she says will multiply against the walls in balanced, dizzying jumps like a gyroscope in the heat, but she is alone. Later, she would remember herself as a carved figure and its shadow on a blank board, but she is her balancing stick, and the ground to each side of her is its length, disordered once by an armored car, and once by an urn of flowers at a crossing. The stick isn’t really the temple’s bisection around her, like solstice or ancestor. This Tang Dynasty peach tree would be parallel levitation in the spine the person recording it. Slowly the hall looms up. The red stair’s outline gives way to its duration as it extends and rises at a low angle. In comparison to the family, the individual hardly counts, but they all wait for her at a teahouse inside the wall. First the gold knob, then blue tiers above the highest step, the same color as the sky. When one person came to gain confidence, she imagines he felt symmetry as flight after his fast among seven meteorites in the dark. He really felt like a globe revolving within a globe. Even the most singular or indivisible particle or heavenly sphere will adjust when the axis extending beyond itself is pushed, or the sphere it is within is pushed. What she thought was her balance flattens into a stylized dragon on the marble paving stones. Yet she’s reluctant to leave the compound. Only the emperor could walk its center line. Now, anyone can imagine how it felt to bring heaven news. She is trying to remember this in Hong Kong as the tram pulls suddenly above skyscrapers and the harbor and she flattens against her seat, like a reversal occurring in the poles, or what she meant by, no one can imagine how.

1 The reservoir is trying to freeze over with an expanding map shaped like an angel Separated lovers on a coast keep walking toward each other. Low sun reddens their faces without heat They are weary of always moving so seldom touching, but never think to move inland, massive and stable Imagoes hatched on thin ice, it’s their illusion membranes are brighter than occluded flesh of interiors Membranes have the density of an edge, and edges violent as lava 2 All day she walked across the tundra He began to drive away obliquely at exactly her speed, so she altered her angle, aiming above him, as in a current He departed in a zone that solidified at his whim, so she reached for his hand Land cracked with their weight. He seemed to reach toward her, a hand like paper twisted and folded over, only a surface with wan modulations, like a map 3 Then she delicately stepped out toward the edge, tenuous as a leaf as if waiting for a letter but it froze too swiftly before her At dusk his voice broke her concentration She turned, vexed, and saw he had not spoken.

1 We call change in a person the effect of time, witness my new dress, so short, with buttons on the yoke shaped like swans. I enter from the back of the room, pausing at the hopeful energy of people gathered to see me. They are a surface, alive and redolent, half unseen, like iridescent cloth. I sense structure spontaneously form, as when crossing the room to greet you, what I say forms. And I worry that spontaneity acts for its own reasons, not mine. My dress is a visual image of unconscious affirmative processes, the way spontaneity expresses its order, as I create a world, stocking it with small dogs on the runway, handbags, a bouillonne of rose tulle at the waist of a jacket. So, I'm not limited to what I observe, rather than feel. 2 They assess quite accurately my choice of babydoll dress as value for others. Each absorbs encouragement from her assessment, even though every being's imprinted with data to create every appearance. Seeing a leaf may reveal knowledge that communicates instantly among microbes, which can change in a wink. So, the optimistic idea would be the most biologically pertinent one. I dress to express a hoped for solution. Rachel's blouse, for example, is not purple just for photographers' enjoyment. Flowers are intrinsic to her feeling for her value, she seeks by expression to extend. Each guest creates her own sumptuous panoply from my honey sable coat over silvery pajamas, new, vintage, because of simultaneous time, therefore matter. So, physical change is not time, as such. 3 I feel love from the fashion community as light from photographs of others' bodies as light from their scrutiny of my photograph in a dress bold enough to sustain the penetration of disembodied light of my entrance. To audience, unnamed cutters, sewers, embroiderers, beaders I attribute this beauty, when meaning i.e., style, is given a sympathetic presence. Mirroring touches it, like exquisite jet beads on a gray coatdress in almost transparent bouclé, clusters of dark stones on the shoulder. A loose blouse in cream silk crepe is tied at the sleeves with glistening cellophane ribbons. You feel I understand your own contingency plans. Do you remember my show in London, when all the models were drunk, broken glass everywhere? Fashion does that, giving shape and color to our inarticulate impulses. I present the contemporary as liminal, transitions, transparencies. You nurture the uncontained confusion, when no permeable resonance has yet formed. The gray is cloudy, deep, but without melancholy. 