Noir Cruise Control (edjmmusechron) 7 November 2019

It is cold —and even when we get into the car so.... I wait for him to put on the heat and shiver as I lean sideways against the side of the seat with my legs up and my knees to my chest to huddle for warmth

I ask him now about the weird thing he just said

He takes out his phone and shows me something,
“do you know what this is?”

“It looks like musical notes,” I say

“Yes, well, obviously! Look closer, duva,” he insists

“I’m dyslexic—but— I could hazard a guess it is —what—the major and the minor piano chords? I never could read music, Jörn.”

“Exactly....” he says and smiles at me, “but you are right, that is what this is.” He puts away his phone

Suddenly he says, and very casually,
“So did you miss me?”

He can be so strange but so impossibly handsome. I move over to him and angle between the steering wheel into his lap and wrap around his hips. I press myself there to him, and loosen his hair then cover his mouth with mine,
“what do you think?”

He smiles as he glances at the side rear view to see if anyone is there.... then runs his hands up the back of me to my hips and pulls me to him with a roughly accurate motion which belies what his expression does not

“You should put your seat belt on,” but he laughs and pulls me by the hips to press me into but then he sees someone in the rear view,
“actually, you should, there’s a state trooper ....” he says now

“Oh! ....Do you know it has been a year since ....” I say as I move up to move over ....but then I stop for a moment to look at him; to look .... into that den inside his eyes, “that first day ...” and watch his eyes respond with their elusive mystery

I move to the passenger seat and say,
“but you are too rational to get caught up in things like ....”

“Things like?” he asks me but he teases me

“You know—emotions..... You don’t really ever get emotional about anything —so it seems things don’t really ....” I run out of what to say

“I don’t? You think I don’t feel things?” he asks me seriously, “you think that I don’t notice you’ve been sleeping in my bed ....?”

And still he says nothing

“Jörn.... you know, I think you are like .... you’re like Spock, I think, —I mean, sometimes a girl needs ....a clear indication .... of—some sort of....” and run out of words

“So I’m Spock and my father is Yoda— what does that make you?”

“....Barbarella,” I say

“So my mother would be....?”

“Sarah Connor—“ I shrug easily as it’s a given but see he needs a hint, “the Terminater....” and I cock an imaginary machine gun. 

we both laugh but then he shrugs with a heavy sigh,

“You really are obtuse.... you know? you don’t notice ....how I have turned my life upside down ...?” he looks at me and waves his arms, “look where we are.... why are we here? Because you wanted to get away from the city —do you know what I did just to bring you here? Why? Because of something going on in your pathological past you still won’t talk about and I have not forced out of you but you are running away from something that .... “and he looks at me in a kind of tragic way.

What is he thinking? He takes my chin in his hand thoughtfully and then drops his hand and looks suddenly away “.... which, at this point, you have to realize that.... the demon is inside you,” he says

“Yes. Well, whatever. Dr. Freud ....be that as it may.... Jörn, still.... sometimes a girl needs a more obvious sign.”

“My opera ....you know it’s because of ....we’ve talked about this.... ” he says and looks at me, “and the fact that my parents have accepted that Lisa and I are done.”

Such a brave statement and a comfortable commitment

I become aware of more than one conversation happening at the same time.

But then he asks me,

“Do you still want to know what I was doing in New Jersey?”

“If you want to tell me.”

“I found the table that went to the safe —your sister sold it on e-Bay for eight hundred dollars back in 2003. Wasn’t that the year after your parents died? They died six weeks apart, right?”

“Hmmm....” I put on my seatbelt

“And there were no wills....?” He asks me

but I take that as rhetorical rather than decide to open that conversation

and now ask, “the table to the code ....?” and look at him

He says,
“The table with the code ....key  —to the safe with the code —lock,” he says

“What does that mean?” I ask him

“It means ....” he starts the car and turns in the seat to back out, “I need you to remember how to play that piece you won that award for.”

