- Joan Jonas / Light Time Tales

There is a room. A big room, with a steeply pitched roof, like an attic. It is blue. And in the book on the floor, she reads: “Doors and windows are cut out in the walls of the house. And because they are empty spaces, we are able to use them.” The windows of the house are small, high, so that when you sit all you see is sky.

 You see something in the distance and walk toward it. Then, when you get there, and look back, things seem so different from how you imagined them. Now I do not feel particularly attached to the house. The barn is vast and golden. The animals live there. The wind is blowing and the crows are gliding over the sea. And sitting in the barn, it is beginning to rain. All the trees on the road were cut, destroying our privacy. At the concert, the dancers swayed on their toes, and turned on their ankles. We found another white dog like the first. She had chased a sheep over a cliff. I became uneasy when he told me how much it would cost. Where should it go? I drew the hills again and again.

 She decided to sell the farm. And that night, she dreamed of two huge black birds. One was killed by the other. She opened the book right to B for blackbird and it said, “you will be called upon to show a great deal of courage if you dream of blackbirds flying. If they alight, you will be fortunate. A dead blackbird is a sign of trouble.”

 It is very quiet. The sun is setting and there is something quietly crashing in the woods. Maybe it is an animal or the boy who was making a path to the flat rock. She calls his name and the noise stops immediately and does not resume.

The spaces I made were intellectual, historical, and stuffed with references carrying the past, stifling me in the hot blue cellar.

The air was totally still, with the smoke rising over the trees, the sun orange through the flames. Each dry pine burned like an inferno, throwing off an intense bright heat. Lucky there was no wind. A fire’s speed is seldom seen in these parts.

 It is possible to see what is happening, and yet not know what is falling.

And they taught her all that was known of shape-changing.

The red car goes by every morning now as I am washing or coming up from the field. Just someone who lives on the road. But they always wave and blow their horn.

The women were all watching until the end. Then suddenly we were all running around the charred trees, stamping on coals.

Last night, we turned on the TV for the first time in weeks. Poltergeists lifting and moving furniture. A child thrown against the wall. The smell of sulfur.

I went and there were a lot of people. I sat next to him. He was about to show some movies. And I decided to go and comb my hair, which took a long time because I couldn’t get it looking right. Then we walked down the path and saw a faint grey figure in the mist. Someone stole my jewelry and I woke terrified. In San Francisco, in a high light room, with large clean windows, flooded with sun, on a ladder, in a precarious position, scared but alright. Outside the window way below were rocks and barnacles. Someone said, “look out!” I said, “it’s okay.” A man and woman came walking up the path. My friend said, “watch out, they may steal.” I say, “oh no, they won’t.” I woke terrified. Swimming back with the boy, the sea rose and fell, in immense swells. It took all her strength to get back to the beach that hovered above and below. Later in the dream, she sat on the floor of the ocean at this point, while the waves crashed over her head.

Everyday with the dog she walked into the woods, with no path, and chartered another part in her memory, with broken twigs and stalks and stems. She remembered summers long ago when she spent days alone in the trees. She would not go with him but he would, and he was particularly good at finding lost objects. Now she knows it by heart. Build a house, I feel a reluctance to do so. I saw a red car by the house falling into the sea.

I am not here, I cannot see. There is no silence and they are blasting on the road in his quarry. After dinner I felt uneasy about coming back here. I locked the barn doors and undressed by candle.

He told her a story about the sea lions who pushed the box up and down the surface of the sea, whistling and calling to the wind, as you would to a dog, “come to this box.” And their toy was a rainbow.

Time is more precious year by year. The air sharper, the sun warmer, and the trees more like friends, and my friends more precious like trees. The wind by the green house and the grey grass is gentle, turned by the hill. But here the wind is on the brink of violence. In the new house there are no memories.

The day was hot blue, and she was lying on the beach all alone. Except that the sound of a motor, like a mosquito, was getting gradually louder. And she had to put her bathing suit on and lie face down when the small boat rounded the point. It passed slowly with the man in a blue shirt standing at the rudder looking at the beach. He was just out of recognizable sight. Although he seemed to be the same one. She stared at him from under her arm. It seemed forever. His stance was that of the man at the quarry. Finally the boat went behind rocks and she turned on her back to feel the sun on her breasts. The sea as usual was immense. A man is walking down the road toward the house, 5 which is part of the mystery on the hill. The wind comes up every night.

The house was a disaster. And the cat was killed last week by the dog. She reads, “They chased each other around for another whisper. They calculated things by the shape of clouds, by the length of shadows, by the flight of birds, by two flies on a flat rug, by throwing bones over the left shoulders, and by every kind of trick and game.”

Last night I had a map dream in color of a detailed region above Egypt. Only it was all mixed up, and I was trying to say names like “Adada.” I can walk it but I cannot draw it. Then when I came back, I found the wooden door chopped down and all the windows broken.

The vaguest it can grasp. It makes a solid object though. A gesture, a look. Still there is the wishing when I see the evening star. In what order did we meet? And when did I last see her? And where have I been since then?

It was hot again. I slept on the porch. Tonight I will sleep in the field as the barn is an oven. The crescent moon rose, and I watched the stars move across the sky. Too bad the land is so close. I am tired from the fire and the heat. I’m not afraid of night, finally.

As soon as I got upstairs, the wind overtook me, the wild trees blowing. And this morning they were still swaying. The house will be beautiful, and the idea of it takes over. As the summer ends, I learn more each day in the field.

I can hear the planes looking for the wreckage of the boy, who went down flying from Sydney. We are watching our woods. He said to listen for the west wind. At dawn I will walk down the road.

When I saw the man of the red car at the fire, the mystery escaped, but my obsession continues as before. It’s the distant figure on the hill, the house in the future, and the man in the distance. But he thinks I should have a trailer and a gun. He shoots deer. He is a hunter. He drives out every morning and every evening to spot them. He observed me also, he said. “Restless, but not afraid,” he thought. Strange the way we see one another in the distance. I ran over to the field and saw the red car out in the point. I ran in circles with the wind.

I am sitting upstairs where there is a lot of light. In high winds it is like a ship creaking, and I feel uneasy about the shingles. I took him home and went swimming in the harbor. A big black mass covered the sky from the North. The water was slate grey and absolutely cold, the sky dark with patches of grey light reflections of the sea. They came to visit and I was relieved. They stayed until dark. It is silent and ominous, like something had happened.

I am lying in the field trying to stay awake under the stars, watching the trees for smoke, listening for crackling, in case it happens again. Fire travels underground by the roots. You can’t know where it will surface.

Someone said the youngest land is Iceland, and the oldest, Greenland. As she walked into the ocean, she told me that we were both on the edge, and that these are games of survival—time fillers—and the development is cyclic, circular, and that you always return to the beginning. I am an immigrant here, carrying in my heart a myth I support, from another place, where I do not wish to return from this new land I am occupying. And I fell in love the first morning.