THE PLENARY BITCH
Amanda Osiatynska
She lights daily three sconces against the ordinary brilliance of morning. She likewise surrounds herself with an upsweep of conifers and birdlife and no few stilted mirrors. Understand, the plenary bitch requires not only order, but a frame there around it which is hers at will to shift.
Take for example how each morning with mortar and pestle she prepares an uplifting elixir that both frames and rearranges the clogged imbroglio of her mind. She gathers the ingredients of the elixir from the body of the original bitch, Mother Nature.
She cuts first a generous wedge from an undercup of psilocybin. Adds griffonia simplicfoli and Siberian ginseng. Passionflower and chamomile. Valerian. Saint John’s wort. A button of peyote to create a deeper edge. She disentangles each luminous anchored vein from a tapered length of cockroot. She grinds all the ingredients down and mixes them under and over until they reach the folded consistency of something nearly liquid. She takes a taste. Then another. By midmorning the chaos of her mind has been rearranged by the elixir into a delusional healthy pitch. The plenary bitch looks into the stilted mirrors encircled about her. She smiles.
The mirrors, however, are greatly overrated, as the plenary bitch seeks and collects her reflection from everything she sees. This distresses her only when her image is found reflected in those parts of the world which do not appease her, that somehow tilt the perfection she attributes to herself, which, of course, is all too often.
Look for instance at the waterbug that crosses her floor. The plenary bitch cannot help but see at least a portion of her own image brought forth from this creature which otherwise repulses her. But how dare such a low and useless presentation of life become a carrier of her reflection! She crushes the waterbug with the upside of one of her many high-heeled shoes, and, immediately upon doing such, blames the waterbug itself for ruining not only the shoe across which it is now smeared, but her entire collection of footwear, which she promptly heaps and incinerates inside the furnace below her room.
“If only all things were birds,” the plenary bitch ponders, “the world might become a mirror nearly worthy of my gaze.” She whispers, quoting Hegel, “Vögel haben den Gesang, den die andern entbehren, weil sie dem Elemente der Luft angehörn.”
“Birds have song, which other animals lack, because they belong to the element of air.”
Which brings us to Plato, or, rather, Plato’s chum Archytas of Tarentum, who in the fifth century BC invented a mechanical bird that was propelled into the heavens by a simple jet of steam. This history enraptures the plenary bitch. While she knows nothing of Plato and his tenets, she has given Archytas and his mechanical bird a great deal of study and deep attention.
“A bird without a heart, aloft,” the plenary bitch ruminates, “What a lonesome and wonderful thing to be.”
She spends the greater depth of her narrowed afternoon pulling her reflection from the upsweep of birdlife that surrounds her. In the shaped absence behind her ribs the plenary bitch can almost feel their wingbeats. She throws her gaze across all the birds, giving them her plenary attention, and flexing her image from each. By nightfall the birds have all fallen dead, their small hearts exhausted by the self-serving gaze of the plenary bitch.
Incapable of sadness or remorse, the plenary bitch feels disappointed and betrayed by the dead birds that surround her. She cuts away each wing and throws what is left out her window.
“Fly!” she says, and as their wingless bodies plummet to the ground, she is further disappointed by the clutter below they become.
She drinks more elixir. Then more. The effect is one that now pitches her mind into a delicate framework resembling a net of spun resin. The essential term here is net, by definition something used to either save or entrap. Let us allow that the plenary bitch might simultaneously achieve both, or negate each with its other—this saving and/or entrapping of her mind—as she now disrobes and extracts from each horded wing its avian oils of flight. She spreads the oils of flight across the whole of her body. But understand—this does not concern flight. The plenary bitch is not a bird. She is a bitch. Therefore this concerns fire.
She walks out into the crowd of the world where it is mostly gathered at the local town square. She catches fire to herself, which spreads with great speed due to the highly flammable avian oils of flight. “Look at me!” she screams to the crowd of the world,
“Look at meeeeeeee!”
And the crowd of the world, by the very nature of any crowd, offers only a small and curious peek before immediately recoiling from the spectacle of a bitch on fire.
The plenary bitch burns and screams and all her words fall away and what she now imparts from her mouth and body is a sound beyond language, both sonic and primordial.
But it should be noted that the plenary bitch is more an idea—fiction, figment, a barbed lure of the imagination—than flesh and blood. And being more an idea than a living creature makes her mostly or nearly immortal. Through external thought and dialogue she will always be alive, and, not unlike a certain mythological bird, she will rise each morning from her ashes, lighting her sconces and seeking out her reflection, and ordering the world into a series of daily disappointments.
But for now she is burning, yes, and she will continue to burn, and the sound she now makes is something below human understanding, and it fills and breaks all frequencies, and though it is all but unbearable you will listen, and you will listen alone and with horror and without comprehension—this fully hollow sound is not meant to be understood—and it will grow smaller and spread thinner and become perhaps a hum, lifted now across the winds and out of reach until tomorrow, aloft and without meaning, but still a kind of song.
Says Hegel, “Die leere Stimme des Tiers erhält eineunendlich in sich bestimmte Bedeutung.”
“The empty voice of the animal acquires a meaning infinitely determinate in itself.”