Vampire encrypt

“My life has been empty, 

my life has been untrue


And does she really know, who I really am?


Does she really know me at last?

And are you just like me?


Dead eyes, 

are you just like me?

Her eyes, her eyes 

were as vacant as the seas, yeah

Dead eyes, 

Dead eyes, 

are you just like me?”

— ‘By Starlight’ lyrics by Billy Corgan from the Smashing Pumpkins album “Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness”

https://youtu.be/GYJfzw6gZx8

*************************************************************

as I wait for him at the airport I watch the sky .... and realize

looking up at the setting sun

I had the dream again ....last night

it was the one again where at first I don’t see my foot prints in the sand as I move across the shore

..... and I move like gossamer but this time, I see an image of a field of burning crosses and see the silent screams of dead empty skulls swinging from trees

I hear his music to the opera in my dream


And then I see him again for the first time 

the day at the market....like a moment eternally frozen in time

the way the wind swept back his hair, like shimmered gold against the beach of sand as he stood there at the market with his bag of swords,

the slate gray of his eyes of his eyes of possession that blended with the blue of the sea and the sky

and then it is another scene with the smeden on the beach through her eyes.... a ritual or ceremony

under a full moon

in the dream I walk around him on the wet sand and draw a circle around us and kneel before him and before I move to kiss his body, I hold up the moonstone and scry into the white-blue moonstone cabochon

and hear the foreign words spoken from my lips say,

“am byth....” as he repeats the words with me ....

and then I see too that.....

he is so young really....too young to look so old

 ....his eyes, like that of a vampire who lost his soul—sucked out by life—eyes of such wild beauty and hidden fragility that only a dove could actually see

and I become aware, as I have the dream, of this warrior’s heavy sense responsibility; of that life and its great burden on his soul, to trade for an artist’s soul and found myself wondering how he took it on and what or how it served his life’s need, if it kept his soul in shackles and defeated his greater purpose; the warlord; a prisoner of a life, was that why he was given the chance to try again and does the burden remain because it has become a comfort of baggage and all that he knows?

***************************************
It has gone quite chill in the mountains and there is sleet on the road on the way to the airport


Jörn is easy to spot from a distance, as he stands out tallest among the exiting passengers with his gold blond hair pulled back and carrying his cello. He wears a long, heavy, trench coat over a gray turtleneck with darker gray flannels.


He smells good when I reach up to him and kiss his neck; like wood and citrus. He fills my head and .... I catch my fingers into his hair to prolong the embrace.

it is always such a rush to see him and it occurs to me it is going on one year since the first day I wound up in his living room to retrieve my mail

“So what were you doing New Jersey?” I ask against his ear stretched on toes to reach him, “and what were you saying about a table and e-Bay?”

“I’ll tell you on the way,” he says and then, enigmatically, he says, “hidden keys, notes, codes, chords ....”

The raging sea

When we were little I nearly drown in the ocean but the sea spat me back. I swallowed whole gallons of sea and watched the sunlight dim through the wave as the current held me down

we had been walking on the shore, my aunt and my mother, my boy cousin Steve and my sister and all in a row until she pushed me down into the water as the big wave hit. I saw her laugh and walk away to follow them and as I sank into the ocean that was my last image before I was being pulled and pumped of the water .... I saw her just standing there watching me with no remorse

Electra’s dictionary; word for vampire soul

a meaning of ‘Wavegirl’

Because I think in pictures and scenes, ‘Wavegirl’ contains an encyclopedia

much like characters in a story are dialogue drawn as symbolic props as voice to speak the secrets whispered from an internal dialogue never uttered aloud


I did ‘Wavegirl’ on four pieces of cheap oaktag that I taped together on the floor of the apartment we lived at by JFK airport. I could not afford good materials so the paint I used was also cheap acrylic but.... this painting got me through so much and it contains a piece of my soul.....



I did this painting during the time of what I just wrote about; the date is 2000.

