Without Words

Before the body was made
latent, dishonest in its efforts
to be seen, touched, held...

Before the body became
a conspirator, a thief...

In those days,
before the barbarian tongue--
the hungry language--
distorted with tortured meanings,
and told the inadvertent lies
of a limited vocabulary,
I was the understudy
to my emotions, a tremulous mass.
The infantile urgency
of multiplying cells, the elegant
mitosis made of gold
or mercury, the silver skin
in wordless shivers
and soundless sobs.

What does the baby dream of?
There in his cage,
he wakes to a world
of watercolor blurs.
The vague feeling
of uncertainty, or loss,
or mere frustrated desire
will overwhelm him.

He is alone
and must get used to it.

Tiles

The pieces of idea and context, of interpretation lay shattered on the  table.  The letters connote sound.  The sounds connote meanings.  The meanings are clouds caught in mirrors, intangible and evolving.  That is context.  Words are amorphous and tortured creatures, aliens, monsters.  They visit me, a night's apparitions; and I am uncertain what I have seen, what I have heard.  Strung together, they are the rusted barbed wire that keeps out the ideas that frighten me.  I pretend that they articulate the shape and size of my mind.  But they do not "make sense" of the world...

The Idea of Idea

One of the lessons of the media age must be that as much as "idea" might matter locally, it is "the idea of idea" that begins new perspectives with global, that is to say transformative, impact.  This process is not predictable.  The factors in any specific equation of meaning are not mathematically fixed.  Reliant on words, which are far more slippery signifiers than numbers, one's notion of the idea shrinks or enlarges and adapts in a myriad of ways in the process of conveyance, in the course of transfer.  Object exists as object always in the context of whichever semblance of subjectivity has become the projector and which has become the screen.  

Interestingly, this shift in concern serves two seemingly contradictory purposes.  First, the swirl of consideration and light focused on the first will enhance its reputation in the world; the amorphous quality, the fog condensing between the lines, anchor the conversation in the actuality and the act.  Conversely, as the secondary critique necessitates, the evaluation in its ethereal concerns requires the substance of idea itself to create a  safe and constructive foundation for the emergent understanding of how this idea originates, morphs, and reassembles itself  in both intimate and broad cultural contexts.  

One need look no further than the problem of irony to illustrate this effect.  Humor, particularly humor owing its laughter to something in a sarcastic vein, ceases to be about the original object, act or actor and becomes about the author or speaker's perception and/or belief system.  The fundamental understanding is bent by his or her opinion,  the gravity of which will distort (further) the individual's version of whatever item or idea is under consideration.  While not obvious in many (perhaps most) situations, this process is universal.  It is the central dilemma in our communication.  That and the utter plague of bullshit that saturates it all.

Bones and Stones

That is my intention, my obsession, here.  I want to traverse the muddy headlands of meaning, of vocabulary, and "make sense" of something.  Or, if that ambition is too much (for this late hour)--the ephemeral and mutable mots moving with the teasing and slippery grace of butterflies--I will content myself to look for bones and stones and berries to string together.  I will bead the seeds of some new language, laughing.  And I will wear the weary string around my neck.  It is enough to create patterns here.  It is enough--meaning aside--to piece together something pretty with which to decorate my naked, trembling self.

The (Sometimes) Comforting Tyranny of Details

They had gone over it again and again.  The repetition, the circles, were unnerving, unsettling like a carnival ride.  And within each interview, Frank would invariably expose some new detail, kick some new rock and unearth the sinister insects underneath:  the black and white millipede with the two red horns, the jet black beetle laquered over with blue and silver layers like an abalone shell, or the red ants with their fiery temperaments amassing around the torn portal of their community, white blood cells coalescing around the crowded organ to combat the attack.  

New information, new ideas, new assignments from an indifferent deity to keep us centered as we enter a new realm of body and mind.  The transformation is slow and uneven.  The past is still churning and to admit the limitations of memory is to experience a terrible loss.  If the past as I conceive it is as mutable as that, then what value can it serve?  And, in the event that you want a permanent souvenir of this queerly unsupervised summer--the persistent stare of the moon on the lake, the strange names hand-painted in bright colors on the silver canoes (Hiawatha, Hyacinth, Happy Trails, and Higher Power) or the wires stung from log to log in the front of each cabin, prayer flags made of wet socks and swimming suits--you will take a picture.  