4 Before dinner, we're asked to sign the guestbook on a Boulle console in the hall. People I've seen in magazines seem very tall, their features enlarged from being photographed. Each appearance has a materiality more significant than we usually expect from bodies. Style, soul, is power through which matter is formed. Like historic change, a body can re-materialize in its chrysalis, when the life you know is left behind. You're alone in a white brocade jacket with fur trim and frosting white cloque, a skirt of stiff flounces, like quartz crystals flecked with gold. In this chrysalis, you now change the contemporary, viewing the past in extending light that's mobile around your body. My dress is not stuck in time like a butterfly born in a jar, whose wings are therefore useless. 5 In the dining room, with Ming wallpaper restored by young Chinese artists, Kiki wears a blue silk coat embroidered with gold. I mention Louise's white helmet, Camilla on pewter platforms flashing to gold, light on water, what we mean visually by souls for whom the the body is potential, futural. In my closet, there's no distinction between material and the intelligible. When I continue to dress after I tell  him my dog has died, he begins to weep. He asks how I can waste this evening chattering? I say through tears I mourn my little dog, but that means little to him, because of my outfit. He makes a mistake in reading, like a wrong accessory, inserting an extra vowel or syllable and changing the whole passage, though I don't usually wear sheer stockings with that dress. It was a case of spontaneity, a transparent white warp like an open window through which a moment is perceived, unshaded by the physical. And in fact, many in the room were not in good health. Through this window, I take in a non-causative molecule to change myself, what a mother administers, placebo, the intent of a dress. When you wear it for the first time, you're surprised by a rush of feeling for yourself.

1 I seek a permanent home, but this structure has an appearance of indifferent compoundedness and isolation, heading toward hopelessness. The boy pulls an animal on a leash. The house with a red roof rests between two hills. I can look through its windows to the sea. His aggression opposes what in a domestic animal, cold open space, large enough to work with isolation? House is the projection, space around it intermediary, theater. You don’t have to consume the space to exist, distance, point-to-point, in which a beloved ruin is middle ground, for example. 2 First house and space negate one another. Then, they’re a series. The boy watches a mouse run around the rim of a lampshade. He relates wanting to catch a mouse with the room, ground. Wanting a master image obscures ground, like objects in space. House and space are composite, like my dream, a bubble, lightning, starting point and any second place. 3 Rain pours out a gutter onto the poor horse. Horse runs under a tin roof supported by poles. Stockpiles of beams, salvaged wood, brick melt into contextless waste. I understand the situation by perceiving parts, one after another, then reversing in a glance that removes time. So, I can intuit contextless waste as ground. 4 The water tank sits on a frame of used wood, like a packing crate. I look through it to an extinct volcano. The panorama is true figuratively as space, and literally in a glass wall, where clouds appear like flowers, and the back-lit silhouette of a horse passes by. A file of evergreens secures the cliff amid debris from a crew bilding, as at the edge of the sea. Oranges, dumplings, boiled eggs take on the opaque energy of a stranger. Knowledge as lintel, bond beam (model signs) holds the world at a distance. A master image like bone condenses from the indistinct point-to-point feeling of self with which construction began. My house returns from outside, as if my spirit had been blocking my path, when I wasn’t going anywhere in particular. 5 Materials and freedom combine, so materials aren’t subjective. The material of space is like having a skeleton to gain a vantage point on seamless distance, as in a comparison. It’s a style of accumulating materials that does not become a solid thing, anymore. Accommodating a view by being able to be seen through is perceptual, not abstract, like space painted white. Give a house the form of an event. Relate it to something there, a form of compassion. Your point of view is: it’s solid already, so there’s warmth. In this primitive situation, pure form translates a former empire of space as wilderness. Chinese space breaks free from the view in front of me, while my house continues to rotate on earth.

