Month: July 2024

Nonsigns

And insignificances

I used to think that I might learn myself into some authority. With that, I might point, insisting look, look! In looping response to a constant call. This and this, on and on, beyond divisions or classifications, or orders of being, or causes as something other than effects. 

My natural response was to melt away from authority, preferring to drip into hollows and wells, to be among those strange strangers where the dominant discourse, such as it was, was guided by a compass of laughter, silence, body, and song.

What home was that, pulling our constant whirls back for mealtimes of melodic banter, brimming with every former and future self? It avoided our gaze while seeing us, into and through.

Marooned

At another shore

At the impasse
beside this night,
bodies arrive
to be washed
and the hour returns
to botched rites:
incomplete burials,
baptismal fonts gone dry,
the hands and their memory
opening to waters opened
by a perfect vessel
at the peak of its wake
having only ever wanted
to be released, explained.

Now a scorched earth
flames a storm
to absolve the eyes
for turning away
and now what
to do with this
wreck but watch
for the strange fish
to find it, for the
coral to collect
to begin again
that cycle of
looking to be
fed.

Without a Bridge

Against reproach

How much floats unsaid between these islands. Yet there are moments when it is all there, a deafening amen, edged in icy light. An incurable fool, I keep setting out on these little rafts made of so few words so poorly bound. I am no sooner afloat when I hear the wind laugh. But the only place for hesitation was that shore.

Considering Defilement

To sanctify or desecrate.

That meeting space, love, had once been consecrated by our belief in what it was. This is what it means, to sanctify. This power is shared. To make holy. And so, as it turns out, is the reverse. To take the sacred and use it thoughtlessly, out of mind, like any old tool. A resource ready for the taking. Of course, it always is, and any fool may come. But that flame will only continue through active attention. Its desecration is so often a quiet violence. But the effect is total. There you had been, once. Then you were not.

Still Waters

With cat.

In the early morning, an hour for the dust, your altar, your black eye, long since healed, the ridge of the once-purpled nose still visible in certain lights. That weather is over now, moved elsewhere, but still you come to sit with it.

This morning’s sounds are birds and the laundry room just outside the door, and dogs after a passing truck. The phone rings at an odd hour and familiar panic crashes like a wave. But it is nothing, a pocket dial.

And yet, it means something to gather these nothings to the chest and hold. Either because unless I still do this, I am nothing––or because I am essentially nothing, and it is good to be among my kind. Probably both are true, but I don’t get to know.

So, I sit here with these nothings and now here the solid weight of this cat pouring herself into my lap, to hold and be held. She is someone, this cat. She won’t do this with anyone else. I think she likes that I am good at disappearing, too––into the bed, the chair, the book, the music, birdsong.  And, when interrupted––gone.

She is a great teacher the art of emptying the form, so that the liquid of something else may come in. I have spent enough time with the form itself, testing its limits to see what it will take. A lot, it turns out, but for what? When those limits finally cracked, I felt something else move in. It will not be named so it is nothing, and here we are now, these insubstantial breaths our sum, and the sum of us nothing, too.

On the Lag

Transmissions among us.

A day of midnights, and we wanted the endless blue. We waited for the bodies to walk from the graves and when they did, we saw them as flashes of what we could not explain, would not mention. We were watching for bands of jays. We wanted, walking at the lake’s edge, escape. Escape! we said. Wild, we said, Untamed! Aspirational declarations, we did not know their substances and heard the dead sometimes like voices between sleep and waking. They offered up secrets, but we had yet to learn their language, smug visitors that we were, proud of our rage, our escapes, our untamed hungers. The rest was late and deep and went on mostly unseen.

Craft Talk

With Andrew Wyeth.

The less there is in a subject, the more I can pour into it. And I have a strong feeling that the more objects you use, the less there is in a picture. It’s not that I doubt the object. I doubt the way I paint it. If it becomes about the object, forget it. What matters is what seeps unconsciously from the object. The fleeting character of shadow, the sadness of fall. It is important to forget about what you are doing, then art may happen. Sometimes.

***

Adapted from interviews with the artist, whose “Wind from the Sea” moved me this morning.

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