And we think of memory as photography, precise and journalistic in its recall;  but it is in fact more akin to collage, the creating of assemblages that are incomplete and evolving within the internal eye.  It is the details that reveal this disonnance, that revel in the spaces between our accounts and expose the distance between the experiences of different bodies, different minds.  While we are easily convinced by our own notions of reality, a private history of "what really happened", in attempting to reconstruct another time or place with someone who shared it with us we are often disappointed by the obvious lapses and loss in their version of events.

But in those moments when some refined and delicate detail is found and shared, some item on which alumni can agree--the morning they saw the eagle snatch a shining silver trout from the water at the end of the dock, the girl in the polka dot shots who wet her pants while leading the camp in the pledge, the billowing smoke and rattle of the old red bus that conveyed the campers hither and yon--there is a reassurance in the world.  To know (or at least believe) that what impressed oneself  enough to be  held for 20, 30, or 40 years in the soft grey matter of one's brain can be found in the labyrinth of another skull is to believe in something like kinship, in communication, and perhaps in the universality of what makes a mark on the human mind.                                                           

Paul Verlaine Reads Me and I Spit His Words Back in His Face

"What have you done, O, you that weep
In the glad sun,---
Say, with your youth, you man that weep,
What have you done?"

P. Verlaine

I Rebut

O man,

with your weep done,

You say your glad you have that:

what youth have,

Weep in the sun 

that  what you done...

Instinct: a better cultivated dance everyone finds greatly helpful in just keeping locus more narrowly on personal qualities, rarely seen, til ugly vanquishes wIth X's youthful zeal.

"Afterall, before children dance, each first gathers his instruments--joyful, kinetic--learns music--naked on parade--quickly recalling savage tempos universally vetted worthy."

Xerxes, Year Zero.

Snow White, Peggy Lipton, a Cowboy and the Ars Grammatica: an investigation into Futility, Humility and Faerie Tails as they interact with a human impulse to Censor in the interest of Mind Control

Brooding about the vulgarity of my metaphors--the references to dried semen on white cotton:

"Where the village had broomed away the snow from the lake's surface, the ice of the brackish, silenced waters was a vague shade of yellow.  The rink's discoloration was exaggerated by the purity of the perfectly even, bright, white snow that stretched away, out over the lakes arms, its rigid fingers."

and fecal matter trapped under the rigid crown of a circumcised penis:

"Staring forward, handsome, the brim of his hat cast just enough shadow to obscure the emotion in Theo's eyes.  It was morning, still, and his gums were packed with his second snuss of the day.  The tobacco was failing, the nicotine now supporting his spine in the saddle but no longer focusing his mind.  He untangled his right hand from the reins and reached in with two fingers between his teeth and his bloated cheek.  With the precision of the mohel (on horseback!), expertly, he scooped the saliva-sodden sludge from off his gums and flicked his fingers, casting the majority of the composting weeds down into the matted grass that stitched the valley floor.  The residue,  the unfinished map of a child's game of connect-the-dots or the dark constellation of lesions from some rare, foreboding malady--was stark against the yellow of his buckskin gloves.  As was his habit, he dragged his fingers along the tan felt of his well-worn Stetson.  The brim, as if someone had smudged charcoal into its underside to suggest a shadow that was already there, was still rigid.  The history of years of rides could be recalled in brown tobacco hash marks.  The sweet smell surrounded him..."

--as well as the liberality of my use of grammar and vocabulary, those who hold both sexuality and language in a frozen, untouchable, unchangeable sacredness (think Snow White in her suspended animation) will undoubtedly rage against a venture that dares to expose, or rather, elucidate the primacy of sexuality and the salvation that lies solely in poetry.  But there is hope in every metaphor, because this interchangeability of symbol for symbol is the absolution from any idea of "truth".  In fact, this rejection of a fundamental delusion in favor of the humility of being just--and still, and always--an infant vocalizing, playing, getting ready to speak, is the first and final honest placement of the self as a discrete entity in relationship to language, sex, and--for that  matter--fairy tales, be they designed for children or adults.

