Simon Vigneault's Blog

(A dream vignette based on a dream I had before getting any of my weirdly extreme/extremely weird, ‘Canadian writing’ published–not in Canada so far interestingly, it strikes me now, just in Germany, the UK and the States):

Emmanuel clambered down the embankment—the fastest way in—to the backyard, where the party was in full swing. He felt himself to be like a breeze blowing in, joining the whirlwind, the dust devil of the party, immediately blending in and mingling with them, popping a beer.

Shortly after he arrived, he noticed several closer friends seeming to circle around him in the way they positioned themselves in the crowd, while conveying by their body language a subtle message, as if they’d planned in advance some code to communicate with, like hunters in a jungle using sign language and bird calls, so as not to startle the prey. He didn’t actually make verbal contact with any of them, except for Micah who of course he connected with, since it was Micah’s party.

Eventually Emmanuel found himself in the kitchen, now nursing his second beer. There was that crowded party atmosphere of people flitting around, a haunted, frenetic inebriation, frothy champagne communing with itself.

He felt him first. There was a wave of unsettling force, welling up inwardly on the one hand, and at the same time coming from the door leading to the hall.

Joshua entered.

All the subtle cues from his friends came to a kind of point in Emmanuel’s mind and emotions, stirring up a complex tangle of inner trajectories. He wanted to continue the light mood he’d been enjoying since entering, yet due to the warnings and to his past experiences with Joshua, he was bracing, with a sort of ‘inner poker face balancing act’, for one of Joshua’s penetrating attacks, preparing actively not to react.

At first it seemed Joshua would just walk past in a fierce flow of haughty energy, letting the burnt bridgeness between them resolve itself, in this instance, as a cold, brief acknowledgement, before moving on quickly.

But then he stopped, turned to Emmanuel. He felt the room also bracing itself, everyone half listening, casting their attention toward them, while continuing their current fraternizing focuses.

At this point a few peculiar perceptual events took place.

Joshua, in a flash, seemed to alter his form in Emmanuel’s eyes, becoming, in mannerisms and even in physical appearance, to be like an old woman. To say he had become like a ‘scolding’ woman, would not do justice to the complexity of Joshua’s manifestation, to the depth of history also conveyed between them, in every fraction of a second. But there was something like that present; Joshua became like an old woman who presumed with intense emotional fierceness, self-justification, and righteousness, to have a say in Emmanuel’s life, regarding Emmanuel’s character. It was this sort of aggressively intimate, convoluted energy that Emmanuel had poised for.

He managed to remain neutral.

Also peculiar, was how Joshua reached out with his wine glass, and kind of hooked Emmanuel’s own, beer-holding hand and arm. He didn’t touch Emmanuel’s arm or his drink, but the energetic action of it was such that Emmanuel experienced it as a thrust into his personal energy field, as an opening up of a line of contact, in a certain clever sense—like a martial arts move.

This too was part of what Emmanuel had prepared for. He remained on his horse.

Then Joshua unleashed a volley of paragraphs. It didn’t appear directly to be a criticism. It was more complex than that–the nuance of his manoeuver consisted of a misdirection such that Joshua wasn’t, by his verbal content, overtly criticising Emmanuel, but by the way he said it–‘speaking on behalf of the collective’–he was allusively indicating that Emmanuel had sadly fallen short of this inarguable artistic commentary. So it had the character of a pronouncement with the clout of the collective will behind it, the collective opinion; it borrowed of that wider power signature, as in “This is the way things are objectively, as everyone agrees,” with the added sense of it being a highly elite and intelligent view that only could be formulated and understood by the very intelligent. It was something like a presentation of extremes, of poles of expression, which then looped the attention into ‘a middle’, to a kind of vacuum-like centre–‘the perfect area’–against which no one could argue, thereby conveying the inexorable conclusion that “Canadian Writing Is Too Extreme…”

Emmanuel knew enough not to react to this complexity, to just see it for what it was, and let it defeat itself, thereby countering Joshua’s literary kung fu with his own non-manoeuver of ‘lake lets knife sink to bottom’.

Emmanuel and Alex were in the club space. Emmanuel was aware of the space as a location where an indeterminate multiplicity of modalities came together.

To some extent it had the character of a laundromat—where complete strangers but also intimates all gather to wash their clothes.

It was also like a cafe.

But, more essentially, it was that space in which they had established a certain stability, within a mode of insight, a way of being and acting in relation to the collective world.

It was not exactly true to say that he and Alex had ‘figured this out’, because this insight-stability-location was inherently a work-in-progress, a focused art of improvisation.

The occasion at hand was about being there in the club space to receive Malcolm, who was coming along just now. They could see him passing by the window.

Malcolm was always coming by and was always welcome.

Malcolm pushed open the door and entered, came over and sat down at their table.

Emmanuel began to speak, to gesture, but mainly to convey via a species of non-verbal ideation, the nature of their stabilized-yet-dynamic insight club space.

Malcolm was taking it in like a regular cafe conversation at first, but then, as the import began to sink in, Emmanuel saw that the characteristic existential vertigo was affecting Malcolm—it was a feeling like suddenly becoming aware that there was an immense sky above one, silent, opening out vastly all around, and that the ordinary objects, and one’s very bodily being, were becoming unnervingly transparent, tenuous.

Predictably, Emmanuel began also to feel the unsettling vertigo, the ‘too high feeling’; it rubs off. Alex of course picked up on it too. But more strongly present was that stability, the matrix of insight feeding forward to Malcolm an equanimity, their hard-won certainty, via the momentum of long repetitive work or focused play.

Emmanuel remained poised, shifting into a light, improvisational mode, whereby he adopted the tactic of unfolding the expressive, dynamic feedback nature of the new stable space. He teased out for Malcolm the underground interplay of subtle perceptual-cum-communicative emanations they utilized consciously here, revealing how there was an ongoing, non-verbal stream-field of environmental energy that, in broadcasting everywhere, was also everywhere its own feedback—making it a highly flexible condition. The trick was to ride this with a certain attentiveness, to get the knack of synching up with it, learn to float words across to each other on its silent waves.

The nature of their improvisational flow was tuned to make it the new normal, the new everyday, just about adapting to a more thorough, more rich and resonant level; it was taking fuller advantage of what was already there.

And they could see now that Malcolm was getting it, saw him settling into his chair, relaxing into infinite potential space. 

To work with Frank was a mixture of being his colleague and of being his friend. It was pleasant to be in Frank and Sara’s large house. The ongoing motion of their lives was Emmanuel’s engagement for now. He noted that nothing in their possession was seen as terribly important in comparison to the self-evident flow of friend and family interactions. Presently Emmanuel was in this intimate flow, as they all poured into the kitchen.

In the kitchen the locus of attention naturally became the young daughter. She was so enchanting, so beautiful. Such a marvel. What a spell she was weaving on them now, without intending it, yet knowingly somehow, as an emissary from the heart of the smiling sun, holding her fragile arms out, gesticulating at them with her lazily flowing hair and shining, relaxed face, cradled in the arms of her father.

“Hello Amanda.” Their friend Harry said from a corner of the kitchen.

Amanda began to babble various things in response to this statement, her actions full of arcane meaning. Emmanuel strained to understand what she was saying… It was cryptic poetry, an announcement of the deep, sacred processes of her child’s mind, like the ripples of light cascading off the impossible complexities of a morning ocean. He seemed to catch some meaning in what she was saying: “You collapsed me into my name,” he thought he heard her say, with her arms sort of languidly floating into the atmosphere, bespeaking her primal innocent knowing, as a sigil of her status, honestly won as a newborn, as a mediator, at the gap between life and death.