My divorce papers are dated September 2001 as the proceedings took a long time

and from the window there I used to watch the airplanes ....

My mother died in 2002

This painting faced so much

it hung on the wall of where I slept on the floor

and was next to Marissa’s playpen in the living room and I would climb into her playpen with her and lay down inside and stare up at the painting when she napped with her head against me

but it is now actually stored back in Michigan by courtesy of Ken’s garage.... along with all of my art, including the one I did of the ‘Vampire Pirate’ in 1999; all from around this time.... my art is part of my vocabulary; my personal documentary of a dissection of a Celf

and so I fear it has not fared too well

If you look inside you see the goddess and so, gutted, yes, she holds the goddess within which I did not notice until I had completed the painting and hung it up. Like the horse reflection .... that painted itself for me.... often art for me is something much more than art, it has often sent me more than just its vision 

Electra’s dictionary; word for Cinderella’s wicked sister

“If you see the wonder of a fairy tale,”
                       —lyrics from ABBA song ‘I Have a Dream’ by Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvarus

****************************************

Layer 1 of the sister backstory

****************************************

“How did you lose custody?” Josef asks me

Jörn was suddenly called away last night on some secret mission but he tells everyone else the reason has to do with the philharmonic and Lisa uses the excuse to follow him to the city with Lorenzo

It is late afternoon

It seems Josef has decided to follow me down the hill to the mysterious ‘Farmer Granger’ which has turned out to be the farm attached to the property; once a major farm that eventually stopped running due to the mass competition of commercial farm industry

We heard the story, reluctantly, from Lisa as there was a hidden clause involved and part of the fight that was going on all around me in Swedish

Her client, Agneta, who had been a flight attendant for SAS, is a widow whose late husband’s family had once owned the property for generations. Agneta had met her husband, Theodore (Ted) Granger, then an architect, on board the plane to Sweden for a work project in Stockholm. And then met again on his return flight, which the two took as a sign for destiny and the rest —is history. Thirty years later with children grown and husband now deceased, Agneta wishes to join her family back in Sweden which is why her property is being rented, but

Lisa never bothered to explain about the horse

And the small plot of farm vegetables

nor the chickens

and the goat and sheep (just a handful)

Which was behind the sweet deal for the newly renovated barn house —yes it was also a sweet deal because Lisa was to be featured in an article for the interior renovations; Agneta wants to put the property on the market so, it was contrived for all around possible profit

The tomatoes that were left outside the door, I had worked it out now.... was left there by ‘Joey’ the person who was tending the farm and who had suddenly quit after some disagreement with Lisa (which has not really been examined, come to think of it)

Lisa’s sudden appearance with Lorenzo and Jörn’s parents had a two fold purpose and had something to do with what to do with the farm dilemma and apparently Andreas had humble dreams of filling Joey’s shoes which neither parent supports but Lisa blames on Jörn for his “foolish choice to leave the city” that I have heard her say more than once, in English, for my benefit

***

as we are now in the stable....

“You see....” I begin as I look back at Choklad, the old horse, as I brush him down, “I had been living away from the family in Michigan as ....I always tried to live my own life out of their shadow and so I moved away with someone I had been seeing for awhile who was from there who.... is the father of my daughter ....”

Choklad is a very affectionate horse who seems to like to nuzzle a lot; especially when I speak; he seems to like my voice

So for a moment I am stopped to enjoy the attentions of my suitor

and with relief because it allows me to go inside myself and wrap myself deep inside the inner well. I search there as I press my face into the coarse dark brown fur, touch his long face with the flat of my hand , close my eyes and breath

It is when Choklad gives me a shove that I find the courage to go on

“My mother had stage four cancer....” I explain

I hear Josef shoe scrape outside the stall door behind me and he hesitates before he asks,

“what kind?”

