Three Encounters of a Recurring
(a short story in 3 steps – or 3 short stories in one step)

- By Isoje Iyi-Eweka Chou

Encounter I
What can I say but repeat that life is one heap of recurring matter. This morning, as Xiexie moved about her studio feeling for the remnants of last night’s ideas, she reached for the cup of tea sitting herself by the east table only to find, looking down in there, in the cup itself—for some wild reason, for no reason at all—the memory of an odd encounter at nineteen. The thing is, the teacup turned out to be not too clean, so that her herbal tea was milky at the rim. But this set off a series of remembering related in the overcast status of things presently. Just as unwashed milky residue seeped out into the tea proper, cloudy remains of unresolved memory was now taking itself for Present Speculative Worry Time. Like prophecies coming in from a lecherous Past, each event threaded one into the other in a bizarre kind of eternal return of basic concrete human acts: that of sex, death and movement. I say these now in no particular order but for the rhythm of the speech here: dying, fucking and moving about. For Xiexie, these memories strung like whitish beads on the black thread of her current anxiety, looped from the starting point of the milky insides of an otherwise milkless cup of herbal tea.

And all of this was before the telephone call from her art dealer. Did the art dealer’s call come in before the worries or did his call suddenly expose the uncertainties of things?

But firstly, let me begin with how it all began.

As I mentioned, this morning, for some wild reason, for no reason at all, looking into her cup of tea, the cloudiness there brought in a rush of automatic recollecting—as if a button has been pressed. Several years back, Xiexie had met and gotten invited to the home of a South African woman. They had met at another South African friend's party. Her husband, the woman said, was a sculptor whom Xiexie as a budding sculptor ought to meet. Xiexie’s first acquaintance on entering the woman’s house was with the smell, which ought to be written with a capital S. It could not be helped. It was not an unpleasant smell but it was strong and not exactly pleasing. Like a ferment of beans left to slowly rot in a kind of manufacturing process set off with sprinkles of sulphuric spices. It was a smell that new organisms could flourish in but one that affronted your breathing mechanics with a threat. As Xiexie sat in the woman’s large kitchen, which opened to an even larger living area filled with traditional African arts of every make and replication, she began to notice that the porcelain on the table was severely chipped at the sides—and some deep enough to seem ridiculous since the position of the cups, saucers and plates on the counter seem to indicate they were in use as common household items. She looked up at the cups on the open wooden shelf and saw a line of remarkably chipped old porcelain all standing in line. Like a brazen display of infirmities spread solely for her benefit. Xiexie found herself marveling at the orchestrated chippiness so hotly brandished. The entire thing felt in short like a set-up, and given the area of her emerging practice using found materials, she felt that perhaps this was an installation. Something done on purpose. Or perversely allowed to continue. (Besides, as Xiexie told me, there was a nearby Chinatown where one could easily purchase porcelain cups and whatnots for less than a sneeze). As the woman spoke her sparse words heavy with its British-accented edges, Xiexie became aware of a vapid expression caught between the woman’s eyes when they interacted across the bridges of the woman’s nose (which was pierced with two rings per nostril). When the woman drawled, and what kind of art did you say you made again, it became clear to Xiexie that she had been invited not out of any interest but rather out of a listless boredom.

Dragging her eyes from the relayed info being sent by the woman’s back eyes, Xiexie’s gaze fell back on the counter and saw that the water in the drinking glass beside her tea was cloudy and the glass itself dirty. Just then the ‘sculptor’ husband, the one whose work Xiexie was supposed to see, bounced in (no, a correction here please because I remember clearly Xiexie saying, weightlessly flew in). So, he flew in weightlessly. A wiry Englishman with a chirping sort of voice chirping hello hello in a very Englisher sort of way, weighing no more than a pffftttst of fart sounds. There he stood suddenly, as corpulently vacated as his wife was heavy, sumptuous material. As if he had lost all the bodily material she gained. Standing aside at a position in the spatial stylings of that eclectic abode that made it easy to view them both, man and woman, Xiexie saw that he shared in his wife’s listlessness—in a kind of vague hankering after ‘a certain something’ else of life; as if the whole thing about their existence, their house, the party last week, her own visit today, was all a ruse for this certain something they wanted from life. Thinking this, Xiexie noticed how the woman's whole body seemed to rise, in some kind of voluptuous complaint, and then fall noiselessly in an equally noiseless abstracted anticipation.

