And creator.
It lives
by the distraction
it makes
before it dies
at the insides
only to emerge
as task: one sole
task given me
out of time.
Here I am again
afraid of running
to enact the small
body of infinite
infinitesimal
purpose given
to each, a creature
alive, scratching
for release
from suffocation
by a world yet
to know how
it breathes.
Enough already.
What is today our objective isn’t one and the materials needed are no more than what we already hold, and much less, and the words for the hour are only favorites including those we’ve never said, and the challenge is to find it in us to do one small thing or better yet, no single thing, not one, so that when they come to ask us to account for ourselves any one of us might respond, We are––, and leave it there?
Overheard, near the studio.
Here, each feather is stripped into muslin, then draped over discarded wood, then set in an abandoned pocket of stone––And here, look. Someone might have let this go, dismissing it as a mere bicycle tire. Now it is something else.
What is it now?
Becoming.
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.
In the late days of long wars.
We wanted to mend, so kept company with our mothers’ ghosts. Our yesterdays were wounded and came to us until every bed was full.
O muse. Your song was bleeding out.
We brought cloths and went to you. We wrapped you tight and held against the flow. It entered then.
We are still, holding.
Decay as creative premise.
Nested in cordgrass, a master work sinks.
The artist smiles over its cracking disappearance.
Rubble is one of my primary interests, she tells us.
She imagines its rearrangement.
I mean, she adds, what might come?
There are good reasons, after all,
––and especially here, to reject nostalgia.
***
The title of this post comes from this installation by American artist Beverly Buchanan, which a recent New York Times article by Siddhartha Mitter describes as a vanishing masterpiece.
Analogical selection.
Here is a picture.
Consider it a useful imaginative tool
which, like the hammer,
helps less
when applied to
the wrong situation.
Writers on writing, overheard.
What are you working on?
I am writing a series of stories. I think. Or something.
What are they about?
They are about what this book is. They are still coming.
What is this book?
Complicated, I guess. They keep adding new parts.
So, what do you do?
I listen and try to write as they come. I guess it would be easier if so much of what they do didn’t evade language.
Wait. That doesn’t make sense. How can any part of writing evade language?
I mean the verbal kind. The kind I know.
What do they use?
It’s more like an incandescent unknowing. Like the brilliance of the world after memory loss.
Do you speak that?
I feel like I could once but lost it. I am trying to learn. But I guess I am a slow learner. I keep defaulting to the old expectation that they speak mine, forgetting I’m the visitor.
***
Inspired when I encountered Ingrid Rojas Contreras’ use of the phrase “incandescent unknowing” in reference to her experience of memory loss, which she relates interestingly to her process of storytelling in this interview she gave to Kaveh Akbar.
Reflections on night work.
It’s easy to give short shrift to surface reflections. No one wants to be called shallow, but look at the distances to be traveled here. I know a guy who only paints at night, his subject always other paintings, who limits himself to reading them by moonlight. I asked him why. As he sees it, the fully lit subject offers a false sense of clarity which masks the problem of too much information. The more you look, the more a well-lit form will start to fold, collapsing in on itself. It can be very distracting. This happens to me all the time, so I was very intrigued by his solution. By taking away the pretense of clarity, he gave himself over to what he could imagine. By removing the pretense of originality and limiting himself to the study of another’s work he was paradoxically freed. As he puts it, I take comfort in the discomfort of not being myself.
***
Inspired when I encountered a description of David Schutter’s Night Work. I take creative liberties with this imagined interpretation of the artist’s process, adapting insights from a recent BOMB interview.
Here we go again. . .
Look, I’m not here to lecture you. If I was, you’d know. Then you’d think, not your wheelhouse, is it? And you’d be right. In lieu of a lecture, I have a proposition. What shall we eat, play, flay today? Sashay, maybe––or love, gut, burrow, swim?
I vote dance. Are you coming? Pray? Oh, I see. You are not going to do any of these, are you? Your face says it all: you’re going to stay right there, aren’t you? Until you figure out the poem.
Sigh. Not that you’re listening, but really? Of all the ways to be, you choose that one. And now you want to know what I mean.
