the moirai

What sort of strings are pulled, pulled taut and knotted, that bring two or more people into the same building at the same time? What if that building is a market, in the middle of nowhere, so in the middle of nowhere that it’s listed as one of Massachusetts’ quietest places in a moldy guidebook your mother just gave you for Christmas, published in 1998? What if it’s a gallon of milk that the familiar stranger is holding, and you recognize his face but not his name? Ten years ago he drove the truck that you unloaded. Thousands of pounds of heirloom tomatoes passed through your arms, from the truck’s interior to someone else’s hands, or to a plastic folding table, or to a concrete curb. The weight of even one tomato box was reminiscent of the weight of a baby, any kind of baby animal, dense and animate. Tomatoes transported to a city, the summer before all this conspicuous fascism. Fire-red sun rising and setting as you work seven days a week, 12 or so hours at a time. The truck driver then was your co-conspirator, you recognized fatigue in one another silently. Ten years into the future, exactly yesterday, hundreds of miles away from that city, you are in line together in a market, he’s buying milk and you are buying chocolate to share with your friend who lives up the road.

Through Cecilia Vicuña’s performance transcripts I learned about Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos. But first I should say that I met Cecilia Vicuña because she walked into the building I was in. Into a dirty cafe staffed by teenagers, by the ocean. The neighbor’s chickens had just escaped and they were walking into the center of town across Main Street, I could see this out the cafe window. A woman walked in and I noticed her because she was wearing a woolen dress. The rest of my time in the cafe that day I thought about walking up to her and telling her how much I loved her dress, but I left without saying anything. The following day I discovered her identity totally coincidentally on the World Wide Web (as Cecilia would call it). So in this way it is a stretch to say that I met her, but I don’t know another word for it.

From Cecilia’s performance1 at the end of September, 2001, in the United States:

Clotho
and Clotho she's the mother of the cloth
that we wear...
What it is, according to this myth
is that the cloth is your time here
so the cloth is really your life
and the way you are living it...
Then comes
the woman that's called
Lachesis
hmmm
Lachesis is the one that
allots
to each one
a portion.
And you should know
that the word
name
also means portion
So
each
one
of
our
names
is a portion of the total name...
And the last of them,
this is the terrible one
this is AAAtropos
you know tropos
tropos is the movement
so Atropos is the one
that won't move...
the one that cuts the thread....
y cloto lachesis atropos
spinning life
and death
...fate
fate is not the force
that predetermines events
as the dictionary says
fate is to speak
and you fate yourself as you speak

The truck driver turns around when you speak. But how did you recognize me? he asks you, not alarmed but happily, easily. You have no response, there’s just a drawing in your mind of the time gone by, ten years of it, since you last saw and were seen by this person. In your mind, like a camera flash, a sudden portrait develops of that summer. The visions you had then of a massive hibiscus flower falling across New York City, landing there like a child’s parachute, pacifying everyone the way a petal uniquely can. You hallucinated the aroma. While a bleak, demonic governance was sounding out across radio waves, you witnessed a reality show celebrity grope his chimera of power. You woke up at dawn, the sun rose like it was blooming, you were paralyzed by trauma so you inhabited the moment exclusively and asked others to join you there.

Your boss owned the tomato farm. He had anger issues, you downplayed it by saying that he ate too many acidic tomatoes and his tummy probably hurt. He threw a cinderblock in your direction when you were moving too slowly. He was off to Bloomingdale’s to buy a suit to go to dinner at the Best Restaurant in the World. The dinner would be on the house, as it was tomato season, and the boss was the restaurant’s tomato supplier. And when the truck driver parked each morning and you unloaded it silently, naively you listened as famous chefs flirted (with machismo, in a shop-talk way, the way men who think they can cook talk to one another) with the boss who threw cinderblocks and bought a suit. Yeah while the boss was occupied by this or that, the truck driver (with fear in his eyes) was kind to you, silently. He may or may not have slipped you more money than you were allotted.

The air was hot. The heat came from all around and was magnified by the ground. It was as if you died the death of a rotisserie chicken. On trips to the tomato farm, in moments alone, you buried your face into the soil, erotically, to cool off by the river. Picking tomatoes, you were the only native English speaker on this plot of land in Pennsylvania. Everyone else spoke Spanish. You didn’t understand then that you were born in, more like extracted from, the innards of a literal monster; an American girl. Well it felt like you were just in from your birth. And you were being indoctrinated into a world where the boss spoke English perfectly, in fact he had an Ivy League education, but he wouldn’t or couldn’t speak Spanish. He only spoke demands.

A fly landed on a mutilated tomato in his kitchen.

Of course I recognized you, how could I forget? When you say this, the truck driver smiles. He doesn’t seem surprised much at all, but you are shaking and you don’t know why.

-

Cecilia Vicuña writes in her introduction to her poetry/sculpture project Cloud Net2:

I invited a group of my friends to join me in an unannounced performance… In the video of our dance, the World Trade Center towers are in the background, and the poem set against it says: “We will all go away unless a new net-worth is born” (the worth of the entire net of life).

-

Ten years ago a woman pulled a fat fava bean straight out of its pod and handed it to you with her hand, you saw burn marks and other kitchen scars all over her hands. How could it really have made so much of a difference. But your life began that very moment: the taste of vegetal cream fused with a long-exposure photograph of the poor working very very hard and the rich lounging and depressed, don’t empathize with them. They turned the tomato into a luxury fetish, they deported your teachers. They bombed the future of the world’s fertilizer and dosed all your meals with an unknown quantity of forever chemicals. You are changed forever. And your life began by loving a single fava bean that an exhausted cook, ill and almost rabid from the heat, handed you. And the truck driver handed you money for lunch from the change box, secretly ten dollars more than the boss offered, it felt like a heist, and instead of lunch you went and bought a book that began with the words3:

Write me down
As one who loved poetry
and persimmons 

Having never eaten a persimmon. Having never eaten that or arugula or sungold tomatoes, perfume peppers from Trinidad, or French Breakfast Radishes that look like white candles dipped in pink. Maybe Pythagoras was right that fava beans contain the souls of the dead. Isn’t it crazy that he thought that? Well you know what it’s starting to make sense because your life began and ended that day at the tomato stand. When you say your life, you mean your identity. You found what you loved and moved with great force to secure it. These three ladies came by and they didn’t even buy anything, they just wanted shelter from the rain. Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos, a string’s inevitable knot. Not even tangled, necessarily. A gallon of milk, a chocolate bar, a truck driver and you, I mean me, with a name that’s portion of the total whole.

Remind me, what is your name? And he tells me, and we exchange numbers. Regular time is populated once again by us. I mean it’s not all past, now there’s the future, once I’ve read the ten years scrawled across my old friend’s face. When we part, my partner and I leave the market with the chocolate bar and drive up the hill to see our friend, who has lit a candelabra, and is drawing vector problems with chalk on the living room wall. What’s a vector? I ask my friend. My friend says, that depends on who you are.

People say that
unspun wool
contains the power
of the cosmos
because it's not yet-
it has not been spun
it's pure potential
pure future
pure being
pure nothing
a shaft of light
a line of light
running across
the worlds
creating the intermediate
space

4