Bookstore Creep: Free Association

This column may be perplexing without context. Check out the previous columns in the Bookstore Creep series:

I - Love After the End, from Belmont Books

II - Hikuri, from Mother Foucault

III - Alien Daughters Step into the Sun, from Word Virus Books

After six months of investigation, things started to get a bit weird. I was meeting bookshop stewards, building my diagram, moving through the streets of Portland with purpose. I was also spending a lot of time dumpster diving and handing my business card as intriguingly as possible to event organizers because let’s admit it-- I was becoming broke. Rosalie L.H. Caggiano does not have a day job. This pursuit of the meta-narrative is a full-time undertaking. Luckily, I also do not need to eat very much. As someone who is not entirely of this world, my earthly needs are partial.
Even as a partial-earth creature, I was still shocked by the turn that my narrative took. I was heading out of Parallel Worlds bookshop with two books in my hand. Maybe this was the first moment where I summoned in this eerie turn. I had entered with purpose, I had interacted with the book-tender and I had received his recommendation. Just as I was about to purchase the recommended novel, some longing made me turn around and gaze at the discount section. The missing piece of my Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea collection sat there: Tehanu. The book where Le Guin continues her fantasy world after learning much about the workings of any world. By that I mean living for thirty more years.

Maybe it was life that came reaching her hand from the ether to turn my head, to lovingly derail me.
I was heading out of Parallel Worlds bookshop with two books in my hand. I stepped out onto Alberta street and into strong sunlight, which felt so good that I paused to focus all of my energy on its absorption. At that moment I heard two people talking behind me. They were talking about a renegade book reading. They welcomed their friend, a third that they had been waiting for, and all began to unlock their bikes. I discreetly unlocked my bike as well and pretended to start reading Tehanu while they mounted their bikes leisurely, flipping their little raccoon tail key-chains out of the way and adjusting their patchy jackets. When they took off, I counted three deep breaths and then followed.
What followed I cannot recount here, but I can share that I left a few hours later with a third book, Warlike, Howling, Pure, tucked under my arm.
On some sort of high from obtaining books, I stopped back again at my neighborhood bookshop and spent a long while browsing. Eventually I walked out with Mark Fisher’s The Weird and the Eerie. In awe of all of my new treasures, I decided to throw myself a picnic. There were still a couple of hours of sunlight left by the time I reached the park with tea and little snacks.
The sun began to set and I was still flipping through my new books ravenously, with a chaotic focus. When at last it was too dark to read I packed up and began walking back to my house.
At the far end of the park I noticed that there was some sort of happening. There was a small stage erected with blue lights shining dimly upon a lone figure. As I got closer I noticed one more figure, a very small one nearly crouched behind a sound board. I began to hear the music then, it was some odd take on drum and bass. Just as I got close enough to the stage to make out the features of the speaker, they slipped off stage, leaving me with a blurred impression. I felt immediately uncomfortable in my body, like my arms had grown very long and heavy and I did not know where to rest them. Right in front of me was a set of stairs, and a small sign that read ‘the line begins here’ with a little arrow. But no one was in line. I looked behind me at the audience, but everyone was wearing black and it was too dark to see any of their faces. I looked back at the stage. The DJ had risen a bit from their crouch and was inviting me onward. I wandered up while my mind did some sort of backwards roll, gymnastics that I had never learned before. They gestured at the microphone and said “it’s church”. I whispered back, “what kind of church?”. They just smiled at me and said “any kind”. All was quiet and it should not have been. The microphone was eliciting some static feedback, and the audience did not move and appeared cloaked in black robes. Without any idea of what I was going to say, I walked up to the microphone. The words that I spoke, I pulled from my subconscious and penned them onto the air around us. I filled the night with my thoughts because the other option was a silence that threatened to become the sensation of being lost.

“Can you hear me? Good. I am still unsure that you can always see me around here. You see, I appear to be about 30 years old, but really I was just recently born into this reality. I have always been a vague specter, a shaky energy that appeared more solid when my narrator was feeling passionate. But I didn’t have a form until the last six months. I was put on earth with one mission: to construct a history that has not yet been constructed.
How, you ask, can one construct a history? Is it not something which just exists? To that I say: with words. With words you can construct any history that you could ever imagine, and you’d better do it because people are always constructing different histories. They say on earth that history is written by the victor. Well, now we can hack that reality. Anyone can write a history now. Case in point, I just picked up this historical account called Warlike, Howling, Pure which writes the history of anarchist insurrection across continents from BCE to modern day. More cases in point, the other two books I have in my pack.” I paused to rummage through my pack for the three books and hold them up a bit above me so that they caught the blue light.  
“In Mark Fisher’s The Weird and the Eerie he traces a gradual development of thought as writers, musicians, psychoanalysts, and filmmakers define a genre that is not formally known to exist: the weird, the eerie, the unhomely, the familiar yet not. In Ursula Le Guin’s Tehanu she takes a world of wizards and ships that she built long ago, and adds a twist that sets woman’s magic above that of the wizard-men. The story was always open to that history, and it had lain waiting for her to continue it.
You see much of your world through the history that you learned in school. Through the history of last week that you watched on the news, or that other people tell you was on the news. Through the Bible, I guess, if this is that kind of church. You put these together and they become the real world that you inhabit.
I am inhabiting earth in order to add a new history to your amalgamation. To weave the threads of the literature of the transgressive, the underground, the counterculture, from modern day all the way back to its conception. I mean-- there has to be a thread. Each artist interacted with so many others that there is surely a way to trace the web of meetings and cited inspiration directly from person to person.
When I began this mission I started analyzing where we are at now. I stubbornly began with where we are at now. These last ten years are perplexing and I am struggling to find common threads. It feels as if everything has fractured into billions of tiny pieces and every single person is so autonomous that there is no tale to be told. Will our minds and our spirits ever catch up with these multitudes?

