Three-Dimensional Dementia 3
___by Carolyn Guertin


The text keeps returning to memories of Violet, even after her death, because she can lead us to the next world if only we can unravel her associations and follow her phantom footprints in sand. Seers, sirens and sibyls were prophets who, with one foot in both worlds, enacted a temporal flux through the power of revisioning the future. Violet is a guide who stands on the threshold of the text between past and present, informing Augusta's understanding of the mythic nature of the family obsession and teaching her how to follow in the footsteps of Violet's own associations. Just as the voice of sibylline prophecy disintegrates into nonsense once it is recorded, so Violet's hypertextual voice is transformed into "a mosaic of shattered syllables" when she speaks.

In Califia, we also encounter the Spirit Woman of the Milky Way who rises on the third night after her death and, like the text, visits all of the significant places in her life. She then wanders east, west and south, returning each time to her starting point. As she heads north, she begs her husband not to follow as she mounts the bridge of the dead to the Milky Way. Like Violet, all she leaves behind are "the shadow of her heels" visible in daylight. In the same way as readers, we undertake the journeys through the old memories of three compass points, and return to our starting point at the end of each voyage. When we make the last turn, some final pieces of the mysteries of the constellations of star lore and family history are revealed to us. Dancing through time and a literal family archives, narrative roots in space and place are the mythic elements that hold Califia together in the fractured California landscape--for, this is a text of the soil, veined with maps, and topographic details as much as with ongoing rumours of buried gold.

Califia's structure is organized on a mosaic model with its shattered syllables being grouped into two archival collections: Kaye's myths, legends and prophesies and Calvin's documentary-driven re-creation of past events. Combined with Augusta's chronological narrative of the present, the three perspectives write a history that tells lost stories and unofficial knowledges. This alternate history is a feminist genealogy or countermemory told through a discordant union of discourses in eight "books": text-based biographical 'snapshots,' letters, government reports, deeds, conversations, journal entries and reconstructed narratives are complemented and rediscovered through photos of people and places, fault lines, a scrap of blue blanket, music, four journey maps and a spinning night sky with its network of guiding stars.

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