art Archives

Tangles

To catch the breath.

Thinking I might better hold what I meant not to lose, I tried to secure the shadow, but there was life again, trying to occur. Like the memory of a dream. Like the dream that never happened. Like the bottomless past and the future’s ancient heart.

A small part of me is flesh. The rest is myth. The rest is webbed with the enfleshed stories of more others than I know. No, I do not know myself. Except that I am no one, and only when no one shows up, can anybody be here. The cat suggested this. She seems to understand these things, so I said to the cat, cat. will you elaborate? But she has yet to grant this request. Or perhaps she has been magnanimous and elaborated extensively, and I have missed it again. She has frequently suggested that I am missing most of what is happening at any given time.

So here I am, this knotted soul so tangled that pulling only draws it tighter, with the words flying off and these colors threatening to absorb me completely into their seas. I hear a sea now, but I cannot tell you which one it is. It is likely I could not stand such knowing, that it would break me back into shards of every becoming, and now is not the time for being able to stand any more of what catches in the narrow tributary of this full throat.

Only Keep Looking

For Santu Mofokeng.

In quiet devotion from within the crowd, you witness the sway of a collective in song, knowing this moment in transit a destination of its own, and call it Train Church. You seek out parallel moments, always from within. The stream crossing, the waiting line, the dancers, the cave. Outsiders wanted spectacle and you pushed back with ordinary life. The long looks of tired eyes over the horizon from the middle of a field, breaking from the labor of the day. The hanging clothes of late parents on a bare pole against a concrete wall. Shaded interior of a kitchen, ethereal light through pleated rayon curtains. The mist pushing against easy meaning, smoke against certainty, dust against the definition of forms. No, the magic won’t be captured, you insisted. Chasing shadows to witness, atmosphere to witness, sediments to witness––faces, in long attention, patient. Insisting, here is only the beginning of sight. Look again.

***

Inspired by the art and practice of Santu Mofokeng (1956-2020).

Camouflage Optics

Seen and unseen.

In response to the question of what any of this is, you offered an alternative. Forget all that, you said, and come inside. We moved among your impossible bodies. Stair spindles became towers of refuge, ventilation gates morphed into window frames. You took the leather skins of sacred texts and stitched one house at a time. You stitched a neighborhood of these, suspended from the ceiling. Welcome! You called. What you gave us was neither nature nor a matter of belief, but their shapeshifting beyonds. Here is an intricate network of colored glass, the view unbound by familiars. That you may better see inside you, you offered, and out again.

***

Inspired by the work of mixed-media artist Chiffon Thomas.

Intimate Geometries

The lens turned inside out.

Some days it is clear upon waking that what follows will involve certain reminders. About how, for example, I am at any given time rarely more than half-open or half-closed. Even when I thought I was more than aware of being somewhat too dense for my imagination’s preference, I am now the weary stranger offering directions to the inquiring heart, wondering whether its own spiraling rhythm is moving toward the center, or out. Or else, a shadow cut from its source, floating around like a kite. And it’s unclear, from this wavering axis, whether the metaphor is the blunt object sending an atom of awareness out into a larger field, or a mat to cushion the impact.

The Unmapped

On what is good and lost.

One theory is that you know you have arrived when you can get yourself good and lost without worry over getting home. This assumes no one is waiting for your arrival, or the meal you would make, or the rent––difficult to pull off in a given day, and yet in the suspended space of making what we make, I suppose it happens all the time. But just as I am starting to think, here is something, I am back to thinking of the birds falling from the sky, whole flocks of them discovered in the aftermath––but also once a snowy owl, living, in a tree near the local library, and the punk defiance of the tiny nest that once appeared on the electrical box, and the lizard that looked back as we crouched to see him beneath the cabinet, the cat and I, and maybe the point is only to lose the trepidation over being fatally human––into a wider web, woven of strands this limited sight is still unable to detect.

Sunsets

And other routines.