Sitting by her east window, as she thinks of that Sunday afternoon, she remembers vividly the feeling of weightlessness in how that woman’s husband entered, flew into the film—because that Sunday afternoon has become, over the years, a kind of cinema. The noiseless heaving voluptuous—what I call voluptine—of the woman’s organic response had become somehow a quality she sought in her artificed moulds. But it is as a kind of ‘mental motion-picture work-in-progress’ that that Sunday afternoon became a perpetual landmark in Xiexie’s thoughts. Here, Xiexie, auteur-director, continually re-writes the script, re-arrange the actors’ backgrounds, reshapes their bodies, colour and discolour their particular aesthetic; sometimes, in remembering, Xiexie would either mend or completely demolish the porcelain so that she arrives at a different narrative, a different sensibility.

And why you ask me? Well, because Xiexie is who she is, whatever that means here. Because too what followed that afternoon was a kind of vicarious recurring linked to the madness of a friend, linked to the pain of loneliness, to uncertainties about her own work.

This of course takes us to the second encounter though there’s no chronology here. But I shall return to the doings here. Or at least the reflections thereof, however worrying it all became.


Encounter II
Physicists have said important things about this notion of the recurrence of things. The eternal recurrent. There’s perhaps some quantum theoristic formula out there. Similarly, old world religions have had their say. Until the last of them—the trio we all seem to have given in to—booted off the idea and demanded tithes and obedience in its place. But right here right now, in the space from which I write this, the recurring of things is almost like a presence filling out itself. With Xiexie, it was as if the shapes-in-progress scattered about her were all connected to every past encounter in a heap of sheer human urges. When writing statements universally demanded of artists, Xiexie has known herself to joint down sex, death and movement. Sometimes she’d even ‘elaborate’ on the above to say something as vague and as posturing as “…issues around sex, death and movement, the place of the individual in the larger scheme of things, the individual struggle with place and identity.”

For Xiexie, the banal tyranny of statement writing was a demand for complacency that disturbed her. It was as if a young artist was continually under the stranglehold to comply. Write Statements to overblown curators or Die. Socialize or Quench. Schmooze (what a word!) or be obliterated.  She has begun to feel that deep down art was a sham. It does not even begin to touch on the horror inside the soul when faced with mad beauty and shoddy beautiful evil of all the god-awful terribleness of this cunning animal calling itself human. Xiexie herself had begun to suspect that art is failed precisely because it must now be everything. She as the artist is an impostor. She claims to represent some of the most beautiful and deadlier parts of herself. She fronts as herself. But her art cannot touch the devastating beauty and horror inside her. No matter how much an art/artist is critically acclaimed, when she encounters the work, a poseur is revealed. The only ones who may have been freed seems to her to be those who begin to understand that art is the artist, yes, and art is pleasure, yes yes. Art is PLEASURE. The experience of the audience gaining pleasure from object and maker, idea and thinker, is what the Art Experience fulfills.

                                  It is the caged taking wing, But it is not space encompassed.

If Art is PLEASURE, the experience of it is not even so half time. Because PLEASURE is no easy enjoyment. Pleasure is serious business. Very few people can truly experience this experience. Pleasure is not pleasantness. Pleasure is not Money: it cannot be bought. But the reverse of this was the sum short of the phone call from her dealer, whom Xiexie saw fondly as a struggling pedlar of unbelievable goods. He needs artists with administrative minds, he says, because that’s where the strength is…that none of the people on his side can dish out any sums, big or small, without assurance on someone not in a museum yet. They want guarantee. They cannot rest on Pleasure, which flees them. So investments it must be—this assurance that the object can be turned over for a large sum soon enough. This is the sum short I say. Yet sitting as she is by her east window, Xiexie has already done a kind of transference of anxieties and can only fixate on an odd cloudiness noticed in her cup. Because this, this recurring of things, call to question her very purpose. When the weightless spouse flew in chirping hello hello and that massive body heaved as if in some kind of sweet pain…wasn’t that being the art itself in some kind of direct injection of it, of pleasure—or was it just empty hankering after it, after Pleasure? When the woman shouted the abominable things she did, her heavy body moving forwards, was she celebrating her grasp of this or decrying a divorce from an experience she and her spouse have engaged their lives to seek?

And this, reader, is where lies the second encounter, well, the second story in this story. Because the South African encounter had, that Sunday afternoon, revealed itself as a recurring, a vicarious recurring for that matter, and she fled. She fled. But ever since, she could not erase even its most minor aspect. As she sits now thinking the above and thinking too how slyly the memory of that encounter returned through her morning tea, Xiexie suddenly realized that she was, for some reason, holding her cup of tea exactly the way her friend Brandon used to hold the cup of green tea he drank in copious amounts. That was just before Brandon vacated ‘sanity'—when the possible hidden reasons behind unclear liquids got so on his nerves. Brandon once the master self-controller, the picture of health, amicability and congenial accommodation! It used to be that the cloudiness of things never bothered Brandon. But towards the end, when things started, as he explained once, to ‘recur and recur’, not only was Brandon holding his cup with his thumb and index fingers holding the handle in a tension of self-disgust, his little pinky would stick out as far off as possible as if to avoid all propinquity to cup, contents, and even the rest of the other fingers. Brandon found horribly suspect the secret cloudiness of liquids in general. It permeated life and snuffed it out. Everything was stained with a kind of oozing fluid translucent stain that was viscous, dangerous and alive. A membrous film covered even more things holding within its thin milky skin a living viscous whitish liquid waiting to burst forth. It was this suspect cloudiness of things that sent him in wretched search for ‘clear water’, volunteer-traveling from country to country from Bratislava and Bogota to remote Dogon villages with neither electricity nor, for that matter, ‘clear’ water.