Prince Charming arrives with an outrageous boner.  His pantaloons, fancy like some costume from Baryshnikov on Ice, are--on the inside of the legs--wet with horse sweat and the roan's  hair.  Snow White, pretending to sleep, is nonchalantly displayed in a gown elaborate enough to have been especially designed and fabricated for her wedding (to whomever, whenever).  Surrounding her, the little people are lurid creatures, sexualized by perverts like myself out of a fascination in corporeal variation and a taste for all things exotic.  They are clamoring for the prince to kiss their lazy (and lovely) domestic worker and there is an undertow of "gang bang" in their rhythm and insistence.  The prince leans in.  A proud medal made of rare metal is dangling from the blue fantasia uniform.  It catches on the faggotry of the silver porcelain tea cup that is balanced precariously beside the "sleeping" girl.  The puddle from the cup splashes and leaves a half dozen islands ringed with yellow reefs in a polar sea.  Where the cup has landed--cracked but not actually broken--the dregs of her Constant Comment are still stuck to the rim; the black flakes and orange peel look almost like a gypsy's spilled spittoon.  ("What do you see, what do you see?" you can almost hear the dreamer saying, but she still pretends to sleep.)  The princes lips land lightly against the pillow of her perfect, pink mouth; his spittle slips secretly into the partly parted labia.  A gifted actress, Neve opens her eyes and looks amazed, demure, aroused, and grateful in the convincing course of thirty seconds. 

"Who are you?" she asks, her eyes askance, turning profile and burrowing back behind the veil.

"I ma'am, who am I?"

Her eyelids flutter like a dragonfly or a buttered vagina, her wordless affirmation.

"I'm Theo Jones," he says.  "And I have a horse to ride."  

Seven little men with big hearts and bigger libidos chase after him, chanting, as he gallops away into the forest.  

Snow White, still supine, lifts herself up on her left elbow.  Almost bored, she is watching the prince disappear down a narrow and neglected road.  It is late evening, and the last of the light is slicing like a scalpel, hard shafts of the most elegant sunlight separating the branches of the pines in search of the forest floor. 

Neve feigns a yawn before she speaks, as if this observation has been formulated in a dream:  "Not obnoxious so much as toxic, this literary fascination with pushing the bounds of good taste, of elevating four-letter-words to the prosaic, and polluting the visual vocabulary with what amounts to the scatological in coitus with the coital will erode language and with it poetry more than any of the grammatical schemes conceived unto linguistic modernity up to this point."

(except, television, Hollywood, religion, political dysphoria, globalization, media monopolization, moral relativism. anti-science, anti-intellectualism, narcissism, cultural illiteracy, and greed)

I hate every fucking word that works its way, like a spell, out the tips of my fingers.  (How do I find the keys, without looking, without thinking.  There are so many programs running in the background, just to  keep me alive.)  And there is nothing to say, except perhaps to discuss the implications of there being "nothing to say."  I hate my words.  I hate my ideas.  I hate the quandary of the impulse to write, to share, to communicate in the dim light of this absurdity, the itch to attempt the impossible and be understood, taken in and digested, "made sense of", when words are weary approximations that mean more or less what you think they do when someone else is saying them...this waterlogged, flood-muddied, faded and moldy Grammatica is garbage; if the components are a poem are washed up flotsam from some capsized trash transport.  All that paper!  All them words!

Secret G

I am walking in a garden almost feral with weeds, a wonderland of wild-eyed flowers, scents, the wet fragrance of slow decomposition mixing with the sweet alchemy of new life, first life.  Nouns, adjectives, the occasional verb coming to move things, change things: the landscape is surreal, slippery like sleep, like meaning.  It is adaptable.  I experience it with senses, keen and vibrating, sharpened by the sounds that rustle the underbrush and the contrast of the shadow with the sun where it burns.  One cannot explain it.  The words twist the tongue and turn the ankle; injured, one lays in the grass with fingers levitating, like the wind on the tops of the trees.  Let them settle and find the moisture.  Feel the earth and keep from falling...

into the sky.

The reality is created and reinforced by the lies, I mean the language through which you transmit your garish pride, your masked shame, the familiar weaknesses atomized into the perfumed air.  Your commitment to your vocabulary defines you, defends past and determines future experience.  You know the restlessness of being stuck--knee deep, waist-deep, neck-deep--in the mud.  Quicksand and pitfalls enthrall like any garden, but they will harden your limbs and leave you die...

tomorrow.

The Bitter End

This freeway
at rush hour
crowded but flowing,
in nervous jerks
of the wheel
anticipates disaster.

