I have been known to sleep at high velocity, rounding corners into that historical narrative, written in the third person, in which the pronoun "I" names a character reading its own biography into a slow wakefulness of overture, where sovereignty turns on relations of indiferrence with rule in a black box left uncontemplated. The softest objects there have a kind of face, while my own face manages only to approach itself from afar in a comfortable world of hurt. And then always on this side of the wall, I have found that furniture, piece by piece, from which I differed only by a slight degree in dreams I "had" by refusing sleep and the long, slow, imaginative fuck it offered. With such advanced technologies at my disposal I controlled the weather and the dispositions of astronomy and physics, dying repeatedly of damp and vacuum. "The clothes make the man" was my motto along with everyone else, but one did well to remember that others wear those silks, linens and synthetics on the scale of epochal costume drama, while one's own body is simply too busy recreating room and rooms for itself to be bothered with more than a shapeless drape or fall in muslin or mylar. This vagueness was always the exact size of the present tense and its culpable ownership of certain craft objects in stolid, smoky glass, suspended heavily from the center of its dome. I found my body finally in that attitude, a chain stapled at one end to the hard transparency of the sky's obscuring of its own far side, threading its full length in constant recomplication through the world in the manner of a promise that at every post where something stood, there also would be a knot, binding up and squeezing like a muscular snake in its indissoluble folds lasting the entire space of a single night those bits of velveteen, wool, mahogany, yellowed paper of hackneyed pirate adventures, and swept wings of certain tiny birds whose delicate and durable spittle made stony edifices fading always farther into beadlike permanence, strung along that selfsame chain always taken up in relaxing its each sore clench in turn so as to come itself into the foreground in a stroboscopic photograph of nothing moving very much at all. Someone in that place was always counting, "one, two...twelve," you could see it on her face and hear it loud inside her when the grownups downstairs stopped talking, the inexorability of the sequence ignoring and nullifying me even as the enunciation of each number in turn sounded the dimensions of that chamber whose size and shape an upward geologic pressure urges me to this day to become. It marked a limit to my own talents of perception, my own ability to have a clear and distinct idea of the political architectures in the intimate air around me, that I remained undecided whether all this furious, vague movement marked a flight from successive generations in the images of women's bodies, or took place entirely within them, as in the example of Bergman's rear-projected tarantula providing both the icon and the curtain for childhood. Just then, words began to push worlds from my mouth, sciences of prediction colored and weighted like money jingling at the back of a seldom-opened drawer. Each such world was a ballooning crop of bone pushing through the pastoral sward, a skeletal bulge in the imaginary, around which thin, membranous bodies would wrap themselves as proxy faces for my own bad habit of aversion.


Taylor Brady was born in Dunedin, Florida, in 1972. He lives in San Francisco with his wife, the artist and librarian Tanya Hollis. His project as a writer for the last five years has been an extended serial work, To Not, whose parts include poems, critical prose, and the novel, Research.