Summer, 1964, and: Untitled, 1978

Abstract

Summer, 1964, and: Untitled, 1978 Victoria Chang (bio) Summer, 1964 There are 1645 boxes. Inside each box is a small white dot. On some days, the dot looks like a dot. On other days, each dot is one of my tears. 1645 tears in the last week. Mary Ruefle kept a cryalog. My log is here, in these squares. I now know that tears aren't stillborn. In Chinese, 心疼 is different from 心理難受. The first means heart hurts. The second means heart inside is uncomfortable. In English, we say my heart aches. In every language, the heart can be in pain. But the heart doesn't feel pain. It is not a small mammal. Tears do not come from the heart. They do not come from the eyes or the body. They come from outside of us, like time, from one large repository, which is why we cry when other people cry. In this way, tears are communal. We depend on each other for our sadness. Which is why the repository is kept in a safehouse, away from the CEOs. [End Page 10] Untitled, 1978 Agnes once said, the silence on the floor of my house is all the questions and all the answers that have ever been in the world. I sit and wait for the floor to speak to me. But it just acts like a floor. The floor never testifies on my behalf, even though it has felt everything. Agnes says to give up facts, to have an empty mind. That if your mind is full of garbage, if an inspiration came, you wouldn't recognize it. Agnes tried to avoid having ideas because they are inaccurate. Someone said that what torments us isn't death but life. All along I have been preoccupied with the wrong thing. Maybe the five red bands are life. They wrap around my neck like someone's arms. When Agnes said you just can't be an artist if you can't be alone, I dreamt of the Tahoe fire. I, in the middle of it, sparks falling from the sky like men, the ski lift swaying from thoughts. And I woke up, my mind filled with smoke, no people, and Agnes's words. And the floor emptying my thinking like long division. [End Page 11] Victoria Chang victoria chang is the author of a nonfiction book, Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief, and several books of poetry, including The Trees Witness Everything and Obit. She lives in Los Angeles and is the program chair of Antioch's low-residency MFA program. Copyright © 2023 Yale University