Napoleon's Mare - Excerpt

Machines, like the kabbala, were meant to ease the anguish of the brain, its straining after meaning, its hopeless love and abhorrence of harmony. Impatient with devices, alpha dream machines, writing machines, creating conditions just as easily arrived at by accident or hardship. I decided merely to concentrate on the impossible: moving objects at a distance. Without words or devices of any sort. I knew a man once who claimed to be kinetic, as in Caucasian or pecan, as an excuse for not being able to speak the truth. Women, he seemed to think, were exclusively verbal, it was up to them. Two things joined, two things joined against the laws of probability. Thus ended a series of experiments begun 1971. A long experiment in various houses by water. I knew a woman once who said, after we separated and were trying to be kind by phone, "I've had enough of this little experiment." The joy of moving objects at a distance, their wordless float. Once in a trailer in Athens, Ohio, I watched a woman wrap herself completely in tinfoil. Until their primitive versions of physics on any impressionable surface. Dust. Sugar. Skin. Frost. I knew a woman once in Ann Arbor, Michigan, who went to bed each night entirely encased in saran wrap. Crinkling, rustling, dull dry rounded thumps. He rolled her in a carpet, he said, so he could beat her without damage. Once I knew a woman who had a body cast from ankle to neck. Lived on cookies and wine from the corner store, as far as she could hobble. We made movies every night. We made them without cameras. Once I went through a box of clothes abandoned by her former lover and found a lace skirt with the lining cut out, and a leopardskin muff. Protection is lifted. Speed is trapped. Women are bound and gagged.