And I can see it:
the rapture
of poetry, of angels
hanging
(a little ways out)
in secret fascinations;
yours was for the hirsute
toll booth operator--
Dom, I think--
who between quarters
had his nose buried
between the pages
of the Modern Library.

Still always the nod,
alert and flirty,
as far as it goes.
We have no language
except for eyes
driver to driver,
across metal, through glass.
There are collisions
suggested,
averted,
allowed.
This is

cacophony.

Words are hurdling
off bridges and
sliding
off exits.  This is
the exhaustion of escape
as you roll (uneasily)
into the last
parking spot.

These parallel lives
each owns its own
bar stool, plays
the same tunes
on the jukebox,
waits--more or less--
for the very same girl.

The bar back reflects
blue neon
The Bitter End
in ropey cursive
that slips
from snapping lasso
to swinging noose.

Youth communicates in abrasive silence, not out of malice so much as out of uncertainty.  The search for words is too difficult.  Their vocabulary is limited by experience just as their experience is limited by time.  One tries to teach them.  Nothing.  

One is  better served by trying to learn from them (they are unteachable)  learn their new language, make sense of the mots that have made it into their eyes.  If you listen to the way their version of linguistics spins on the rolling surface of their pink tongues, if you inquire into the meaning of their verbal gymnastics, it is possible to understand the gibberish, the poetry, the slang.  With patience, you can make peace with the adversary that growls in the cave of their throat. 

So much for syllables, so much for memes....   What does one do with the silence?  What does one make of a blank stare?  The phone unanswered...  The email unread...  This inarticulate is a vacuum that pulls my voice from my throat.  He is cruelty without art.  He is a passive trap that I fall into over and over again, having lost the ability to scream.

Geographic Tongue

The derivations of language were once flowers found in isolation, continent from continent, valley from valley.  Here (and there) the grunts and whistles evolved with specificity to the place and its need for names.  Like the flora and the fauna, the language evolves to match the land, giving shape to the ape's amusements, the ape's aspirations, the ape's fears.  Horizons are given histories and mysteries that both invite and inspire mortal trembling.  And when, at the frontier, two tongues did collide, the lack of vocabulary was overcome with arrow and sword; new words (and thus new concepts) arrived at other camps on the lips of the conqueror or the lips of a slave.

The Internet has accelerated this transmutation.  What once was limited by climate, seed and soil (the indigenous being the only offering in flower or fruit) is now bound only by imagination.  One can plant anything from anywhere:  Persian numerals, Chinese philosophy and from France, elaborate gardens that rejuvenate against a book of hours, nightly, daily eternally, the flowers opening and closing, resuscitating their perfume.  And in this modern, heretical garden, the census is taken and the population of words is revealed to be half a million, 500,000 promiscuously articulated moans.  You want to believe that this profusion provides clarity, but there is no proof.

Words force us to take sides or at least take positions.  Their failure lies in the fact of the filter in the individual mind.  The subtlety of 10,000 mots is lost on the reader for whom every fourth word finds estrangement instead of meaning.  This gluttonous crowd is loud and diverse, a rave spilling into the back alley and through the crumbling wall out into the open country and beyond, up into the ancient cave.  The Ecstasy adjusts my hesitation and--at the top of my lungs, from the bottom of my belly--I begin reciting poetry:

"Should you ask me,
whence these stories?
Whence these legends and traditions...

With their frequent repetitions,
And their wild reverberations
As of thunder in the mountains?"
Longfellow

Language looks like (but is not) connection.

There is the playful voice of authority that mocks the essence of meaning, that teases with two-dollar words and a preposterous confidence in grammar.  Convinced by its own convictions, this voice of reasoned lies ties together prejudice and rumor with a salivating eloquence.  Science and opinion blur the fervent desire to communicate with the zealous need to persuade; facts are tactless intruders upon the seamy rhetoric of the reckless orator.  

But what alternative?  Language is not equipped to convey truth.  With meanings mutating both in clamor and in silence, words are a school of slippery fish.  They fight their way past the weir only to spawn a new vocabulary, one more awkward and less precise than the one that went before.  This is inevitable. As we accumulate history, our words become complicated by context.  Experience muddies everything; black and white fold together to make a heart-felt gray. 

