Category: writing

In Passing

Overheard between dreamers.

You look cold. Here’s a bonfire. I’ve been carrying in around in my chest all this time. 

You sure?

Take it. Really, I have no use for it but this.

Thanks. I keep falling into wells.

But you always climb out, yes?

Yes, but wet and cold.

I am trying to be more of a tree, really. But the fire keeps getting in the way.

Hmmm. How?

I mean to put down roots and draw some order from––everything, which is too much.

That is a lot.

But at the top, see, there’s the crown. The leaves. If I get it right, I could be a sort of mediator between the soil and the leaves.

Huh.

Here. Check this out. It’s my first clear vision of reality.

Um. It looks different. Not like any reality I’ve seen. 

That’s kind of the point. 

***

Inspired by this feature in Daedalus: Statements and Documents: Artists on Art and Reality, on Their Work, and on Values (Winter 1960).

Out of Sight

With Italo Calvino.

The cities were born a little at a time––not unlike poems, you said––of various inspirations. You had a habit of collecting odd strangers and mythical heroes, and notes on places that you had been, might be, would tend to imagine. What happened was not a book exactly, but a geography to move in. You mapped cities of memory, cities of desire, cities and signs. There were continuous cities and hidden cities. These cities were braided: cobweb cities across an abyss, a microscopic city, spreading. 

Watch that one, you said, and as it grew, it revealed concentric cities like tree rings. Sometimes, you said, you would come across a city that would write itself.

Into what? We wondered, and you said yes.

***

Inspired by Calvino’s Invisible Cities, in honor of his birthday.

Lost in Translation

Meaning-makers in transit.

It wasn’t like each word was a moving train on schedule to a given destination, the challenge a matter of timing the jump. We thought our losses happened in our leaps from one to the next, like keys falling from sideways pockets.

But words themselves were the vessels, and they held their own gaps within them, and us too, but only tentatively, like so much loose change. So we were always falling out, into sky.

Another Sound

Humming, deep and low.

It was a time of release and collapse, confusion and the search for new bearings, and many painted aftermaths in words. There was much emphasis on resilience. Aspirational? Perhaps. It seemed a sort of mask. Something unraveled.

What is happening now? Someone asked. Attempts at description became profiles in shapeshifting practices: power and truth, dreaming and living, and then language. Interesting uses of words like safety raised questions.  For whom and from what and by what logic are these questions obscured?

This is what we were wondering on the morning that we left our homes to walk into the fog. We seemed to be going to its source, but we could not see it. No one spoke at the time because the words were not there. Not yet. There was a humming, deep and low. It was not clear if it came from some hollow behind the heart, or somewhere outside. Perhaps this distinction, too, no longer mattered.

Sound Painting

Holding beyond reach.

Near the end, you explained that something strange was happening. You had grown accustomed to a powerful presence. One day, without explanation, it left. What followed had more force but no face. You called it sound.

Later, people wondered if you were letting go or just beginning something new. But even when a body means to hold, so much of what happens slips through. 

Before you left, you painted reminders. You pulled us into its rough color. You said, listen.

***

Inspired by the sound paintings of Anne Truitt.

Expanded Expansion

The artist makes room.

Your aim was an art that would not behave as art. While dying, you made your untitled rope piece, layering industrial latex like paint over string and wire suspended from the ceiling. It resembled a decimated fishing net after a storm, or the work of an overworked spider gone mad. You welcomed unseen others into a shadowy space, inviting us to attend to what crawled, flickered, and flashed. You did not specify how long to look, or where. How is it possible, we wondered, to feel so in the way in a mostly empty room? 

Touch, you said, and meant it. Who could do that now, with all the insurance? Come in, you said. But try another door. You left it to us to find it. There are other openings, you said, and more hollow spaces than we were accustomed to noticing. 

What do you know? One skeptic asked and you said Nothing.

***

Inspired by the art of Eva Hesse, and by Mignon Nixon’s article “Eva Hesse Retrospective: A Note on Milieu,” (Spring 2003 in October).

Painting Time

Lights over water.

Of all your characters, you were most interested in Time, the fifth elemental substance latent in all things. You aimed to chronicle its flow by detailing refractions of brilliance on the river and its bridge, one forever changing and the other reaching toward permanence. You noted symbols in the shadows where one overlapped the other: the river, the bridge, their people; the hope of construction and the tragedy of collapse; the continuance of water and this incomplete permanence in concert with all forms, its eye a chorus.

***

Inspired by the work of Ivo Andrić (1892-1975), whose birthday is today.

What Gives

Sighting vessels.

The animal nation waits in the forked branch, scanning the forest floor where we pause to witness the spectacle of ordinary time. Turning to page next, the passage becomes our hibernating dream. Remember when we knew it, our sticky hands clasped and spinning until we fell? This when there was no difference between our center of gravity and our mother’s insistence, out, out!

Now memory, this temple of endless night, shines on dislocated abundance. One of the ships passes. Whose is that? Someone says. We watch. It isn’t ours, but a complicated creature, endowed with a sighing rhythm all its own, and multitudes.

One among us cannot help themselves. They gasp in recognition, and no one can see the thing in the trees anymore. A branch cracks nearby, and then another––like matchsticks, like the tiny bones of our once and future wings.

Reunion

By the weeping wall.

Near the wall of weeping stones there are reminders. So much happens beyond the light. One day, someone decides that the wall deserves more of our attention, and we gather nearby. In the process, we leave parts of our lives in wrong places. 

–––A full basket of laundry, for example, in the middle of the hallway in the courthouse; a bucket of dishes in the fountain of the business park. Someone thinks, why not? and we get to washing them and now all we need is food. Someone calls their cousins to bring the grill. It is suggested that here is not the place for that, and the suggestion is collectively ignored. Unbuttoning his shirt, a guard offers tables. They’re inside, he tells us. Groups bring them out. 

We cover them with cloth, candles, decorative plates, bottles of liquid, prayer cards, poems. Now that we have altars, the musicians begin. Once we have music, others arrive. Now we are a large circle by the weeping wall.  A naked child runs laughing to the nearby ducks, outstretched hands and fingers splayed. An official story has ruptured before its conclusion and it falls in the center of our circle, bleeding song.