by Jessie Kraemer
Some things are true, I wouldn’t dispute that. But the way a mind holds fact is a funny thing, and no two do it the same. A mind can hold real things in a really unreal way.
Things we haven't seen have a way of being things we’ve already seen—as having not seen them, we imagine them in detail, with familiarity.
There is the state where I was born and lived most of my life, which upon imagining is pale. I imagine first a triangle on the east coast, and second, a farm down the road: two buffalo standing in the water behind a wire fence. One peacock roams, several baby pigs poked by squatting children. The woods beyond hold gnarled trees among what may be the little ghosts of trenches and deep buried metal nuts, or simply dirt. Only these images.
There are continents about which I contain a wild and unsubstantiated understanding grown almost exclusively from things seen in National Geographic. And then the visceral and acute pain of choking on a live octopus, nearly universal. A feeling known almost so well that we do not need to imagine a second time.
Notions are fertile. A whisper can sink damply into a soil and grow fruit, while realer seeds are eaten and forgotten.
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Hair tossed like a scarf, I step from the platform alone in a burst of rivering bodies.
The Louvre is being emptied because of the summer flood. I see the man in pressed slacks tossing windy with each step as he—with dark hair and a pinched mouth—carries one end of a wooden crate of artworks. Stepping a black shoe backwards to, shining, lick the drowned cobbles, his face is unmoved, his calf, unimaginable.
People glide through the green streetwater with an earned, middle-class pep that comes from being European in the time of the bullish America. The world throws up celebratory plastics, they fall almost immediately and do not decompose.
It is the Eurocup, among the tourists and the locals dressed in neutral tones, there are colorful jerseys with numbers. Who knows what teams are playing, and who would ever know, seeing as so many countries have the colors red and white. There would have been so much red and white.
When imagined unknowns are replaced with witnessing, then comes a realness that is underwhelming, neutralizing, and eventually forgettable. To come upon the Mona Lisa is to say, this is much smaller in person.
Concerning the Mona Lisa, I’ve never been to the Louvre.
Paris, for me you canceled two trains.
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Many times I imagined the journey, crossing the French border. The sheep stand puffed and coiffed, their sloping backs like their mothers’ the hills. There stand the small houses, without the dumbing solar panels and turbines of practical Germany, basking nakedly in a relentless nature.
Paris, 476 kilometers away, is both the lit cigarette and the mouth inhaling, realizing it is as well the burning of dry tobacco, as well the smoke in the lungs and the smoke curling through the labyrinthine stem of the cigarette. It is delightful to feel the uncertainty and the displaced sense of arriving, both smoking and being smoked, to see how the lit end erupts in a shine that is meandering like a thin red snake, like the sharpness on a turning coin.
Pouring back and forth into each glass to rebalance the known with the known.
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When my mother was a child she sat in the front on her knees for the class picture. I know this as I hold in my hands the class picture.
I know it to look at her, the other children, anonymous and grey, their thoughts are unsaved, but her I can remember. She has white hair and a handstitched dress, and in her I see a mystic. Her stare is boiled and plain, her eyes are two skinned nuts and two black pebbles. I think, I want that child to come back and teach me to be quiet and odd.
I wonder if she hid things, what she refused to eat, if she stored small resentments.
If she did not smooth all the wrinkles from the bedclothes, there was the witch who would grab her. There were the little dolls with their tiny outfits her mother pulled from the top shelf of the linen closet only when she was home sick from school with a fever. There were the baby lambs who cried as she fed them on her lap with a bottle by the fire. The willow in the front lawn. The peach orchard rented across town where she would rub the skins up and down her arm before the rashes came.
She grew very slowly day by day, not quickly in leaps like chapters in a story. She slept seven to nine hours each night, and this would have been much of her life, a few hours of sleep each night. She rode the bus to school and sat in chairs, and this too would have been much of her life. She would sneeze and push the dirty clothes to one side of the room, and these things would have taken up moments each week. I would like to live each day in her childhood like I would visit the real Paris.
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My three days a week lover beside me in the grass, I touch the eczema on his wrist, something else that comes and goes. A bee mounts a clover.
I cannot know how I’ve moved even to get here. Like the balls of moss that roll on glaciers, in Alaska, in Iceland, the colder places, the blue sheen, somewhere my feet would never travel, the mountain of still water. The sudden green on the landscape, like balled socks, are called glacier mice. A mystery I cannot solve, nor scientists.
These balls of moss must somehow roll themselves, one inch a day, to angle each curve of their oval adjacent to the sun, to keep each pearl of moss alive. The odd thing is not that they roll themselves—that we do not know how—but that they all roll together. As one mind. Marbles that someone is shuffling with a big, immaterial palm. That to see them sitting it is somehow impossible not to see them in motion, creeping forward, even as the glaciologist, the chill of the air at their nose, watches, even in a photograph, even as we see them in the magazine, even then.
To see them still, is to see them in motion, even in the photograph, even then. And to feel it bodily, like a stone, the kind that could be carved into a Mycanean vase, picturing what a Cretan imagines of an octopus, a three-petaled flower and two ribbon arms with ribs like lace, and this in the Louvre, tucked in some lit box, with a placard explaining.
“The Octopus”—it offers—not saying what it would feel like for the same to be swallowed. Not intimating that at the level of the cell, an octopus is one step ahead of us, or eight, or like a thousand liquid stars, is always intimately recreating, an octopus manifesting himself like the environment around him. He sees the room, and imagines himself candescent.
That an octopus could imagine himself exactly the texture of sand, that he could become a school of clownfish, means he could easily negotiate the thought of being sent to the restaurant kitchen. Being held up from the bucket of water, inspected, first interrogated for shape, and then separated at each limb. What he wouldn’t imagine may be the cooler skin of a glacier, what he knows of the smaller ice cube, the exposures of the sun on the water.
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To come upon a Da Vinci, peering over the backs of many others to see it, one’s eyes electing to look at the pimpled light on the golden frame rather than hairless brow of the woman, may be to say, this is much smaller in person. Or I am much smaller than I thought I was.
It’s true, at least, to say that I did not see it.
To enter an unvisited place is to enter every part of its air, an omniscience, a poured jar of bees, each buzz an inimitable touch.
Calling something nonfiction will make me immediately suspicious. If you go out of your way to tell me something is true, I'm going to assume you're lying. That antagonism is what I love about an essay. It’s like a lazzi, the same failure every time. There is no True. Everyone loves a lazzi, and we keep reading essays because they’re this awful analog for how we attempt to cohere narrative about our lives. It’s a kinship with this pseudo-impossible project of understanding the world.
Speculation is the currency of the essay, is any movement in the text, because if we only wrote confidently forward about what we knew to be true, there would be no essay. Some things are true, I wouldn’t dispute that. But the way a mind holds fact is a funny thing, and no two do it the same. A mind can hold real things in a really unreal way. All that’s there are stars, and we see constellations. A trick you learn is that beginning anything with “I imagine” makes it nonfiction. The fact of writing the fiction was true. But putting the focus there changes things: then we are watching you do it.
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Jessie Kraemer is an MFA candidate at the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program, where she is co-editor of The Essay Review and teaches undergrads to like books. Her work can be found in Essay Daily.