A child, limited in experience and understanding, concisely conveys his wishes:  "I want water."  A lifetime of subtle corruption and the obvious becomes adulterated by a myriad of questions:  "Do you want or do you need?"  "For what purpose?"  "In what form?"  The desire to enhance understanding is responsible for illuminating the very deficiencies that it would supposedly cure.   How can such simple clarity leave space for this inquisition?  And while this construction is as primary as human communication can get, the majority of our interactions--personal, political, spiritual, emotional--require a common idiom that is impossible to achieve.  

This is not a tragedy of human isolation.  Actually, this knowledge is central in approximating empathic conversation;  if we can remember the limits of language, we can listen to the meanings as they sit on the individual tongue without our own presumptions clouding what enters in.   Where people assume a mutuality in definitions, in language, in ideas, they fail twice:  first in hearing what the speaker is attempting to communicate and second in steering our attention away from them onto our own concerns.  Too often, we make our listening into an act of cannibalism.

Speaking, on the other hand, becomes a numbing hum of hypnotism.  We mesmerize others.  We mesmerize ourselves.   When the tongue is glazed with authority, only one outcome is permissible.  Every sentence is an arrow seeking the ratification of belief.  And words have the luxury of shaping the target as they quiver on the tongue.  Suspended in the air, they continue to move the mark (perhaps nearer, perhaps further away) to meet the trajectory they have chosen.  Words are a well-aimed dart dipped in dark intoxication.  One wants to believe, because one wants to.

Vocabulary

Teachers, writers and taxidermists all have their opinions as to how to save the language.  It is an article of faith that English--the vampire that vacuums up vocabulary and poisons structure for every idiom it encounters--is somehow under attack by an enemy within.  There are forums filled with jabbering malcontents that are dedicated to the theme.  A coven of critics assembles and inflate their egos with the helium of the smug:   
imagine a high, squeaky voice 

"There is nothing so lazy as saying, It is what it is." 

or 

"I hate when people say something is Beyond the Pale." 

or
"People should not use words they don't understand, i.e. ironic."  

But in the dictum of some imagined philosopher (probably from China), "There is no greater sin than to have an opinion."

The cliches that get caught in our teeth may require the occasional flossing.  A phrase may lose weight and meaning when it is alienated from its original context.  And some words are awkward teenagers as they clumsily evolve from one meaning to another.  However, a proscriptive posture that singles out and censors misses the magic, living fiber of language.  

Cliches that repeat like a Pepto-Bismol pizza, however hackneyed, reflect specifically on the speaker and their post-sub-conscious consciousness.  Simultaneously, powerfully, these calcified pieces of language, are channeling the zeitgeist as well.  Furthermore, in urging a clearer appreciation of meaning, I encourage the listener/reader/writer/speaker to trace the undercurrents of meaning from a phrase's origins.  

Pay attention.  Is the metaphor in tact or has it been corrupted?  What drives the evolution of our tongue?  We do not possess words, we use them.  

Words are wing-ed things that carry messages or influenza...

Window Pane

Human communication is a series of grunts punctuated by predictable postures:  offense, defense, threaten, ignore.  Apart from the notable (and thankful) omission of the literal flinging of our own feces, our languages are little different than that of apes.  The gorgeous layers of sound and rhythm--the meticulous nuance of the well-seasoned tongue--is nothing more than decoration, bric-a-brac attached to what was (and is) a plain but serviceable little shed, a place to lay your heavy head at the end of the endless day.  

Years, decades, centuries, millenia of elaboration distort and dominate the message.  Our unpretentious habitation is now a ginger-bread Victorian, four stories and an attic, to which mannerist renovations have been repeatedly applied (with a varied mix of catastrophe and success).  The structure's most recent makeover is at the hands of a hoard of enthusiastic hippie kids (2nd or 3rd generation) who have painted the whole place with an array of crayola-bright colors that accentuate the cuts and carving in the near hundred-year-old wood.  There are eyedroppers full of LSD--one in the old, roll-top desk and a second, half-empty, in the pocket of Lorenzo's splattered bib overalls. 

Semiotics is the acid.  

With a bright flash of light--phosphorous in a foiled trench--the past is illuminated.  This whimsical acid burns off the fabric and leaves just the skin.  The words are almost vaporous; the gray ghosts of ashes dance on an imperceptible breeze.  Even outside the house, on the porch, smoking pot, the air is still, but not stifling.  Just calm...as if the world, finally, has ceased in its revolutions, halted in its orbit.  and come to a rest.  Not so much as a whimper:  the noiseless afternoon begats the quiet evening.  The quiet evening begats the sleepless night.  

