Pole

From Print Issue 3, March 2023

This is a record of darkness. There have been other records—mostly of love affairs. Sometimes a record of darkness overlaps with the record of a love affair. Those are my favorite love affairs. I once kept a record of the times I had said the name “Modigliani” in conversation. I was hopeful about that record. I thought by keeping a record, I would be more likely to say the painter’s name, causally, when I needed a good word to bring beauty into an otherwise boring situation. “Modigliani” is a name I find sensuous and complex when spoken aloud, despite the fact that I don’t know that much about the painter or his paintings. I’m glad I’ve brought him in here, at the beginning of my record of darkness. I’m sure if I did more research into him, his paintings or life story would reveal a specific darkness—there is darkness in most people, clandestine or palpable, and not only in artists.

There was palpable darkness within G. But there was also something generous. I liked this about her immediately. She had depth, but she invited you in—these are my favorite kinds of people. When I first met her, I was worried she didn’t feel the same way about me. It’s hard to be patient when you feel as though you could enter a deep and meaningful friendship with someone. In fact, sometimes you’re so impatient that you rush things and mess them up. This wasn’t what happened with G. I did rush into things, but fortunately she accepted the rushing—she was ready for me when I appeared. I had been waiting for her for a long time. I do not think she had been waiting for me. In fact, it was the opposite. She had been through this before. Other insomniacs had come into her life needing saving, and she had been able to save them, because she was not embarrassed by her relationship to darkness. This was why I needed her. And this is why I’m including her in my record of darkness.

I do not think you have to be an insomniac to have a relationship to darkness, but it helps. This is because of what G, and through G, Maurice Blanchot says in his short appendix on sleep at the end of his book The Space of Literature:

People who sleep badly always appear more or less guilty. What do they do? They make night present.

Yes. In darkness, good sleepers awaken the light of their own minds, through dreams. In darkness, bad sleepers see the darkness for what it is.

G thought making the night present was nothing to be ashamed of. This was because she thought of herself as a keeper of the night. She said if you were called to be a keeper of the night, you knew from a very young age, because you had trouble sleeping and were predisposed to spend the early hours on the other side of midnight awake and scheming. The scheming when you were young could take on a nervous quality—perhaps, for example, you were scared of an object or bulk in the corner of the room that, in the darkness, you could not identify. The scheme might involve working up the courage to turn around and flick on the lamp in order to demystify the black pole on the other side of the dresser in your childhood room. It might involve blinking at the pole all night until the sun rose and stretched its weak and hideous fingers through the window and beyond the dresser, revealing the fact that the scary entity was in fact the vacuum cleaner your mother had forgotten to move from your bedroom the day before. The scheming when you were young could be borne of fear, sure. But gradually, if you were destined to become a keeper of the night, the scheming embraced the transformations of vacuums into mysterious poles, and recognized that by night, the vacuum was not a vacuum at all. By night, the vacuum was a pole. And if you treated it as a pole instead of as a vacuum, its true nature would be revealed to you. This was because the pole was no longer disappearing into its use.

According to G, this was another concept she shared with Blanchot. Blanchot believed broken tools were closer to their true nature because they were no longer disappearing into their uses. Blanchot says:

In this case the tool, no longer disappearing into its use, appears. This appearance of the object is that of resemblance and reflection: the object’s double, if you will… This is why no man alive, in fact, bears any resemblance [to himself] yet. In the rare instances when a living person shows similitude with himself, he only seems to use more remote, closer to a dangerous neutral region, astray in himself, and like his own ghost already …

The person who finally showed resemblance towards themselves would be like a broken tool: no longer disappearing into their use. By night, the vacuum is no vacuum. The pole, or the vacuum’s double, is pole. And the pole is pole, whether it’s a vacuum cleaner in the corner of the room, or a human being.

But what would it mean to encounter a human’s double? A human who was no longer disappearing into their use?