Sure, we had a habit of holding. All of us did. The sudden beauties we couldn’t keep from loving kept on doing what sudden beauties do. Don’t go, we said, but the plea sounded tinny in our ears. What resonated was the departure itself. We looked from a cliff, and with colors slanting words from us, we were gone before we left. Someone at the end of the horizon kept pulling back the sun. We had the sense of being the butt of the joke in this ritual play. The laughter was gentle, but we felt that it was something else, too. Sometimes.

Drumroll

A recollection.

And then came the memory of someone who so loved the world that they could not stop highlighting her face, who at every turn of the gaze would find her silhouette made flesh and lean into its pliant give. Whose ear, tuned to eavesdrop on dream music, would lift a lucid pen and point it toward transcription of the tattered ends of her beloved robes.

Who kept flying home, crying home, and singing her back, the jazz ache of her grief’s webbed movements and polyphonic breaths keeping time with the ancients at the drums, past the trembling where words won’t go, these nested rolls yoked to something just beyond the reach of the given ear, where the pattern of beats becomes so dense that–––

it collapses,

absorbing our cries

back

to some original

sea.

Clay

Studies in form.

Now it’s a cocoon. Now a moth. Now it’s something else. What is that thing?

Now it’s beautiful. Now it can kill. Now it’s pure passion. Now it’s a study in precision, one-part formal event, another part emotive creature. Fluid and gorgeous, then stoically opaque.

It is delicate, backbreaking work. Now innocent, now disturbing. This heavy love.

***

Inspired by this interview with Kathy Butterly, which is my introduction to the sculptor’s work.

Untitled Chorus

Notes from the days of wind.

In a season when the atmospheric pressures seemed to be in more dramatic flux than any of us could remember, herds of winds would gallop across the ceiling, rattling the furniture. It was the babies I listened for. Everyone was going around shaking their heads. These kids, they said.

There was a painter I loved. He knew how to look when he was painting. When he stopped was where the trouble started. Amid the noisy striving and the sales pitches, the ideologues and the masses of our families clamoring to avoid being ditched with the rest of the wreckage of the hour, it seemed like the babies––so quiet, some worried, is anyone there? ––might be waiting for someone to finally get around to mentioning this other thing. The painter dared to depict it. He didn’t call it anything, and some called it dangerously close to Nothing, but anyone looking to see it could tell you that what it evoked was the opposite of nothing.

It was a verge, and he was pulling the center to the edge of where the babies would sit, unsure whether or how they will stand. He wouldn’t live to see them.

In the season of high winds, the babies cocooned themselves in blankets of ambient noise. Those who thought of silences as nothing more than the punctuation between events, and not the main event, did not know what to make of whatever those babies were doing inside those cocoons.

They never seem to be listening, many remarked. But watch. Relax your eyes. It’s like one of those magic eye paintings where the apparent forms are only a pretext. See the weight of noise that has been heaped on them since birth. It becomes hard not to suspect that they have found some other way to manage what is pulsing nearby, while appearing not to listen at all, like the artist who pretends to paint nothing.

Wait, someone said eventually, of these paintings. I see it. The painter didn’t make it in the end, but the works became chapels unto themselves. The works were gathered in a chapel. The babies would show up, alone and in pairs, looking. They would seem to care nothing for what they saw.

Many of these wouldn’t make it, either. But some would. And when they waited in the chapel long enough to hear something other than wind, they would notice a sound more sonorous than their most immersive dream. Eventually, they would know it knew them. That it had waited as they had, for this time. They would sing.

Pictures

From the floating world.

Paper or stone; water or fire? When in doubt, we played tic-tac-toe and hoped for the best. We were in love with broken things: hiccupping wheels, chipped teacups, the wings of fallen sparrows and the lines of our own teeth. Here it comes, we would announce, pulling the next one loose. You wanted a cast so people could lean in and leave their names.

Empty rooms were magnificent halls to be witnessed from a corner on the bare floor. It was the light that did it, granting some significance to everything it touched. We watched it come and go. It moved like it knew its way around, like it knew us.

***

Inspired when I chanced upon this image from Barbara Bloom’s Pictures from the Floating World.