“It was breast cancer,” I say

and here I find myself touching and stroking the long mane with its strong, thick fibers and watch the strands fall from my fingers

“She lived a long time with it, considering.... it was so hard to see her that way....” I have to stop myself. I don’t ever go there. It is too painful .... and so many years now it has been; surly more than twenty ....? time is so strange.... and I am such a pro at cutting off feeling. I am a pro at going cold, I’ve had so much practice

just a blank page

I take a deep breath and grip a handful of the strong mane that absorbs a trace of my weakness

“I had my daughter in Traverse City, a little city tucked away in the snowy north of Michigan— less than a year after my mother’s first round of chemotherapy ..... you see, I knew she was dying, I had come to visit her —her eyes .... you know .... and it turned out that my husband did not love me because .... you know.... you sometimes only find these things out when real life hits ....”

I stop again and search for a different brush, finding some fresh hay too as I go around the tack room

I glance at Josef who leans on the stall door ledge watching me

After a few brush strokes I say,

“He said he did not love me.... but then it turned out I was pregnant. I never understood why he agreed to let us try for a baby if he didn’t love me and it happened right away. So.... he was not pleased....” I have to stop because it is such a tedious story with so many parts of a celf folded into tucked corners, hidden deep inside drawers long jammed shut to bursting. Those you never intend to wedge free

I walk around the tack room and Choklad follows me with more nudges

“At first he ignored all the obvious signs of my pregnancy hoping the home tests were wrong and that I had a stomach flu....” I look at Josef, “he did not want it.”

At first I just stare at Josef’s eyes as my mind splinters off and as I lock onto his gaze his bright blue eyes encourage me to continue. I blink a few times as ....I am not experienced to what I find within his gaze..... I do not know how to respond at first.... so I am caught in a moment’s confusion. It is too late to turn back. But why does he want to know? is not my life such a boring bit of ‘Les Miserable’? ....how pathetic a picture I must be. Not at all how I would like to characterize myself.... but he stands there waiting and.... he is such a kind man and ....so kind to me.... only— in a way I am so ignorant of

I step out the stall and close the door and let Choklad nuzzle his goodbye as I say to Josef,

“I said I would walk him in the paddock again tomorrow....” and we start to walk out but I suddenly worry and say, “is that hill too hard for you?” looking up the path back to the house and consider the old family farmhouse we are nearer to

“The incline is not so bad,” he insists as we start up it, “I’d like to hear more if you wouldn’t mind,” he says, gently but his tone reminds me of a teacher reminding his student of the assignment

“Ohhh....”

“.....your daughter....” he prompts me

As we walk I search the view around us for wisdom to describe the cavernous secrets of my heart with as little attachment as I might summon

the colors of the leaves....

my favorite colors ..... the yellow gold, the deep burgundy .... the fading sage-green that blend with the sky’s sea foam green of a setting sun behind the mountains

“So, we were getting a divorce in Michigan—all the papers drawn..... it was very civilized, he wasn’t even fighting for custody back then—I guess because, it turned out Ken had met someone, some trainer at his work.... and because my mother wanted me to be near her during what remained of her time, we agreed to move back to New York. The plan was for me and my daughter to stay where my mother was living....”

I stop now.

I take a moment to ask if he is all right,

“do you want to rest a moment?” I ask

Josef smiles at me and slowly nods as he studies me and we stand at the incline by a tree

only I do get the feeling he does this somehow for me. He makes an act of wanting to lean on the tree but his eyes belie with a twinkle in that Yoda way that he has as he pretends not to study me but I feel his mental tentacles reaching with his own magical ‘Force’

“Well, one day everything changed....” I say in a fast gush just wanting to get it out and over with as there was obviously no turning back now; he’d never let it, I suddenly realize....

“So what happened?” he gently prods me

I lean on the tree now too, press my face into the texture of the trunk and touch the grooves with my hand. It is an old, dear tree that stands far taller than the house with a trunk so wide that it is impossible to put your arms around; a tree with an old soul

“My parents had moved onto the estate where my sister and her husband lived in a huge house..... they had an apartment below where my mother wanted me and my daughter to stay..... you see..... she wanted to have us near, you see.... “

I gather more strength,

“....My aunt was still alive too back then, so—one week before the move to New York.....” I look into Josef’s eyes and say, “I get a call from my aunt.... and she tells me .... she tells me I had to find other accommodations .....”