*

In writing this record of darkness, I am attempting to keep G’s double alive. She is gone now, and I miss her. But the fact that she is gone does not mean that G’s keeper of the night is gone. This is important to keep in mind when I walk the park and forest at night, looking for signs. When G and I first met, it was in the park at night. We walked around talking for hours before I saw her face. And even when we passed by the streetlamp, and I saw her face, it still took three more meetings before I saw her face transform in front of my very eyes. We were getting along before that third meeting, of course. But on the third meeting, as we walked under the streetlamp, and she simultaneously pulled up her thin black hair into a dark green clip that had a black beaded design on either side, I watched her features slide around her face and cement into a combination that, to me, was a beautiful combination.

This has happened to me before, and not only at night. Sometimes, after getting to know someone, their face transforms in front of you and they look differently than they did when you first met. Sometimes they become more beautiful or less beautiful. It does not always err on the side of becoming more beautiful. Sometimes you realize that someone you found attractive upon a first meeting is no longer attractive to you. However, G became more beautiful to me over time, and on that third meeting, after her features slid around on her face like marbles on a piece of rotating glass, I wanted to kiss her. I did not know if I ever would, but I knew I wanted to.

I thought about bringing up Modigliani in that moment. I thought by inserting a beautiful word into the situation, it might compliment G’s beautiful features and cause an alignment so powerful it would necessitate a kiss. But I did not bring up Modigliani. Instead, she stopped walking, five yards from the streetlamp, and pointed to a white oblong object that was nestled between an orange parking cone and a large rock. We walked towards the white object. It was the size of a beer bottle. And when G picked it up, I knew we were in the presence of a Pole. This was our third meeting, you’ll remember, so I had already learned about poles from G and Blanchot. This was auspicious because G did not stop to explain—instead, she started sprinting towards the meadow.

I should describe the meadow. It was our favorite meadow. Or perhaps it was G’s favorite meadow, and it became my favorite meadow by virtue of my acquaintance with G—that is hard for me to decide, because I do not know if G frequented this meadow before she met me or not. Either way, we were attracted to it. Our walks magnetized us to that particular meadow. It felt natural the way we walked around that park and towards the meadow. We were in sync. I never felt as if I was going against my nature as we walked, which is something I have felt with other people. Our intuition about which paths to take and whether to go through the grass or not was allied. It was as though we were one organism. You can see why I trusted her.

So, when she began sprinting towards the meadow while holding the white object, it felt right to sprint after her. Sprinting under the sun does not achieve the same speeds. The night gave that sprinting a new speed, and that speed was inhuman. We were racing far faster than what was possible for a human being, and what we were racing was temporally and spatially dislodged—I was sure we were racing the speed of light, or planets along their orbits. A celestial race. G was holding the Pole in her left hand, and her arm was fully extended towards the ground, so the Pole looked as though it might be passed off to someone at the other end of the meadow or cosmos. An intergalactic relay.

I should mention that by this point, the light of the streetlamp had faded from view completely. There was no light in the meadow, except the light from the half-full moon. All was night. The sprinting went on for what felt like a long time. I wanted to remain in it. I could see us from above. We were in scene. We were both wearing all black, and so the white Pole in G’s hand was a signal. A wormhole in the gap of night. Where would it transport us? I thought, sprinting after G and the Pole. And would it be possible, if I ran fast enough, if I beat the nearest and greediest star in the race towards it, that I could jump into the Pole and be carried elsewhere? Would it bounce me through the grid of space-time, delivering me to another part of the universe entirely?