1 You may find at the market a casual comment swerves into 
conversation that’s deeply metaphysical with a young man by 
produce. He wears a white T and jeans, ordinary yet careful about his food. “Every time I meditate, I begin in space among the stars,” he says. “Many of these beings,” he continues, “are not physically 3-D, so it’s frustrating to describe them.” “I have the impression their silver color comes from within.” “They look at me with tremendous love from almond-shaped eyes.” “There’s no sunlight. The whole cloud structure is luminous and the ground crystalline.” “A lot of purple and blue, like twilight.” It’s a complex, partly inarticulate narrative, perhaps because he feels I won’t believe him, yet he’s spontaneous. I don’t need to question the reality of his story. He’s sincere. 2 There’s more energy now as heat, connectivity, radio waves, data, X-rays, and all kinds of interactions. We operate with higher electrical current inside, which can 
rejuvenate you physically by the nature of connectivity, moving 
freely around the body. The next week, smiling, mid-sentence, “seeing Earth from deep space, blue and alive.” More often now, ETs are discussed at the co-op, also, coincidence, spirit molecules, time tunnels, and quanta uncertainty, since we’re close to The Institute. I like that he expresses himself to me as a kind of witness in transition. He’s read my work, and thinks me more knowledgeable than I am, since my poems aren’t true. “Pleiadians create new visuals through which I can imagine,” he says. My care is required for witness to resonate energetically with listener, however nonchalant I appear. The more compassion one has for non-normal experiences of others, the sooner consciousness will shift toward the stars. To him, this means shifting the ethical structure of communicating a narrative. “I think of myself in a service capacity.” 3 “One silvery insect was seven feet tall; I shook his claw and we 
conversed.” “Sometimes reptiles hoard crystals to send and receive information.” “They can space-travel versions of themselves here, as snakes.” “Lipids in a membrane behave like that, channeling the atmosphere.” At home I write, “The membrane is like a liquid crystal to the sky.” Next week, in line, he’s with a beautiful woman with a worn face who knows me. She’s not well, and she wants me to visit them and their animals. “They know they don’t end when they die,” she says; “It’s sad they’re leaving, but it’s voluntary.” “They’ve relatives on other planets, sentient beings with the right to vote.” “Have you ever watched an animal and suddenly it disappears?” he chips in. Witness involves a significance equivalent to truth. “The whole idea of visiting another planet, communicating with a being from another world, to me that’s spiritual.” 4 “When they speak, they subtly vary certain sounds; I hear words, but their sound carries different meaning to my body.” “Some words I read weren’t there when I began.” “Use these new words, enhanced by your imagining, to allow our 
dimension to emerge.” “Imagination stabilizes the shift.” In Santa Fe, in Tucson, Lima, La Paz, people see extraterrestrials. When I step outside, a velvety multitude of moths and insects, 
transparencies, on my screen door whirls up to the porch light. Milky Way shines 3-D with white clottings and dark rifts, covering the ground and trees with phosphorescence. Comets, asteroids from deep space, planets moving at will, contribute 
to this glamour of wonder. He shows me how to pull frequency, starlight, down through his body into the ground, and I try it; I’m more open now. I can carry more light, which fuses with similar energies in mass 
consciousness. Earth will radiate this consciousness as a star or sun on horizons of his other worlds. “Let us hold that portal open for you, in the form of your little crush on him, of light streaming down, and feel a surrounding new ideal,” they say to me. “Now, imagine yourself in the Pleiades.” “You wish to give a present to the source, like compassion or rainwater 
from home.” Early on, I divined that this book already exists in the future. After all, I’d thought of it; it’s a probability, somewhere, complete, on a shelf. My intention is to seek that future edition and consult it to create this one, the original, for you.

