An excerpt from
Complexity Is the Ghost of Understanding

a new novel by Jean Smith of Mecca Normal; published by Arsenal Pulp Press; available in stores March 1, 1998 (ISBN 1-55152-050-8); $12.95 U.S./$14.95 from 1-888-600-PULP

SOUND AND LIGHT are linear systems. Light travels in straight beams penetrating the dark, it passes through itself and through sunlight. When I went alone, in silence, to travel through linearity, binary systems and opposites I was looking for methods of understanding that were outside of duality. What I found was a self-sustaining system of energy creation that had provided water and power to a small community for hundreds of years.

I was working towards the edge of chaos, from solid to fluid, to what is hidden in, what I think of as, darkness. Somewhere in the freezing and thawing of water, between order and chaos, there is a relatively balanced place where the tension of these parameters creates and maintains transition. Transition. Where does John Lydon turn into Johnny Rotten? It’s too simple to say ego and alter ego. Sitting at the other end of a hockey arena about twenty years after someone called it punk, I tried to imagine Johnny’s face. In my mind’s eye I saw him at the height of the Sex Pistol’s notoriety. The history of punk, the original reason and meaning for and of these songs created a linear stamp in my thoughts. I wasn’t aware of punk the first time around, I found out about the Sex Pistols long after they were finished. I saw PIL at Roseland in NYC in the spring of ’81. They’d already been around a couple of years, the Sex Pistols were ancient history by then! The Sex Pistols in ’96? I sat, immobilized, thinking: if they’d come back for the money--good for them. If they’d come back to alter history again, to inform on history--better still. Some pragmatists wanted them to lie down in the pages of history with epitaphs they’d written themselves. It’s disturbing for some people to be confronted by that which was promised to be dead. It was always hard to look Rancid, The Offspring and Green Day in the eye, now it’s impossible. Johnny Rotten is revered and emulated and that was never the point.

From the chaos of those original punk days "order," by way of interpretation and imitation, has been defined and reduced so far that it’s made punk mainstream. Punk is a genre like rock-a-billy, it’s a style. What happens next? When will order be disrupted by chaos and what will that place look like?

When the pendulum of social and political analysis is swinging up to the point where it changes direction, does it stop? Does the bow on a violin stop for some fraction of time on the strings? I can’t see the transition point, but that’s what interests me, not in solid matter or motion, but in ideas and their manifestation; a place where conviction and ambiguity meet. In a network of nerves and vessels, multiplicity is the spirit of knowledge and tolerance.

THIS BEGINS IN the dark. This darkness belongs to something we can’t forget, even when we’re asleep. It waits with us, seeping into our lives at an uneven, faltering pace, never far from where we think the surface is. It’s always ready for us, to take our hands, to hold them motionlessly. And we don’t even suspect it. We don’t know it’s there. Let me tell you about it, let me tell you how quickly it can rise up in you, in me. If you’re driving fast at night and you decide to leave the highway the darkness is already ahead of you, around a corner you don’t know you’re going to take. How do I know? I’ve tested the darkness, I’ve spent time there, beside it, watching it. I’m almost ready.

I’m striving for a plainly constructed annihilation. Pinned against the exist door, escape, in this case, is too good. Its habitat is behind the spokes of a turning wheel. Chrome sparkles like laughter. When does it rest? It’s the only thing I did, pursuit consumed my time. I believed that when I’d finished it off I’d be left in purity, in a kingdom without weather.

The experiments have been different and I’ve never spoken to anyone about them. For all anyone else knows I’m living a normal life. Almost a normal life. It’s a matter of tension and control to find the designs. Within the rules of darkness I’ve melted glass back to sand, split yellow trees to splinters and wrung sap from the remains. It’s a hurricane watch. I’m getting there.

I used to work days at the counter. He, sunken cheeks, paint flecks on his clothes, rubbed the dust from his hair and came to meet me. Together we drove home. My ambition faded. After that I used to work part time in an office. He built things that other people wanted. He counted keep them for himself. He always managed to pay half our bills. I began to move like him and picked up all his habits. He developed a fondness for rare wood from mainland China. Any extra time he had he spent sharpening his tools. My ambition slipped away, I couldn’t stop the dullness from roaring in. Something was slowly rotting in my box of souvenirs. I took a token of my ambition and rolled it in my hands and like my plans, like my desire, it disappeared.

