Chromatose Starter Kit

Story start-ups. Inquiring minds want to know.

Planning the Revolution in Matthew Rose’s Apartment/Studio - Photo of collaborator Suzie Holland thinking about it - 2005 - Cecil Touchon

Inquiring minds want to know.

Instructions

WHAT IS CHROMATOSE?

Chromatose is an exquisite corpse novel about revolution.

It is written by a dozen people and illustrated by many more.

Each author writes in his or her own language (with perhaps an English translation) about the trials and tribulations of the main character who can morph into male or female, young or old, sick or healthy, smart or dumb, with as much minute detail as the author wishes to impart.

For example the protagonist can spend a page examining a flower or removing a bullet from his or her arm. Or walking a dog “before” any of “this” happened. Or explaining how she or he came to be a fighter, soldier, intellectual, truck driver, flag maker, farmer, marketing expert in the struggle to engage in the “revolution.”

There is no up or down or past or future or present or even void, but all of these things in this neural narrative mind twister. What is interesting is how the “revolution” finds itself – eventually – as one featuring a struggle within. But of course, it’s all the struggles without (the film noir and b/w silent horror of the world).

There we understand how the protagonist finally sees the world for what it is and isn’t and understands there’s another place where one can actually care for another person and be unafraid, fight the good fight and understand right from wrong. It’s not an easy trip and there are many trap doors.

Writers will be passed sections of the work over time and each session should result in a few pages. They do not have to be connected but they can be. That can be connected to what the writer has written in their first session, or continue the thoughts of the received narratives. There is no style guide, there is no sexual orientation guide. Or even a human or American theme.

It can be political thriller, comedy, tragedy, comic, romance, scientist biography, memoir, dada poem. The protagonist can be a dog, a cat, a fish, a cloud, Jesus, God, Zeus, a box of cereal on a grocery store shelf, an historical figure in a painting, a trashcan, Billie Eilish, even the dead James Joyce or Charles Bukowski.

What’s required is that the narrative roll forward and that the revolution is made apparent in its struggle to proceed.

•••

Chromatose Starter Kit

If you need a prompt, here are some starter stories from Matthew.

Boxes

Me? Where do I live? Now? Well, I’ve long lived in boxes, typically cardboard, sometimes the nice ones that at one time cradled refrigerators or gas ovens. Santa Monica Boulevard was one of my swankiest addresses, but I’ve also lived along Rue de Rivoli in Paris, France and Augustrasse in Berlin. For a while I camped out on Floral Street in Covent Garden London and for a year in the giant plaza in Mexico City – Plaza de la Constitución, El Zócalo. My favorite was the box I huddled in one winter under the Rialto in Venice. Sweet. Chilly, but nice. Now, I’m in Brooklyn. Court Street. Why not? I’m visiting some friends.

What? Oh. Sure. Well, the quality of cardboard was always best in Paris, or maybe it the capital vibe, the architecture, the Seine, the cheap bread. Plus during the day I had the pleasure of visiting the Manets in the Musée d’Orsay and the two Vermeers in the Louvre. The Astronomer (1668) is a favorite. So thrilling seeing the mind push out, gravitating upwards towards the cosmos. Sure that the late 17th century, people barely understood gravity. Most didn’t. Most actually still don’t.

But the box? Love the box. As a boy my brothers would shoo me into an open one, close the lid, tape it up and skedaddle. I didn’t care. I liked the darkness and liked what it planted in my little red headed skull.

Now? Now, I’m an orphan. Left alone, on this planet, nothing left to fight save tilting at windmills. No fight, no purpose, no process, no meaning. Revolution? What you mean like 1776?

You crazy? The Revolution is within; it is not without. Love? Well I have memories of course. We’re rivers; we’re not things, we’re processes, like rivers. The past... is it fixed? Who fucking who knows fucking who cares fucking.

Time a river? Sure, Johnny, just like in the song. A series of dull instants with a future next week on the television box.

’Conomy

Grifting gold molars from the graveyard, a currency in the ‘conomy where a chompe nugget is worth a meal or a pillow or a filament. We are and were after all, in the case that, where and when, were and are still, questionable ‘ordinates on the carta. But boots, amigos, are meals, are what we are after in the spaces that were and are left when those fuckers disembarked and and and, and and.

Lookin ‘a me to see if I couldn’t a shoned the light on the thing, but I couldn’t as my forces were spent like so many dimes on the arcade or on life or on the sweet whore of life; a silver round, fuck, well then what?

So here now, and in this stone and brick forest, I see a cardinal and blue jay minding their territories and arguing about the fuck.

Cubic squares of air. As if that matters, it doesn’t and never did and then all the body parts and now the pages of Newton and Bergson flying in the wind, hunting them all down for to make a fire because the last fuckers blew the fuses and the lights went out and it’s just me and my wolf, looking for canned heat.