1 My soul radially whorls out to the edges of my body, according to the same laws by which stars shine, communicating with my body by emanation. When you see her, you feel the impact of what visual can mean. Invisibility comes through of deep pink or a color I see clairvoyantly. This felt sense at seeing the rose extends, because light in the DNA of my cells receives light frequencies of the flower as a hologram. The entire rose, petals in moving air, emotion of perfume records as a sphere, so when I recall the emotion, I touch dimensionality. From a small bud emerges a tight wound bundle of babyskin coral petals, held in a half globe, as if by cupped hands. Then petals are innumerable, loose, double, sumptuous, unified. I look through parted fingers to soften my gaze, so slow light shining off the object is filtered; then with feeling I look at swift color there. It's swiftness that seems still as noon light, because my seeing travels at the same speed. I make a reciprocal balance between light falling on the back of my eye to optic nerve to pineal gland, radiance stepping down to matter, and my future self opening out from this sight. A moment extends to time passing as sense impression of a rose, including new joys where imagined roses, roses I haven't yet seen or seen in books record as my experience. Then experience is revelation, because plants and people have in their cells particles of light that can become coherent, that radiate out physically and also with the creativity of metaphor, as in a beam of light holographically, i.e., by intuition, in which I inhale the perfume of the Bourbon rose, then try to separate what is scent, sense, and what you call memory, what is emotion, where in a dialogue like touching is it so vibratory and so absorbent of my attention and longing, with impressions like fingerprints all over. I'm saying physical perception is the data of my embodiment, whereas for the rose, scarlet itself is matter. 2 The rose communicates instantly with the woman by sight, collapsing its boundaries, and the woman widens her boundaries. Her "rate of perception" slows down, because of its complexity. There's a feeling of touching and being touched, the shadings of color she can sense from touch. There's an affinity between awareness and blossom. The rose symbolizes the light of this self-affinity. I come to visit drooping white cabbage roses at dusk. That corner of the garden glows with a quality of light I might see when light shines through mist or in early morning reflects off water. I stand quietly and allow this quality to permeate air around me. Here, with a white rose, color is clairsentient, this color in the process of being expressed, like seeing Venus in the day. Walking, I move in and out of negative space around which each rose is engaged and become uncertain of my physical extent as an object. Look at the energy between people and plants; your heart moves into depth perception; for depth, read speed of light. I set my intention through this sense of moving into coherence with the bio-photons of a plant and generate feeling in response. A space opens and awareness gathers it in, as at night my dream is colorless and weaves into the nuance. I can intentionally engage with the coherence of light beams, instant as though lightless, or the colored light of a dimension not yet arrived, as our hearts are not outside affinity with respect to wavelength, shaping meaning, using the capacity for feeling to sense its potency in a rose and to cultivate inter-being with summer perfume.

1 Taking advantage of the relationships and interaction, which actually exist between what happens to her and her desire, she creates some metaphors both obvious and opaque, as screens of rays crisscrossing the landscape in which herself and what she expected from you in the way of support coincide, so that I and you resemble each other, now. The way they light the land like infrared without a trace on film, really, part of your image was linked so closely to my desire, it remained inside my body. It never reached the emotions, which tend to damage the body, but which memory requires. Thus a formal device was discovered for detailing information that was intimate and largely unacceptable to what I thought I required from you, regarding beauty in idea and form. She expected distress to automatically bring about this beauty, like a woman’s theft of fire rope from your house, but not her hanging in the orchard by the house. She was a stranger to you. She was never in your consciousness. Hence she was never forgotten. She is in you the way direct experience generates consciousness, adding the energy of its materialization. To live another person’s biography is not the same as to live his or her life. She constructs a story line or cluster of anecdotal details, like clothes around the body, instruments of both defense and expansion, which give meaning to fluctuations, such as in pleasures occurring between herself and you. Her sunglasses swathed in feathers express the contingency of a light and a space, so that the anecdote of a hanging could be utilized as colorist or combinatory data, instead of her instinct for the imaginary in which what she imagines represents what happens, whether or not it misrepresents it. Sometimes it happens during a routine she represents by evenness of light on the land or when things usually mean nothing, like harmony in light, what happens and something to mean join accidentally. The thing isn’t what it is, but it is like what it is. Like a fake, it doesn’t mean anything, although there is something to mean, so that her solitude is the guise of unending repetition of a hanging or her relationship with you, in which all that is to be included will find a place. This is empathy or sharing her intuition with her. You look into someone’s eyes as if you were seeing through the face. 2 Because it’s not possible to absorb more than one insight at a time, there seems to be a contradiction between the visual or space, and the context or meaning. She felt deep uneasiness with the image of this sunset of unnatural energy, its sinister expression of an order of impossible beauty we thought we lost, accounting for the intensity of yellow light on the hill, which is not a thing,and it is not a metaphor, the way your life is not a metaphor to her, or the way intense light on the hill is a recollection en plein air, in the sense that it happened. Soon the background turns gray and the hill regains its natural