At first Josef just draws his white brows together as he searches my eyes with his

I finally say,
“you see.... my sister did not have the courage to tell me herself that she was not going to let me stay there so she asked our aunt to tell me.... and, to add insult on top of injury— I was forbidden to even visit there because our father did not want me there either.”

This is not made up. It is what really happened.

I say,
“Ken already had his new job to start in New York, he had an apartment secured in a town near JFK airport .... and in one week I had no where to go with my daughter to live....”

I turn away for a few seconds to watch the sun sink along the horizon and watching the sun I say,

“by then Ken’s love affair had ended .... and I guess he changed his mind about Marissa.... the divorce proceedings stopped instantly as he offered the only solution that I was forced to take.... and that is how I lost custody. I had no where to go and no means. His family raised money for a good New York lawyer.... and my father and sister got their revenge .... I stayed there as part of his deal—but as the babysitter; we were divorced so he could carry on as he wanted ....on and off with .... I got a night job and paid him rent but made sure to get her to school and fed and I felt at least lucky to be near my daughter .... my mother died about two years later.”

“So your sister ....?”


I finish his question,
“....is behind why and how I lost custody....”

the mystic sun

Jörn does not speak often about the strangeness of the bond between us. Almost as if he assumes it is something that is understood

 but I believe his opera is his way to express this

He is too rational a person to speak about these things but sometimes I wish he would. Life is so fleeting and moments go by in a blink. Some moments you never wish for again

but others are gone before they ever got to happen and then it is too late

I write from my phone from the gallery alcove above that faces diagonally to the wide, open, living-room, space below

But I face the window and watch the leaves fall with my headphones on to tune out the voices of conversation that trickle up from downstairs —between Lisa, Andreas and Jörn that I know I would likely not understand but I am sure the tones would tell me enough

So, again, I watch him from afar, it seems, absorbed in his world .... like an artist’s task, penning scenes of his life in my dictionary; occupied with the theater of my muse

Josef and Elsa have gone driving locally exploring the autumn foliage on an audio tour they discovered on some app. The Adirondacks are beautiful now; like a travel postcard; everything brilliantly yellow ochre and alizarin crimson



but I think of this morning.....

*****************************************

“I had to come back for you,” he says

only he says this to me in sleep or maybe it is half sleep

an early light seeps into the room with us. I am turned to him in sleep; pulled inside his warmth within the circle of long limbs and I find I cannot move, caught in his fingers that hold my skull, his fingers tangled in my hair. He unconsciously grips and then releases, creating a symphony within my head of his touch and by how he breaths I know he is not awake

I don’t know if he is aware of what he says but he says in a deep, soft voice,
“I was to late that time so .... I knew I had to follow you....”

if his words did not make sense to the dream I just awoke from I would not find the relevance

because I dreamed again of the little hut and the smeden .... the blood and the hides and watching the firelight die beneath the forge .... and....  he held my head this way.... the same way he does now

when I left him ..... when she died in his arms

I dreamed again

all the blood everywhere, all over his white hides .....how he never let go, and how he stayed that way long after going cold ....and remember how hard it was to go and to leave the sight of him, to long to be near him that lingered


You see, this dream —these dreams of the pirate, only ever seem to surface while in extreme duress of danger or emotion —when something in the present life is in deep turmoil

or— just triggered when we first met when it seemed like every night we had the dreams

  ....like some voice that recalls, it surfaces when it seems all hope is lost

“Follow me from where?” I ask him holding back a sudden sob

absently he caresses my hair, his fingers comb through, he says softly with heavy regret,

“I was too late....”