As I speak, I realize a few things. First of all, I realize that the birth of so many new histories may be the exact reason why the act of summary is so strenuous. By that logic, this is a good thing. The act of true summary may have always been strenuous, but it was not perceived as such because many voices were censored or ignored. Because we only had to summarize the histories of the victors. Secondly, or maybe thirdly, I realize that the reason why I picked up all of these books instead of the book that relates to my singular mission is because there are large bases of thought that support the transgressive narrative that don’t fit neatly into that category or any category.”

*

I walked off stage, sweating. I took a seat among the audience. The row that I selected was indeed full of folks clad in black under a large black blanket that looked like a cloak from afar. They lifted the corner for me as I arrived and I slipped in among the darkness. My breath was coming deep and a bit raspy. I thought of Gods. I wondered if it would be of use for me to name authors among mine. I wondered if this is already what we do as humans. I thought of the Bible. I wondered if it would be of use to name the different tales of insurrection as parables in mine. Chinese Millenarianism, The Dionysiac Frenzy, Black Liberation. I wondered if I could invite James Baldwin among my Gods as well. I had to open Warlike, Howling, Pure again to read one of his many quotes that were included in that volume:
“We agreed this morning that guilt and responsibility were not the same thing. But we have to agree, too, that we both have produced, all of us have produced, a system of reality which we cannot in any way whatever control; what we call history is perhaps a way of avoiding responsibility for what has happened, is happening, in time.”
The strange music began again and this time more rapid. Another of the crowd went on stage and began to speak, but I found that I could not follow their train of thought. They pulled out a book and everyone around me pulled out their book simultaneously. I tried to peek over the shoulder of the person next to me and read it, but it was too dark. Perhaps the words were not in the English alphabet, either. At that point I wondered if I had died. Then I thought back to the James Baldwin quote. I got up and started walking away from the church. The thing was, I didn’t recognize the path that I was on, even though I walked this park every day. I used the tiny blue light from my flip phone screen to try to illuminate things more, but it just added to my blindness.
I walked for a long while, thinking about how history may be a way of avoiding responsibility for what has happened, and what is happening. I wondered how I might take responsibility. I remembered one of his other quotes in the book:
“The crime is committed until it is accepted that it was committed. If you don’t accept, if I don’t accept whatever it is I have done... I’m doomed to do it forever. If I don’t accept what I have done.”
Circular wording to describe a circular concept. He included ancestors in this cycle. I remembered this, memorized this, because I am very much created by ancestral angst. I would not be here on Earth partaking in absurd quests if not for all of the repressed creativity of my woman ancestors, who were kept in a domestic way. I puzzled over these quotes, trying to piece them together. How do I function in society while accepting and taking responsibility for the luxuries that crime has ingrained into the structure of our society? How do I even use the word crime in my lexicon of thought as it stands now, weighted by many misleading histories?
It was on this train of thought that I arrived at the edge of a cliff. Far below me, the ocean, and a harbor. It was Re Albi, the port town from a different world, a seafaring world. It was still dark, and it would be a long time before dawn. I wondered if I could follow the descriptions from the book in my hand and find my way to Ogion’s cabin for some rest.

It was a couple of months before I returned entirely back to reality. Back to Portland. The hardest part was when two realities overlaid and intermingled as I started to return. I could tell you more about my adventures, but it would be more straightforward for you to read the books I had in my pack.

 
Rosalie L.H. Caggiano

Bookstore Creep contains recommendations from the continuous investigation of Rosalie L.H. Caggiano into modern-day authors who are writing about the counterculture and the underground in the USO (The United States Of...). The USO is a zone that may encompass the whole of what is known as North America, or might not quite make it to the Southernmost and Northernmost hinterlands of what is known as Mexico or Canada. Rosalie searches for modern writers that upend the impression that “nobody does anything even remotely interesting in real life anymore”. She talks straight to the book-tenders of the City of Portland, exploring bookshop by bookshop instead of wallowing in the depths of the 129+ million books on Earth without guidance. She is beginning the construction of an extensive stainless-steel 3D diagram that documents the intricate webs of writer’s connections and histories, which become more and more clear with each column. This diagram already takes up most of her backyard.