color, but there are three dimensions of gray. This is a metaphor for the fact that the hanged woman actually made contact with you, although you never knew her. There is a link with her appearance, as with sex, or the way a name is attached to something after naming it, by the occurrence of its name, in this case linking with the appearances or biographies of a whole parade of lovers, so what she thinks of as human help from him is no longer dependent on changing her desire for him in the present, but is a substitute for it. The landscape is empty and it is immanent. The context of the woman in its reality may differ from the context in which the viewer thinks about her, the element of transparency. The way the viewer thinks about her is the way low clouds extend a landscape. The viewer is acting on the landscape in consideration that the context of the viewer distinct from the context of general human help could be a metaphor for itself. There were yellow-leaved trees behind a screen of green ones at the edge of the orchard. They are not a border between organization and decay of autumn trees, which are organized. The yellow leaves around your feet have an impossible beauty that was achieved and then lost. A way you can define a woman is to remember everything the woman is not. If you move your head fast enough, you can all of a sudden discern the whole structure of the surface of each leaf, and it links in your stomach, as with sex. If you remember not desiring her fast enough, you can all of a sudden discern her whole body. You can feel in your stomach the way any moment that happened and in which you think about her goes a long way toward convincing you of the autonomy and pre-existence of her form. 3 Her concentration became a direct experience of his life, an erotic concentration. Her biography of her persistently locates the point of impact of one’s own system of representations, insofar as vision itself is a representative operating on what she sees, and for which a particular light can represent an initial condition. Even the slightest movement of a hand or a finger is controlled and emphasized as by a spotlight of this sensitiveness, the way repetition is a cessation of the potential for conscious experience, or death, visiting the same places during the same seasons, at almost the same hour, so that landscape could be a simple repetition, which thrives on reproduction, in order to resolve what is happening into its own combination or name of words in the form of its time, and in order to defer the story. In a way, her memory is a theory about how the hanged woman looked to her in the orchard, which she has to respect, in the sense that the landscape’s immanence is an organically developing failure of its language to speak its content. The connection between word and idea corresponding to the landscape is retained, but the connection between the word and the landscape is lost, so the shadow of a hill stays dark during lightning. How she sees the lightning is a time lapse into the planar dimension, a hierarchy of grammar or deference by way of the word belonging to her such as lady suicide or woman suicide, because the woman doesn’t die in her own absence or in effigy, so that no existing philosophy and no philosopher will know soon, enough points with enough speed to handle the richness of her reconstruction of her or him for long. He starts to see patterns in the words and the patterns are pretty to him and distract him. It is well known that lightning is attracted to body heat, a person on horseback or a large saguaro, the way a racket of birds in the morning is a kind of empathy for two people. If we retain the belief that her image of him or her, let’s say him, is a pre-requisite for gaining consciousness of the unknown person, we suppose there is no direct channel of communication to the unknown person, with the result that facts about him or her must exit into the world, before a life can be perceived between the light and dark of function or the object, and desire or the image. At any time one can turn into its opposite, like desire or a screen, and the object or her story and him, who does not so much convey an image as a background to the biography. So, he says, she must emphasize references and conditions of her own life over its memories, or what she sees of the landscape by the manner of its illumination, unless she says it is illuminated within the arms of a great cottonwood, yellow or green, a faith of imaginary or real connotation repeating itself from him, like alternating current or radioactive dirt being turned up that registers on her without marking her. 4 Her persistent observation, even after the frost, is of each leaf coinciding with its luminousness, because of its structure as a lighted space and which shows brightness in idea and form, so you have to maintain your own consciousness in order not to be unconscious with me. Even if we can uniquely bridge the gap between the fact of a frost and the value of luminousness, and even though these intrinsic properties of the plant may not be what it feels. What it feels may be a space with pillars, so with light the space extends, as in what you believe to live with. A belief is a word-like object. You can focus your attention on it down to a point, like desire or memory of a strong feeling. You have a certain amount of control over your feeling about general human help by changing what you believe, which embodies the memories your speech is empowered to represent, she says. Space is material, but seems to open up a beyond, which is thought to defy material in its failure to speak its content. It still cues this content by links or desires, as to a form of physical appearance. To the extent that she can reconstruct a context or pornography in her body suitable for a hanged woman, a contingency is beaten back, critically. In the sense that events happening at the same time are meaningful, but not connected, there are events which mean nothing, though there is something to mean. This is an easy way to expect with desire from moment to moment, while the woman was hanging herself, as if consistency and the quest for certainty were not emotional, as when a person begins telling a story, leaves move. He believed that when a life is valuable, there is further value when it is responded to as valuable, but this could occur through evaluative judgement, without his attendant emotion. The product is in one case consistent manners, in the other, beautiful manners.