Category: art

The Long Becoming

With Christian Wiman.

When they asked the poet how he became one, he said, I’ve been wondering.

The assembly waited for more. There were follow-up questions, a discussion about certain ineffable qualities: a sense of life brought to bear in language. A sense that the density of life’s layers may be represented with a clarity of expression. The importance of having a capacity to suffer; to know and express grief without making a shrine to wonder.

Then the poet asked, what do you believe? If you don’t believe in poetry, you can’t write it. He tried to explain what happens when suddenly everything learned will no longer do; how over time, an original wound may become the site of roots for a larger life.

But how? They pressed, and he repeated, I wonder.

***

Notes while reading Christian Wiman’s Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet (2004, Copper Canyon Press).

Reading in Space

Across time.

A question for the author: how do you want people to feel when they walk into this book? She answered by blackening a number of pages, then adding windows. If you stood before the words in the sunlight, they would curve across your body like cats.

The best part of the book, she answered, is what I don’t understand––also, the suspended moment when a page is turned; the wait between words, as especially what they do not say.

She invited the doubters among us to put our fingers in the wound between voice and image, and again between voice and word, between voice and speaker, the speaker and her intentions, and we were beginning to get a sense every page brought with it another wound.

Every page revealed itself by slicing us open, and we fell to the floor to collect ourselves like autumn leaves to our chests, a gesture of remembrance for all we had yet to imagine we were.

Between decay and emergence, these open windows. And from window to window, the broken skins between space and her time.

***

Inspired by the work of Lynn Xu, whose debut exhibit And Those Ashen Heaps That Cantilevered Vase of Moonlight is currently on display at the Museum of Contemporary art in Tuscon, Arizona.

Angels of History

A prayer for the real work.

In the dark of the valley, the sense of an emergency was the beginning of an understanding that we had none of our own––not yet, except in the wild beat of the drums where we gathered in the streets. The gods of progress, long disgraced, continued to shout. We pounded the drums against their noise, and our hearts awakened, to dance in revolt against their empty reasons.

There is an angel among us, pausing to awaken the dead. But a storm stops his wings. Though he turns his back against the future they call progress, the storm blows him into it.

Let the future not be the vast emptiness and us the supplicants of soothsayers. May our knowledge of time be an act of remembrance, our concept of work what we do in service to creation and not as slaves to the death engines of progress. Give us the courage to recognize the narrow gate in every second and be moved.

***

Inspired by the moment at hand and by Walter Benjamin’s essay “On the Concept of History.” In this essay, Benjamin vividly animates the context of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus.

Ordinary Noise

The role of contrasting elements.

In art, dreams are realized––and the worst, not to be measured or weighted, but lived. Counting may follow, anguished measurements in the unflinching face of midday, when anyone with living ties to memory is susceptible to affliction by the pretense that all is well and as it seems, amid the noise of countless machines, distracting from a vast hum in the background.

This is why mornings and evenings are so much kinder, because the dominant noises are more obviously birds, revelers, and other wild sounds, none of which pretend any allegiance to standardized notions of good sense, which routinely kill without making any noise beyond those that have become so ordinary and expected, they may easily go unheard.

Preparations

Into the dark.

Some would go for the quick thrill of a familiar spectacle, but you did it differently, pointing a lens toward endurance. Only the unthinkable is interesting, you said, and who could argue? Sensing the dark did not change its darkness, but it was possible to train at walking forward in it, bumping along. 

Well, you reminded. There has never been a time when this was safe. We took off our shoes and entered.

***

Inspiration: Franz Kafka’s writing, particularly when he writes about  “the Holy of the Holies” in his fragment Wedding Preparations in the Country.

Specific Ambiguity

With Jon Fosse.

There is a possibility, when planning a scene, of doing nothing. Of taking time, as the saying goes. Besides, something always happens anyway because with nothing to do, it’s all breath and questions, both of which are loaded.

With no buffer between a life and a sense of scale and scope, every exchange is weighted, too. There you are, lover. I see you, strange stranger. Strip it down enough, and you are left with a fierce poetic sensibility.

With space enough for reflection, everything is linked: death, the living, and the tension of seeming opposites. With so many unknowns, held at the boiling point, you get a very specific ambiguity, and if there was a point you were meaning to make about the nature of communication between us, perhaps it is only this. 

Yes, it has always been this complicated.

***

Inspired by (and with borrowed phrases from) this article by Sarah Cameron Sunde on the plays of Jon Fosse.

Paper Shields

Preserving history against war.

While in hiding, the artist made canvasses of bed linens and clothing. On these, she penned poem prayers. Trying to escape from war, she said, is like trying to protect yourself with paper against tanks.

Her subject had been landscape. Now the landscape is war. You live moment to moment long enough, one risk is losing memory. Whose right is memory? There are monumental works in ornate halls to glorify the history of war––and then there are these small sketches on paper and textiles, the cries of those living under the impact.

She prayed for strength and remembrance. That her soul would not be poisoned by pain, yet retain enough rage to keep fighting for the right to a history.

As soon as your skin is totally hardened, she says, it becomes easy to break. I am trying to learn from the flower, she says, on how these get trampled by the boots and stand again.

***

Inspired by the works of Ukranian artists Olia Fedorova and Dana Kavelina, who were recently interviewed by Monika Fabijanska.

Service Work

Artistic practice as an act of devotion.

Here is a riddle, one said. 

And who do you think you are? asked another.

Only a servant. He was making films. The answer is unimportant.

Why ask, then?

There is a code in here somewhere. It is the mystery.

Which mystery?

The usual ones: possibilities of transcendence, rebirth, levels of existence. The role of ritual practice.

Such as?

Such as this one. Right now, I am filming a liturgical text. Contemplating the sacred frame by frame, but I am just beginning. He had been at it three decades.

Are you praying, then?

I call it excavation. I am a social worker with a background in archaeology.

But why?

The idea is to resuscitate the present. This is my devotion.

***

Inspired by an interview I read this morning, in BOMB magazine, with the filmmaker Ashish Avikunthak.

Fictional Singular Beginnings

With Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa.

Light through a lens, an entire image. It appears whole, complete. And it is, but it is also what you said: the fiction of singular beginnings.

When you added, every image is saturated, we thought you meant with meaning, and we said sure. We are big fans of your work.

––With origins, you correct us, and there you go again, making and remaking our capacity to see, and we begin to get a sense that any of the meanings we saw––anywhere, were nothing but beginnings.

***

Inspired by the essay “(W)hole” by Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa, appearing in the most recent issue of BOMB magazine, in which the photographer and writer reflects on some of my favorite themes. Italicized phrases are from this text.

Reading Maps

Approaching infinities.

Here is a tundra. There is a village. You are on your way and keeping on, but you never get closer to the village. It is said that the art of withholding enables a reader’s discovery. Consider the example of Socrates, how he used to feign ignorance.

Here is a spirit forever approaching infinity. But reality is no obstacle. There are plenty of maps to the center of the world, but all are missing some critical aspect without which no one will be able to find the place, so what can the earnest seeker do but handle them so often that each page becomes transparent, and then lay them on top of one another like bed linens, and continue to dream? 

You find the garden but only accidentally, on your way to somewhere else––so you pass through it, having no idea what you are missing.

***

Adapted from Jared Marcel Pollan’s article, “A Box Built in the Abyss: On two new fictions by László Krasznahorkai” which appears in the most recent issue of ASTRA.