Maybe I’m making it seem too complicated, maybe you call it something else. Waking up, not knowing where you are, not knowing whose breathing you’re listening to. Have you ever tried to dig straight through to the other side of the world? Lost before I knew it, passing the ones who stopped at the oddest times, others stopped halfway. Listening to another world’s future breathing in the dark. Who is behind you on the way? Is fear an accelerated from of wondering? Do you call it panic?

An extinct creature, an antiquated word, history survives in an unrecognizable shape. We’ve mistaken its origin, but we know it’s there.

Somewhere in me, when people say, "The moon is sinking into the horizon," I believe it is.

I am running with rabbit leggings, looking behind me as I pound against the crust of spring snow. A wolf runs after me, tongue lolling on one side. Cedar boughs whip against me and the full moon sinks into the lake creating darkness. Hiding. A chance.

These spells are my imagination and they occur when I’m on the verge of relaxing, between tension and relaxation.

I am taking a tuna sandwich out of plastic wrap on the first spring day warm enough to eat outside. Office workers are sitting on the cement edges of the fountain, they push back hair in the breeze, look for sunglasses in purses, drop shoes to wriggle toes.

I am sitting alone, enjoying the mutual happiness of a season turning, warming up. I am feeling outside of things, but somehow unconditionally connected; my imagination goes. I am in the middle of the city, following the person ahead of me and suddenly I become a witness and yet I can’t recount the facts of the accident. I know it involved a pedestrian and a car. I was at once part of connection and disorientation. I was skinning a small animal with a crooked knife, my hands flicking the entrails, separating the flesh from the fur. Deep in the forest, two hundred, three hundred, five hundred years ago.

The rocks on the beach are warm colours; warm greys, warm browns. Dull, rubbed smooth by the tides. I am lying face down on the rocks, pushing my fingers through them. My eyes are closed, I can smell the salt. The rocks are small, they fit in my hands. I’ve stopped waiting. Tension disappears downward. The side of my face is pressed against the beach. I am only the translator here and I’m still not convinced I understand the language, but the process surrounds me whether I understand it or not. You’ll have to accept my work as interpretation. Next, you become the translator, involved prior to recognizing multiplicity. The darkness seems to demand an endles shifting, a dense shuffling. The destruction of codes.

I remember that girl, alone on a beach, fending off desperation, filling notebooks with a silent scream. In the transition from a daughter to a wife I made a list that read like errands to be run. It was a list that was intended to define the future on paper. I got tired of recipies and redecorating rooms. Inch by inch, but not without asking, I pulled away. Nowadays I don’t want to own a horse. I don’t need to see Paris in April.

The rocks are cold fingers. They are magnets, restructuring molecules into new patterns. Constant motion. Never is there repetition. The sea is breathing in my ears, a conductor of sound. Whose future am I listening to now?

Crimson drops the levels, casting molten iron to the sea. Underwater near the ruins of the shipyard, time, time is slow and energy is speed. Waxy laughter breaks across the back of history. Fingers are pinching dust in the black caverns, searching for a method that exists in a void. Rifling through history, investing in past lives, the honeycomb of doubt crumbles at the slightest touch.

Everyday at about four the crows fly east. Their course changes with the seasons. The crows fly back from the sun like an answer. I’m not sure if it’s an answer to a question or a problem. The directions are half written disappointments. Some things can be left without solution. The sun smells sweet without compulsion.

"The slow days will take us together. I’ll pay you what I want to owe you, I expect you to give me what I want."

Sick of land faith on a mile. Sick of gravity’s shee Sunday at noon believing we can’t fly. Sheer pink in a thousand summers’ eyes frayed edges. Some things can be left without solution.

Snow traces a white outline on the trees. A book is open on the windowsill, open to the pages with a drawing of bodies falling through history, searching for the light to separate them from the dark. The book is so small compared to the original drawing. Taking it in with one glance, as if it was just a thought, a gesture, it’s easy to forget that the bodies fell with such weight and power. If you choose the misconception as a reference, as a guide to understanding, you will reproduce nothing. Really nothing.

If you live your life examining misrepresentations you might never notice where the inconsistencies are, the imperfections that allow breathing. This is the darkness you won’t see. If you are determined to imagine that there are no errors in other people’s examinations then you will be bolted to stillness. Forced to stand along side the unrelenting pulse beats of light and dark, you will have dulled what could have been. Where do these accidents occur?