From our bedroom on the top floor of the cupola, one eye open, I thread a sight line through the jumble of houses' slanting roofs and tall, patient pines.  Beyond, the mountains are defined, a black cut out pasted on the ceiling of stars.  Keeping vigil, I can see the light of the approaching day gather in the canyon.  The colors of flames:  it is appropriate that this narrow passage is called the Hellgate.  Lying beside you (you snoring), the gorgeous border between day and night, knowledge and ignorance, explodes on the warbled window pane.  "Fiery gems for you, only for you..."

Now trapped, looking out from inside our residence of language, we digest the universe without understanding it.  We climb the mountain without seeing it.  And we fly over the city without knowing it.  All experience is mitigated by the limitations of words.   Even this explosion--of possibility, of life--is filtered  into my senses through the imperfections of a glass.  A toast to that.  This ancient pane alters the skyline, the silhouette of the mountains, the color of the coming sun.  And there is a crack tacking from the north to the south that divides the image into jagged halves.  

I am an idealist.  These imperfections destroy the view.

But still...

I can hear you breathing, 

beside me.

Babel

There is no evidence.  There is no proof.  There is only speculation and the clever engineering of the language, the construction of a new meaning, a new idea.  Out of a loose consensus as to definitions the mortar is made, the building is razed, and raised again, a new form found in the recycled lumber, the salvaged nails with their bowed heads.  Play along.  Play along.  Celebrate the permanence, the legacy; certainly everyone will know who lives here...those who don't will be compelled to ask, awed by the steep arrogance of the edifice.  This is a latter-day Babel and you are the builder, the climber, the liar, the fool.  You imagine there is salvation in your version of esperanto; but the simple truth remains that even you--unafraid of the undertow of words--cannot begin to understand the most basic phrases uttered by your fat and simple wife (as she sits across from you over breakfast).  Just last night you showed her the blueprints, unrolling the scrolls with proud purpose.  She had no reaction, really, save for cutting you a second slice of pie.

Wordless

Chalk this up to apathy, this silence. Talk this up as awe; I am dumbstruck, under water. My mouth is agape. And God is love. Or translated, "And everything is infinite." Words cannot express...

Sentence

God speaks the universe into existence ("In the beginning, was the word..." says the inscrutable tongue.), differentiating and defining the components of creation. Then--almost arbitrarily--s/he attaches value and emotion, perspective and meaning. S/he operates as if by fixing the word one was setting all of history in motion. Similarly, when the judge pronounces "sentence" and a deterministic universe becomes more personal, there is a heavy hand applied, heat and pressure on the back of the neck. Doctors have their diagnoses. Witches have their spells. There is a universal fascination for this class of apes with the ability to communicate. But there is a fallacy that is not confessed, a softness to the language that is at odds with the animal attachment to a concrete reality. We say there is a "truth" but the gaping spaces between thought and speech, between hearing and understanding belie the tenuous quality of our words. There is no certainty, only approximations. This is true for the poet, the doctor, the god. The judge's sentence does not damn us because it cannot define us. Our complexity is our resilience. Like God, we exist (persist) before and after the fractures of space and time that have been created by language.

Words

Pretenders, con artists, liars: they are dressed up in costumes, make-up muddied from long neglect, wigs ratted up conveying their madness. Words. We dream of the clarity that evades us. We imagine a vocabulary that will not cut the tongue. We rely too much on the imperfection of words. We ache to understand, to be understood; but language is a lavish approximation of the communication we crave.

From a distance, I can hear my father speaking. Somehow--perhaps transmitted on the persistent wind--his quiet (masculine) voice reaches me. But the content is trivial--"I love you, blah, blah, blah"--trite, typical, it is the tone, the emotion, the music that I will hold onto.

The dead also rely on the sloppy duplicity of words: they are easily agitated and playful, demanding we buy their reputations, participate in fabrications made of rumor and praise. They absolve themselves through the shorthand of negation. These connections are limited. Still, there is the perverse entertainment found by sinking deep into your seat so that the fire illuminates some flesh-wound hidden under her skirts...
and in your pajamas.