These are the dreams dreamt by keepers of the night. If you are one, you will recognize these dreams. Keepers of the night are obsessed with portals. That’s because they have the knowledge that each sunset is a portal. The same for sunrise, G encouraged. Through the gloaming, these keepers of the night pass through the portal that distinguishes day from night, and through that portal they enter another world. It’s so obvious it could be boring, but keepers of the night have respect for the essential portal, because it confirms that portals exist and can be found elsewhere. The meadow was a meadow in the sense that it was treeless in its centermost fold. But there were trees encircling the centermost fold, and as we sprinted, I hoped G was running through the fold in order to get to my favorite tree, a tree whose limbs were so bent they defied all explanation for where the tree thought light came from. This tree, as you can imagine, was a tree designed after me and G’s own souls. Three limbs were bent around the back side of the tree and not towards the meadow, as though the tree thought light came from within the darkness of the forest itself, and not the sun that shone through the open mouth of the meadow day by day. G sprinted at this tree. But right before she collided with it, she swerved to the left and then slowed to a jog, sloping around an invisible arc, until she was facing me. Once she had completely circled this arc, she stopped. “What?” I asked, coming to a stop in front of her. I was panting. I wondered if there were going to be repercussions from my sprint. Was I going to be unbearably thirsty, for example? G was not panting. She was holding the Pole up in front of her body at an angle, parallel to her stomach. “It has to come out,” she said.

It occurred to me to wonder if G was married in that moment, the white Pole held out in front of her like a dildo. She was older than me. I couldn’t tell how much older—she was thin and had small bones. Could you be married and still sprint around the park at night? Were keepers of the night sworn celibates? How could you be a keeper of the night and concomitantly keep a marital bed? It seemed impossible. I thought again about mentioning Modigliani. But I knew the time had passed. G was not looking at me. She was looking at the Pole, held out in front of her, and her shoulders were tense. She mirrored her object. I assumed this stance as well, lengthening my body to be as straight as possible, standing in front of her, the Pole between us.

“It has to come out,” she repeated.

I wanted whatever it was to come out for her. I wanted it desperately. I knew our connection depended on it. It felt like an initiation in that sense, because it had become clear the moment her features changed and she became beautiful to me that I was now her apprentice—I knew that I was, in some way, responsible for getting the thing to come out of the Pole that needed to come out. Oh God, I remember thinking. Life was difficult and dazzling. I felt in the throes of passion. It sounds vulnerable, but I didn’t feel vulnerable, despite the confusion I felt about the Pole. Our pose was smooth, in the way all poses between G and I were smooth. It was like walking down a path with her, coming to a fork in the path, and knowing exactly which fork in the path she would take. We were now in this pose, but the pose was right.

“You need to take it,” she said. “Because it has to come out.”

So, I took the Pole into my hands. And then I knew what I had to do. I also knew I had to do it according to my own terms. So, I moved away from G. I moved towards the tree with the limbs that bent towards the darkness, those limbs that circuitously bent through the forest to get to a less convenient light. I lost sight of G completely while I climbed the tree. Then I was up on a thick limb. It supported me indifferently. The limb was strong, and I was nothing compared to the weight of its other problems. But on that limb I placed the Pole, and then I dug my nails into the top of it and pulled out a soft, stringy entity in its entirety.

Of course, when I climbed back down, the deed done, G was nowhere to be found. I ran around that meadow, looking for her. But she was a fast sprinter. She was probably on the other side of the park by now, if she was in this realm at all. That was the last time I saw G.

*

When I woke up the next morning in my bedroom, I remembered what had happened the night before, and was comforted that the white candle resided next to me in bed, on its own pillow. Its long cotton wick was next to it, removed, and I promptly disposed of that wick by cutting it up into tiny pieces with a pair of scissors and then putting those pieces into the trash can under my desk. The light in the bedroom was still soft and frail, morning light, which meant I had likely slept a total of two or three hours. I sat in my desk chair and held the candle in the position G had held the Pole the night before. I held it towards the white curtains that dressed the window. I held it towards the curtains until the sun spun around again in the sky, and night fell, and through that portal an ancient Pole returned to me, no longer disappearing into its use.

_____

Mary Elizabeth Dubois is a writer from the United States. Her work has been published in Chicago Review, Joyland, American Chordata, Boulevard, and elsewhere.