Month: October 2023

Before Art

Reaching.

maybe all you wanted at the start was to take
the perforated present
shot through with holes to carve it to make
the dappled light it held look like it meant all along
to be held like that maybe you only wanted
to test some strength against the coming loss not
necessarily yours maybe it was in the living fossils
among us, the beyonds they tended to point to
by being there where we were
o teeth
o sorrow
o wonder
o breath
where do you go in this now
but shh you tell me try not to look
like that meaning I think this gulping way
where you try to take it
o all of it at
once

Over Boneland

Fragments in wartime.

The bones had to set when we broke them and we set them in the earth amid the burn in the skeletons of former homes still smoking to grow new cells we needed––

hold still they told us meaning faith but without work it looked half dead in the mirrors 

we listened for wolves and saved the prints in boxes for someday when we would sort them all 

out into a proper display but what happens when the waters rise 

is that sometimes you have to jump to the next roof and hope it holds. 

Hey Siri, asked in secret, What do you know of shelter?

It was something to do when knowing you had no service did not preclude the need to speak 

we reached

ready for the next ledge she might have said you can wait until its dark 

Siri we might have answered, I believe, to heal our unbeliefs.

Impasto Portrait

Visual communion.

A shell, a glance, the hush between them. Your pyrotechnic palette, flashbang bravado only masks the stillness as we enter. Once inside, we become the bare guts of ourselves, removed of all packaging, and no one moves in the aftermath, to take up arms again.

***

Inspired by the work of Sylvia Snowden with phrases from Joe Bradley’s interview with the artist.

Company in Paradise

Interview with the artists in the aftermath of a first attempt.

How do I describe the place where we were? Birds of paradise guard the fortresses, holding still. A hushed place except for the machines. Between each fortress, you must not make a loud sound or have too much of laughter in one place if the place is below the window of a fortress because the people inside tend toward nervous conclusions, such as attack. Now we know, but we weren’t trying to scare anyone––not personally, anyway.

We were together, our company, because of the times, and the way we wanted to do something with our fear. It was going to be an opera. The working title was For the Scorched Earth. It accompanied an installation piece as well as a huge dance floor. This part was important, and nothing that any of us could fit in any place we lived, so we jumped at the chance to stage the event in a place with a large yard. Or really, any yard.

The lead character is an ancient god of the lunar eclipse who has lost his way. The idea was to dance him back home. We were going to invite the whole community! The point was also healing. But now we know that some ideas are too big for a given space. They shut us down.

But there’s no doubt we’ll try again. Reason being, we already have costumes and once people see themselves in those, no one can resist a grand entrance. We even had them for all the neighbors, too! These gorgeous birds of paradise pieces, all satin and taffeta. They were going to be stunning in the light. The mistake was not handing them out sooner.

In retrospect, that was a miscalculation. We were having fun with the element of surprise. It seemed so apropos, given our theme! But not everything translates across cultures. So now we know.  The next space will be much bigger.

Lonesome George

Sounds of a moment.

I don’t like to think about Lonesome George, the last of his species wandering his island home, about the baleful way he must have looked through those ancient eyes and whether he made a sound in the hopes that another of his kind would hear it. They took him into a center in the end and studied him until he died.

But here I am anyway, perhaps because of how often I see a certain kind of look, the way its eagerness seems haunted by a particular fear, the way so much of the moment seems to be wandering, making sounds.  

***

Before his death in 2012, Lonesome George was considered the rarest creature in the world.

Lightbulb

To change it.

When one day you know as you could not before
how you are going and this comes before you know how, how
do you save anything from something that no one will see

if one day the lights in the air
if one day the sounds behind the silent air
rears up if one day getting a grip is like
waking in the morning trying for a fist

how do you find a way if one day you decide
better to do something

than nothing at all.
How to bake bread.
How to remember
the names of all

the categories there are
for things that are and
still, nowhere––

Imaging

Study of extreme closeups.

There is something to know about the parts that are not here.
Move the lens again. Closer and still. Guess what this is. What
looks like a forest is a few square millimeters of flower head.
And what seems like desert stones framing gem is lizard eye.
That fairytale forest is moss on rock, and the apparent geode
is squamous cells from cheek swab. Point the lens and still.
Closer and shoot again. You want to see.

Conundrum

And the cosmological constant.

The doctor is telling me that dark energy is more fluid than the matter I am used to, which seems like somewhat of a gross assumption about my given norms, but I am not in the mood to be difficult so I let it slide and then he leaves the room, and me in it with a sense that things might be pulling away, looking for a phrase opposite to “lightbulb moment” and it’s fitting, I suppose, that I have yet to find it.

***

Inspired by this article in Knowable, exploring how an early dark energy idea offers a way to resolve a problem known as the Hubble tension.

Careful Cuts

New lens on old skins.

She makes collage from the books of nudes but there is nothing reckless about her approach. She’s like a surgeon. Look. This one looks like a flower, and you think you are getting the obvious metaphor but then she calls it target and you look again and there it is. Bullseye.

I cut the way I was taught to use scissors, she says. Meaning gently, as with paper dolls. I do not tear the figures, she says. Ever. I do not rip, even when I would sometimes like to feel myself as someone who would. But it isn’t in me; I am too careful for that, she says. Instead, she holds and she studies, learning how to look. I follow the lines. I scoop them up, she says, of the nudes. To give them new meaning. 

***

Inspired by the work of Justine Kurland.