And the weight of remorse feels nearly oppressive; like a burden


And it reminds me more of other things.... details from somewhere.... like always watching for the sun, searching

and there just beyond .....the hut apart from the other houses with memories of the thought of his scent on the hides when he was away ....the hut beyond; a small shrublike grove that faced the sea....

But he was too late

he should not have gone .... I know from dreams.... because  of the fear for the maimed warrior lord

.... this dream we had tonight

that is when he said he would “be back before the midnight sun”

But he should not have gone

“I had to follow you....” Jörn says this again and breaths slowly, “....min lilla duva.... you were the angel that appeared like a dove.... I couldn’t let you go again.... why did you go?”

I try to look at him. Try to move my head. But I am caught in his grip; his fingers tangled close to the scalp and holding my skull caught and cupped in his hand

what does he mean?

“I could not let you go back to this place alone but —what was the chance I’d ever .....”

“What?” I ask confused

“What?” he asks in reply but still grips me

“Ever —what?”

“....find you.....!”


“....Find me?” I ask and now try to angle or move my body to turn to see his face but he is much stronger and keeps his hold on me as I struggle to free

which now is what seems to wake him and he releases his grip of my skull, his hands absently move down my body, as he sighs so deeply that it vibrates warmly as he pulls me to him,

Only I realize he’s still between dream because now he says,

“....I told you I’d be back before....”

but then now he wakes up

he takes another deep breath but it is more ..... like someone stabbed; like a kind of grunt and his arms go tight around me like a vise,

“.... the midnight sun.”

the desert of j’adore

“It’s you that I adore .....

lovely girl, you’re the murder in my world 

Drinking mercury 

To the mystery of all 

that you should ever leave behind 

in time 

you’ll always be my whore 

you’re the one that I adore....”

—-‘Ava Adore’ lyrics by Billy Corgan from the Smashing Pumpkins album ‘Adore’


https://youtu.be/yzVQT5EgDpw


there is a moment when you try to reach through in dream to confront the bogey man

but sometimes another dream enters and the dreams overlap

Dr. Rothschild used to say it was a ‘defense mechanism’

the same reason why I have blocked memories ....because it is more than the waking mind is prepared for

But I have found that over the years the veils that kept me safe from their being recalled have worn away to thin and ....

suddenly in the middle of a day the awareness of what it hid is fully realized —and they seem —incomprehensible

....those moments when you stumble

     those moments when you understand why a tea kettle might suddenly combust

then crumble

My objects mean different things

      especially in dream —like blood

not always a purging; it is sometimes just more of the side affect of trying to dig it out


but more often than not, the manner to prove I am tougher than pain;I do not feel pain; I do not feel ..... I do not feel anything and nothing gets in

I do not feel

Nothing gets in—I do not feel

only I am never prepared for hypothermia

Such as now

I have wandered outside I realize and barefoot and cold whether I feel it or not —every part of me is shaking as I try to walk towards the house

sometimes you detach


The first memory, the first image of the memories.... I ever had of the pirate was on the beach.... the cold frozen ground and gray light with the wind and looking up at him. It was not the first memory but the first memory I realized..... but it was his eyes and how he narrowed them against the wind....

and exactly how he looked at me —with claim..... like how Jörn looks at me when no one is around; when he adorns me and dresses me —like the strange and erotic way he washes me

only....  it is the feeling like I have known it before—with him; have known him before ....like his fingers when he handed me coffee that day, now so long ago, in his kitchen

—I remember the way his fingers had brushed across my hand that caused me to look up at him suddenly and then I saw it there..... that first time because

I became aware of the den inside his mind, because it was familiar and had to be the reason why we became lovers before we even knew each other; because we already knew each other .... it seemed


“I’m going to put an alarm code on all the doors,” he says now, “—put your arms around me, min lilla duva.”

when I realize we are outside and that I have been dreaming

in between dreaming

....he wears a wool trench coat over warm flannels and he pulls me inside his coat with him