Thanks the Lordy I have my mandolin. Music is my life. Thanks the Lordy I have a picture of my wife. Love is my struggle.

Thanks the Lordy I have teeth and need no dentist. I can still fucking chew.

Thanks the Lordy, here’s my story. An exquisite corpse.

Notions

“Please,” I said. “Let’s get this straight. There’s a problem and I’m telling you we need to fix the problem before it gets worse.”

“And?” she said. A lead. I took the bait, she reeled me in.

“And, people will get hurt, they’ll get hurt badly. They will die and we will all die. And no one will be around to bury you, us, not even the shovel we used to bury those in the before.”

“So what?” she challenged. She challenged me to care. I took the bait, she reeled me in. Again.

•••

We were paddling away from it. The fires, of course. The fires burning the useless computers, headphones, the cables, the Tupperware, rubber tires, the hard plastic garbage bins, even the bricks. The bricks which were now too hot to throw at the fascists. Someone sang a song. You could catch it on the water as if it were a stone skipping gently over the past two decades, touching down on each curl of a wave, the fish half dead wondering what the fuck was going on with the humans. The birds stayed away and configured themselves into curious punctuation marks, punching the air with their knowledge of flight and, not surprisingly, our ignorance of it.

Time Ago

We were surrounded like ants at a Thanksgiving spit of chewing gum. We were the gum. They were the ants. Caught off guard, stuck to the asphalt, just people like you all. Just plain old people. Then, going to school, learning things, writing things, building things like science projects out of glass jars and wires and batteries and cardboard. This is how it works. Science.

Truth, no? Plug it in, make it spin. Rules, gravity, again.

Electricity. Electric City. Belief. And some young scientists (though not me) went to church or synogogue or the mosque or took a walk in the woods to talk and pray to trees. Whatever it doesn’t matter. It was all okay. No one could stop you and no one wanted to stop you. Why would they? So we were surrounded. And it wasn’t the first time, but it was the first time we got out with our lives. My pants still have holes in them from the biting.

The separations started almost immediately.

Darknesses

The lights were taken away. The matches too. They had to control the fire and they set fire to everything we had and then the things they had so we couldn’t use them. Bicycles. Bats.

Radios so we couldn’t listen. Wrist watches so we couldn’t tell the time. And they took away the darkness too. Why do that? So we were only allowed to live in a blindness, a thickness of fog and damp that stank of naptha and mud, rotting dogs slaughtered for their teeth. We were left with gravity. Which, we knew, they could never take away from us.

So is this the story of the war without or the war within? My war? Our war? Our changes, our disintegration? Our redemption?

Chromotose: en médecine, pigmentation de la peau.

One dream returns night after night. I’m in my house talking with a friend and there’s a knock on the door. A tall man with glasses. He finds his way inside. Outside is his parked car, and a bed, all made up. I can see it from a window. I tell him to get in it and leave. But he won’t. I don’t understand. He won’t leave.

No matter what I do. I lift him up in the air and throw him down, rag doll, on the floor, break his glasses. He gets up, glasses repaired and continues to take over my house, now with two dogs on leashes.

I wake up angry. This is my life when I’m conscious. Angry. I find my way back to sleep and have another dream about a girl who is as tall as a tree and a soldier with frizzy hair. She shows me a passage in a letter I wrote about my first true love.

“Your first true love,” she says. “It was nearly 30 years ago.”

“Oh yes, I remember, terribly sad.”

She nods. “You gave this to me to read.” In the letter I wrote how broken I was. Part of the fixing was the writing of the letters.

Returning home the man is walking out of my house with his two dogs. I tell him I don’t want him in my house and I don’t want to hurt him. He pays me no mind. He’s already determined that he’s part of my home, now, and he’s not leaving. Ever.

“What’s the number for the police?” I ask a friend who suddenly turns into a black telephone, you know the kind you see in black and white detective films. Then, it starts to ring.

– MR

Here is one from me…

Dream

I was dreaming all night about the story - about relay, about handoff, about the revolution. I woke several times and sat on the edge of the bed trying to remember. I could not recall the details, or the plot, or even the idea exactly, only that it had something to do with branching trails and stories.

I went back to sleep and returned to the dream. I was planning things out again. It all seemed so clear, almost cinematic. Something was being passed from one character to another.

I saw four figures standing. One was a woman in a bikini, then a man in a suit, then a tall woman elegantly dressed, and then another man. They were clearly characters in the story.

I watched the branching trails unfold, the passing of one story into another. Then I woke again. I sat up. The dream flattened and turned featureless once more.

I went back to sleep wondering what it was they were passing to each other.

Back in the dream I showed something to myself in answer to the question.

Yes. It was a key.

They pass a key from one to the next. Each unlocks a door into their own story. At the end they lock another door behind them and pass the key along to the next.

Now here I am writing it down.

Is that a new story I will be starting?

I do not know. I am already in the middle of so many.

C.T.