Category: art

Signs of Life

What trembles.

Consider all this a precursor, the artist was saying, to work in another medium. I wanted to begin with some questions, she told us. I was talking to a friend, she said, as I am now––and the friend, these friends, had certain questions. These questions encouraged me, she told us. To keep looking, you know. With these hands. 

I was trying to make something, to see it. There is a way to thread a map of layered memories so that knots are formed at the points of collision. There is a way to see the knots as what hold the web together. 

Of course, they won’t hold still, so it is not clear yet, but I can see how the tendrils of these maps might thread together, suspended in ropy intricacy as though in branches above us. How we might assemble beneath the canopy, looking up. 

It would be so much that we would have no choice but to return to a preverbal state with sounds and textures and smells and a sense of being in one place expanding out and then back between carryings, and no one can ever describe what happens in this state, when the tremble of memory is soul.

What Counts

On seasonal records.

1.

I’d love to tell you, but the words become ghosts, choking intention. 

2.

Once, they showed their insides, breaking open. 

3.

Meaning tends to expand at the site of the cut.

4.

The next attempt reminds: what is necessary is also impossible.

5.

The space after time’s vanishing has a way of losing its contours.

6.

To compensate, you can try cross-mapping histories to create an architecture of memory.

7.

Now we are inside the stones, now we are their erosion.

8.

By exposing matter, you can revisit its secretive nature. Some colors don’t happen in paint.

9.

The synapses around a single sentence can curl a face into the face of another time.

10. 

We pierced the soft flesh of old monuments. 

11.

A child makes bricks of debris, each block a memory.

12.

If each of these haystacks is another time of day, seeing is what happens between them.

***

Inspired by Monet’s Haystacks.

Intimate Unknowns

A brief encounter.

It was a single date, but memorable.

Who wears a watch anymore? he quipped, except if you are trying to impress.

He was referring to the old watches that just did time. 

Laughing as they entered the restaurant, she removed her coat to reveal a dress made of old watches.

What is this? he asked. 

She had her reasons. It’s been a week of dark dreams, she told him, and she was done with fighting them off. They are creatures too, these memories. She supposed they just needed a home.

Now nervous, he tried to make light. So, do you have the time?

I have all the time in the world, she replied. Take your pick. Every watch was set to a different time.

Suddenly, he remembered something he had to do. There was no time to explain, he told her. Urgent business, he said. So sorry!

She waved as one does from upper deck of an ocean liner at departure, smiling.

What followed was a beautiful meal.

***

Inspired by an encounter with this reference to L. Mylott Manning’s Kiss the Dark.

Ghost Shed

One interpretation of an artist’s role.

I may not know what to write, but it comforts me to have a wall of books between me and the outside. I am remembering the artist who covered walls––and these were high, museum walls––floor to ceiling with framed pages of books. It was tens of thousands of pages at a time, many of them containing these complex numerical representations. It was boggling, tremendous. You knew everything was purposeful, every page in relationship with everything else, but you could not take it in.

Sometimes a person would ask her what she was thinking, and she would not answer. Then, when they walked away, she would say, It’s about time. To a friend, she whispered, Season follows season. 

Some people evoke shimmering fonts of dizzy admiration, and she was one. Someone told me that she kept goats––three of them, in a shed––but I heard ghosts instead of goats. They had names, these (ghosts)––Micky, Mama Micky, and Kleine Micky––and I thought, that’s her secret! Even though she insisted there was no secret.

I built a sizable shed for my ghosts. This was no easy feat in a small apartment. I brought them food, water, changed their bedding, offered trinkets for them to enjoy. When the time came, I would bury them, as the artist had, in adjacent plots, each with a personalized gravestone.

By the time I learned it was goats and not ghosts that she had been tending, it was too late to change certain habits, especially after having built up whole mythologies to explain why it is that the role of the artist is the proper care and feeding of ghosts.

***

Inspiration for this piece comes from readings on Hanne Darboven. 

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.