It all started when Brandon was about seven or eight. His father, a cantankerous Scottish man, was always saying to Brandon how ‘girly’ he was and each time Brandon’s father said this (which Xiexie understood was plenty a time), his mother, a bosomy woman from Botswana, would smile a kind of secret smile at Brandon’s father. The only person Brandon could turn to was his baby sister who, unfortunately or not, was just a baby though one who shared Brandon’s room (even though there were many many rooms in that house as Brandon remembered it). One night, when his baby sister woke crying in her cot, Brandon, being a very good boy, woke and started to rock her, hoping his mother would appear soon. When she was still crying and his mother did not show, Brandon decided to go get her. He went first to his parent’s bedroom, but it was empty. Feeling a little worried, he started to wander about the house, looking for his mother and wondering where everyone was.  He went to the living room, to the washroom, to the library room (which was really his father’s study and so out of bounds), to the laundry room, the guest rooms...  For some reason, Brandon had forgotten the kitchen, which he then remembered and stumbled towards by now frightened and very near to tears (and this is where whoever hears this story being told, knowing all the awful effect on Brandon’s crazy head, may find themselves wishing Brandon had simply shouted mommy! long before the kitchen expo).

In any case, what Brandon saw in the kitchen involved naked grown-ups, large breasts, large adult genitalia, breast pumps, a milky glass and his father’s voice, standing in as the third party in the manage-a-trois, saying in the very voice used for Brandon, “girly, so girly...”

At nineteen all of these started to recur. In no particular order. And Brandon was toast.


Encounter III
Xiexie lives easily in a world of self-identification with others so that when she tells me that that crying baby, the one whose crying sent its lovely big brother off to go see what his mind would viciously refuse to delete, was she, herself, I really don’t know what to believe. But when I heard of the South African episode, how all the ingredients were there, all the milkiness, the largeness of body parts, the juxtaposition between the scrawny and the voluptine, I had to stop and think.

But then I said, very nearly quoting wiki verbatim, I said, look at it this way, the universe has been recurring and will continue to recur in a self-similar form in an infinite number of times. Right now, any number of people is rightly doing any number of very similar things in a similar mode and format that we may witness, encounter or partake in déjà vue…even vicariously… Because I too use recycled materials in my practice.

Besides, everybody knows anything can be connected by our minds. The messy moulds you often find drying at Xiexie’s when you go to visit her are connected each to Brandon’s neurotic little pinky shrinking from dirtying itself. And this is simply because she thinks this. They connect and she uses the connection—brother, friend or foe. The remnants of last night’s work I mentioned earlier that Xiexie was moving about in her mind were no other than moulds of gigantic breasts she took upon herself to create, opening up room for all kinds of past encounter fetched upon. Perhaps the teacup she poured hot water for tea, which was, like I said, ‘slightly’—if I may excuse her own hygiene—unclean, linked to the South African china through Brandon’s own bits of cloudy simply because she engineered the connection! For the pleasure of a powerful theme you ask? Who is to say but simply to know that connections can be made of any two points in space and statements are vain exercises of pointless justification. Everybody knows everything is connected.

But the key point I wish to suggest here is that everybody—some people—must know too that things, good or bad, absurd or common, are being performed by any number of the 6 billion viruses called human beings spread across the earth such that the possibility of exact copies recurring in space are as plenty as the numbers in action at any point in time, and that—and this here is the point (which, pardon, I have arrived at only after much verbose)—the mind is even more regenerative, more teeming, more callous in this respect, living as it does at the maddening edges of an oblivious space-time curve.

