Category: art

Dream Melt

From the last ice age.

the imagination is where it rains paint onto frescoes
of figures to crowd the divine comedy clubs where we
come and go every evening, no ID, no cover at the door

carrying our huddled masses of memory on backs
crunching shells of peanuts and empires on the floor
the strobe light pulsars keeping time with unborn stars

first wears the crown––it is the chicken or the egg,
but who can say is on the mic now, to proclaim
in a language unknown to whomever has ears

no tears need translation and what is the time?
it is lost and what is the point? only a moment
and where did it begin? in the beginning

was the word and the word rained down where
we gathered here to catch it back to the mouths
of us speaking all at once in the land where

the constant rain is coming
from the vision at the bottom
of the iceberg where it

melts

Reflections in Water

And the telling, slant.

My favorite detail about Perseus other than his winged horse has to do with the delicacy with which he handled that severed Gorgon head, taking care not to scratch or rough the head by grainy sands, how he thought to place it on a bed of leaves, then sea plants, how this act birthed coral. 

I am reminded by Calvino, who in an age for questioning the fate of books, considered a related question of weight, and made a case for lightness. Only the reflected image allows for the presentation of what may be revealed only indirectly.

I am reminded by Moses, pleading let me see your face to God on the mountain, and God like, no but here is my backside and no doubt the frisson of such an encounter with the hind-parts of divinity is the highest achievement of any art.

How else does a winged horse emerge from Gorgon blood? By what other arrangement but such delicacy can the stomp of a single hoof draw water from stone and invite muses to drink? Where they gather to admire the horse, its beautiful wings.

Always wings, always the mountaintop. The nearness to sky, to flight. The weight of being is weight enough. Only the image––or better, song––can pulse across space, soaring.

I hope so. Let us not, before it comes, be crushed the accumulated weight of the dust of ourselves rubbled in the making and unmaking empires, those heaviest of forms.

***

Notes while reading the opening of Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium.

Molt

From one utterance to the next.

They were symbols, sure, but don’t ask of what.
It was a restless practice of experimentation––
over time.

Here is an art seeded across generations,
its braided roots the scales of a skin
shedding itself unto a new body.

Plaything

Playtime with cephalopod.

They were infamously difficult to study, known to refuse the crude foodstuffs offered by scientists as offensive to their refined tastes.  For example, they would have nothing to do with frozen shrimp. These members of the phylum Mollusca were likely not what Plato had in mind when he observed that if we are the playthings of the gods, then play is the most serious thing we do. Such considerations simply were not made. To do so would be to a blasphemy of unspeakable genus. The custom, when it came to describing the creatures one preferred to dissociate from was to declare them to be incapable of thought––an interesting and even artful collection of cells and systems, patterns and even grace, but not cognition. 

It was reasoned that for these non-thinking others that were surely quite unlike ourselves, there could be no fear of death beyond instinct and therefore neither mourning nor inclination to register captivity as tragic. After all, how could a creature incapable of foresight lament the possibility that it may not return to the known world?

Among our kind, certain unknowns often register as their own justifications. We have within us a tremendous capacity to decorate our blind spots in manners suggestive of insight. 

Then an octopus was observed to gather stones at the mouth of the den that it entered, presumably to prevent the entrance of potential intruders. Foresight? Perhaps. Some scientists conceded.

Later, the scientists observed the difficult creatures in play, bouncing objects, juggling, manipulating out of curiosity––us?

The creatures were indeed capable of a great deal, but surely not that. It was declared. Studies continued.

***

Inspired by this morning’s encounter with and excerpt of David Toomey’s work in LitHub “On the Uncanny Way Octopuses Play.”

Breaks

And the long look.

Discarded things were her materials and she gathered them to herself over years.  She spent time looking before she began anything that looked like art, but looking was her primary work. Whatever art she made, and she made a lot, came from this devotion. She wondered over these broken-down objects, the ways they had served, the hands that had handled them across time. It takes a special kind of eye to see their beauty. Hers came from the choice she made, to love them. Because of this, she never thought of fixing or repair. She only wanted to handle them endlessly, to celebrate what they had become, to carry them into their next becoming.

Interim

And process.

The work lacked boundaries and you could feel the struggle and pressure of its raw force as soon as you entered its space. It seemed to press from the frame. We wanted to know how, so asked the artist about her process. She said, there’s a long time between nothing and something.

***

Inspired by the opening page of an interview I hope to return to, with Marwa Abdul-Rahman.

Now and When

The long look.

It is an act of devotion, the artist told us. To what we wondered, and she replied only looking. Which, she clarified, is of a different kind than spectating. To look long and well, as she did, was an exercise in love. She watched the neighborhood, noticed what changed. She kept the ancestors at her desk. They watched her and she looked back. They kept up a running conversation in her workspace. She watched the water, announced: it’s coming. It crept up our shores and she watched the water and watched the birds. They came and went, not unlike the visitors at her desk. She looked long and well. She was working out responses to the questions the children would ask, about how to live here now. With these, she went to the water, the ancestors, the birds. And to the other artists she knew. We need each other, I know that much, she said. We stayed with her as the water made its way.

***

Inspired by a recent  BOMB interview by Wendy S. Walters with writer Emily Raboteau.

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