Spirit-Figure

This is a "true" story about why I've felt the need to mythologize lately.

I’ve started going to dive bars for some ‘local color’. I’ve lived in this desert city for almost ten years now, making me a ‘local’, I guess, or at least a ‘local who observes the locals’. I was born not too far from here, on the coast where rain battered the mist battered the waves battered the shore. What they don’t tell you about rain if you’ve grown up in a dry place is that it finds every crevice to stick to, like sand. It’s been a decade and I don’t know if I’ll ever dry out.

This is one of those charming places with a juke box and pool tables and dart boards, you know, a bar where you can move around, where the social barriers are permeable. One of those places where the bathroom is full of graffiti, which always makes me wonder if people plan ahead for vandalization. It seems like they all buy the same type of pen.

I’m sipping on a beer, which I historically only order because I’ve been told throughout my life that I’m “intimidating”. Really, men would tell me this when I didn’t find them funny. Drinking beer disarms this assumption, and at times I feel generous enough to be disarming in masculine spaces. Especially now, when I am practically vibrating with the need to catch someone’s eye, have them look back at me, to assure myself that I’m really made of flesh and bones. Then once they’ve done that, I can move onto the honest aim of the evening, of every evening as long as I’ve harbored the human curse of desire: to have a person look into my eyes long enough to notice the dark patch in my right iris.

If a person noticed that dark patch, I would tell them that once when I was a child my friend’s mother noticed it, and said it made me a psychic. They would probably ask if I’m indeed a psychic. They wouldn’t believe me if I said yes, so it doesn’t matter, even if I have seen a ghost a couple of times, which I have. I wouldn’t tell them that though, because what they’re really asking is if I can see the future. I would say no, not always, but being a natural pessimist, you’re often proven right. And once you’ve been proven right too many times, you start to develop an adversarial relationship to fate. This is the best course of action for a pessimist. To look at the inherent cruel logic of the universe and say, ‘try your worst!’

I don’t know if this person would find that relatable, or profound, but it wouldn’t matter, because if they saw the dark patch in my right iris, their face would be close to mine. And if their face was close to mine, I would feel the warmth of their breath on my upper lip.

Of course, this doesn’t happen tonight. This is no great tragedy. Acquiring what you desire isn’t the point. The desire is the north star, the light from another dimension used for navigation. You can never get close to it, and if you look at the star and not the dark sea ahead of you, the rudder will run against the reef, you’ll be shipwrecked. You’ll burn up in the atmosphere, you’ll wander the desert in pursuit of a mirage, etcetera. (Really, you’d just transform, but this would feel like death because it is.)

I meet someone at the bar that night. He doesn’t get close enough to see the dark patch, I can’t feel his breath on my upper lip, but it’s enough for now to be made of flesh and bone and to see that oblivion out of the corner of my eye.

I had just gotten back from San Francisco, and I tell him the weather was uncharacteristically bright and sunny. We talk about the qualities of light at different times of day. I say I love the light when the sun has just disappeared and is just about to arrive – dawn and dusk. When I was on the plane heading home in the early morning, the mountains below me sublimated into similar shades of slate grey blue; the clouds and the sky and the sea brushed with the same palette. I loved how everything became the same, separated only by vague shapes, suggestions of themselves. In response, he advocates for the harsh light of the afternoon, when shadows are their most intense. Later, I wonder if he likes that time of day because it is when everything is the most itself, the most separate. It’s a nice thought; that every day everything begins as less itself, becomes more itself, then ends as less itself again.

This all reminds me that when I was in San Francisco, I stopped at the De Young Museum and become totally transfixed by the Papua New Guinea exhibit. I tell him how I spent the whole bright afternoon in that dark mahogany room. Plaques explain that when artifacts from colonized Papua New Guinea were brought to western Europe in the late 19th/early 20th century, their ‘simplistic’ designs transformed the western European art scene. Instead of capturing realism, giving the illusion of three dimensions on a two dimensional surface, they experimented with the impression of the object, or at least that was the European interpretation of the matter. Art from Papua New Guinea introduced to them the idea that the shape, the impression of something, could hold more truth than the faithfully rendered version. The idea that the brain fills in a richer truth in the gaps left by suggestion.

I stood for a long time looking at a “spirit figure”. To the uninformed eye, it appeared to be an unaltered piece of driftwood with a small face carved into it, giving the impression of a spindly creature with four legs. And that’s essentially what it was. These were pieces of wood found when someone was visited by a spirit in a dream, then would search in the marsh for a stick which resembled the spirit as closely as possible. They would carve nothing out of it, except to add a small face. The idea, I guess, was that if you dreamt it, it already existed in the world. What you dreamt doesn’t have to be forged into existence, it simply has to be found.

I’m not sure if he understood what I was getting at, as I breathlessly explained the spirit figure. At this point, the beer is drunk, fulfilling its mission to make me look less intimidating and worth entertaining oblivion for.

I catch what might be a patch of iris unlike the rest of the iris in this stranger-who-is-not-a-stranger’s eye. I lean forward until he must feel my breath. He doesn’t close the gap, but he does ask me about my past, which is the question I am dreading.

I used to try and make some sense of it, the revolving door hospital stays, tubes, needles and bags full of chemo, radiation machines that make a person smell like rotten spinach, weeks and months and years of peaceful waters with the wind at your back punctuated by storms that almost kill you until they kill you. It makes less and less sense as a fully rendered image, so now I look at it like mythology, hoping the suggestion of the shape is closer to the truth.

I lean back so our atmospheres are separate again. Instead of telling him about cancer, I tell him the story of the flying dutchman, or at least how I remember it from this movie I watched recently.

A beautiful woman lives alone in a seaside town. Men fall for her, and she plays with their affection cruelly, returning it only when they entertain her with daredevil stunts. Until she inevitably grows bored with them, casting them aside. Then one day, a handsome stranger appears, and she falls head over heels for him after seeing that he has painted a portrait of a woman who looks strikingly similar to her. What she doesn’t know, but learns eventually, is that this man is cursed to sail the sea forever. Once every seven years, he can come to land in search of a woman who will love him knowing he is cursed. Only her love will allow him to die and escape the torment of immortality.

You see, I tell him without telling him, you see, I had a love like that.

I don’t know if he understands, or is content to let the mystery lie, but he does ask me about the spirit figure. He says it seems like a shame to go through all that work to find the right stick, only for it to degrade over time, being made of wood in a wet place. And anyway, what if the perfect stick existed, but got swept away one day, or it took so long to find that the shape became warped?

I think about this, and it makes me angry, because he’s right. I had dreamt for what I hadn’t been prepared to lose.

And I hadn’t found it tonight, but since I have dreamt it, I know it exists, unless the wood gets warped, unless a flood washes it away. The warm breath on my upper lip, the eyes close enough to my eyes to see that dark patch, the story I can tell them, about how when I was child, my friend’s mother saw it, and said it made me psychic.