And this here is what I find outstanding: what accounts for how vague signs reach into the future of your actions, into the directing of things in such warped sensibilities that your mind no longer can separate the sham (the art) from the thing (the regenerate virus called life)? What accounts for the sudden committing into reality what has been but a string of imaginative recurrence? How could I have failed to use all these shamming—because I am after all a bonafide sham-maker—how could I not have used my imaginative powers to stop beforehand my own absurd, inexplicable actions? The person at the South African woman’s house that Sunday afternoon, was I, me, this your narrator. Like Xiexie, I too suddenly self-identify so with my heroine that I begin to take on her experiences as mine. The gist is I had so connected with Xiexie, I wept over Brandon. The beauty of Brandon and his clear water projects in famished countries crushed my heart in bits. Because he too was suddenly the kind loving older brother I never had. I have been infuriated by the malice of the brains of certain ones, people like me, me, my very self, whose neural-synapses, this our minds, cannot even for one minute let go but would rather, in teeming regenerative propensities, play and replay every detail of every mundane and fabulous encounter rendering every kind of world real, palpable truth-shining reality. The love-cry that burst out of this my heart over the lives of children forced by grown-up to witness their common dalliances passing for pleasure is a pain that hits me in the left sides of my lonely existence when I come to only to find that it is also possible I have never known and have only heard all of these in the fiction of the rotten insideness of my head. Nightly, I am cornered in this room, alone with my thoughts, unable to stop thinking even for a minute of all the children currently being exposed to the banality of Adult Pleasure Seek. But the next morning I realize I have lived every pain ever inflicted on any and all children and that it had all been purely mental. Is it that my brain needs this as a way into pleasure? Do I PLEASURE in this?

But I deal too in the realm of pleasure. Yes I do. As a writer of this tale, the precise of which is this giving of pleasure, I am like Xiexie, a shaman of Pleasure. Yet, like any man or woman out there, I cannot myself, me, my very self, fully understand this human need for Pleasure. Would I have chosen that Brandon not witness the narrative of his life or Xiexie not somehow instigate her own? Frankly, no. I would have made them up even if they did not exist. Because they are possible. Because I cannot resist the Pleasure. When I heard the story of Xiexie, I took myself to that house, I furnished it to suit the particular delights my own story in the making was after. Perhaps I ditched the pieces of broken porcelain. Or were they after all my own engineering to start with? In any case, we are here, and if Xiexie’s story is ultimately the horror of a vicarious recurrence, mine is a meta version of all that. A mental I say. But there’s some empathetic purpose here: I have set it all up so I may banish forever Xiexie’s fears and Brandon’s loneliness. Nevermore will those two be pursued by the generative waywardness of their imaginative floggings.

I am here now at a South African writer woman’s house and her husband is a thinning but energetic Dutch South African painter supposedly somewhere about the house (some of the superficial elements of linked stories may not have to change since the effort is wasted: a story once told remains forever in its essence). The core listlessness, the voluptuous life and its ruptured overused furnishings, the putrid fecundity--they are all here. My glass of water is slightly coloured. I looked up and there’s a row of porcelain on a wooden shelf interrupted by African arts of the traditional milieu. You may take your pick whether to have the porcelain all chipped and the arts a variation of authenticity and replications. Either way you the reader must know that I am not Xiexie and Brandon is neither a friend I know nor a brother I have. I am here, in full blood—all of a sudden—and in the fabulousness of my own imagination, I see that the woman’s voluptine complaint will automatically heave at the very sight of a thin energetic man bouncing in. It is part of the story as it is a private code for the why of the state of things in the house. The smell tells me they have exposed things to their own children. By accident perhaps. The broken china tells me she has tried to hurt him. The scattered collection of dirty utensils says a maid comes in but has now been sacked. And the suspect drinking water standing somewhat murky in my hand? It says they don’t give a shit. They invited me here not because they cared for my ideas…they are sending me messages of a kind of secret sexing up of household items. I feel rather unwell.

…private invisible dancing sessions where certain sophisticat grown-ups play pretend warring games running around naked sexing up not caring that the little boy could see…

adagio
Someone is coming in. Weightlessly flying in. I cannot believe it. My head feels light. My eyes are suddenly burning from inside. Is that her breast? Is that his penis? There’s a large knife on the table…they left it there for me! And I don’t stop cutting. I sliced off the huge breast that has for long offended my taste. I chopped in bits a flaccid penis of ‘girly’…I cut them up beautiful. Beautiful shapes of beautiful flesh far more fabulous in form, far more drenched in poetry than Xiexie ever pretended to make and I to write. Because art is a sham for the thing itself.

…I am here now. In this bare toilet of a room writing this story. I remember now how thinking up things, this my wayward mind, was surely corrupt even back then at merely seven when I was Brandon, walking around silently so as not to startle my parents…how I could visualize in certain details the whole act, how I would become uneasy only from a later guilt…

…the guards will come soon to take away my pen. They bring me supplies but they take away the sharp objects once I’m no longer in a fever of writing. They all like what I write. Especially when I put in the cutting up of heads. They are fools. Once I wrote how the large breasts of a decapitated woman whose house I was visiting caused me to doubt the contents of my cloudy herbal tea of which I had already two sips…

…and they laughed and laughed…



The end.