On Creativity Archives

Aquarian Drip

These dazzling portraits.

When the artist came to visit, we were moved by the shining colors in attendance.

We had questions. One was, how would you describe the world you are building?

There are all these characters, see? Part divine and part human, all in a state of transformation. During each metamorphosis, a being glows these wild colors. It’s magical.

Are these self-portraits?

A lot of them are, partly. Also, part fiction, part archetype.

Can you talk about your materials?

They are loaded. They appear to be surface-level decorations. And yet, the objects themselves emerge from grief. So many people were dying. I was thinking of memorials, how decorative they are. And then I had all these sequins, and was like, I know what to do with those!

Because people are so much, you know? All these glittering layers, and then when they are gone, you have all this extra sometimes, this overflowing sense of all you see, all you wanted to say, all that they were beyond the simple obit.

It wasn’t long after I started down this path that I was like, I am going to need a lot more sequins.

***

Inspired by the work of Devan Shimoyama. The title of this post comes from one of Shimoyama’s paintings.

Fevers

And springs.

Blame the rude lift of shaggy grasses in the hot breath of wind, or blame the running horses for allowing our approach, or the unknown forces hiding behind facades of lifelessness, the array of them unlimited as the wild of fallen feathers in the last song of the dreariness we pretended to know before the brooding effigies of childhood toys wept us forward to long-dormant animal screams, to be caught by the insouciant tongue of this luxuriant lush where bur clumps catch the skin and horseflies shine mad at midday against a chorus of swarms convulsing at the grate.

Blame this teasing glimpse of spring for returning these creatures to something more than what we were in our cold rooms of polite decorum, before our days shed silver scales to this teeming fever, to reveal the honeysweet fire of protuberant growth, dripping conduits of some fierce insistence too raw to submit to any address more refined than the primordial word for teasing us back into this unnamed all.

Heritage

Dust over time.

There’s an idea that water was inherited from a cloud that long preceded the sun, that the cloud evolved from the heat around each newborn star, that the heat so melted the gases and dusts around it that they became something else, and that this something else floated out there in the vast dark for entire forevers, without even a name; that before it was known to us as oceans, and rivers, as life itself, it was just drifting between the other bodies, neither planet or star, comet or asteroid, silently evolving rains and ablutions, storms and sailors, mermaids and the notes we’d pass in bottles overseas, wondering and telling no one; swelling with the fluid of waiting cells and someday wombs, gilled figures and baptisms, rebirths and ritual baths and wild slaps of newborn hands against its sudden surfaces, but what does it take to wait eons, drifting and holding these potentials under a veil of vast nothing, until the moment comes for surrounding a single body in a single time, that will remain for many more eons unnamed, that will remain for many more eons no time at all, in the vast void before the beginning, and be so moved by the body and the moment that you let it all go, everything you are, the body dissolving the last of itself to make the first rain?

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.

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.

Interim

Late winter notebooks.

I could go for a break from these elegies, but these fractures in the sky will not quit, whole constellations of them and dust on all the noise, and every breath is short, and these wings against the window. A theory of flowers after rain, but no bloom. The contours of a coming day, but no traction toward beginning. Tissue without bone, and I wanted to remember what the poet said when I had no pen, about the quanta dissolving but how did it go? Into light, I think.

Forest and the Trees

Detail work and scope.

How often one of us says––of some work or other, whether as protector or caretaker; builder, custodian, healer, organizer, artist––we didn’t know the half of what was coming our way when we started. If we had known, we could not have begun. We wouldn’t have been up for it, yet.

My mom says this about the new puppy. She loves the new puppy. The laundry is endless. Lovers say this sometimes, and parents. People who go all in for the old home, even though it “needs a little TLC.”

On a related note, I am now remembering that the thing I think I am working on is almost never the main work, and that the main project is always some other, still hidden thing I’ve started, or taken up with, or allowed to start me. I wonder what I am doing now, and I have a strong suspicion that I lack the perspective I would need to see it.

The Admirer

With James Tate.

At the clothesline, you watched and remembered loving her in the great storm. You worried she would run off with a sailor. And you saw the shadow of a man but not the man, how it mocked you.

You loved the crazies, wanted to hear them. You were the buddy to the toughest guy in every class––protection, maybe, you laughed. The things we do.

You pulled a gun on the man who beat your mother, joined a gang called something like The Zoo Club. It’s funny how the gangs of old always sound quaint. Your mother was recovering, your grandmother was cooking, and your grandfather was silent. You invented.

The first poem you read was, as you put it, stupid. You fell in love. You met poetry in bars, on street corners and in back alleys. Suddenly ravenous, you could not get enough. It was coming out my ears, you said, of your reading.

The hardest work, you said, after decades in love, is creating the situation, the new reality. Once that was handled, you had something to work within. You loved the surprise of a laugh when you meant to be crying.

It’s a tragic story, you wrote, but that’s what’s so funny.

***

I spent the early morning with poetry and interviews by (and with) James Tate, and I am glad I did. Italicized phrases are Tate’s.

To the Next Attempt

Experiments in style.

Reconstruct. The world is shaped by art. Also, by protest. Challenge the world, the art, the protest. One artist, revealing her best kept secret, confessed I have none. When it comes to the crisis of creating anything, style attempts to negotiate some resolution. Even so, the thing is perpetually unsolved. One devises systems based in numbers, another according to stars, another traces bodily systems, weather patterns. Others make their own instruments, new forms; move the frame, alter the angle, change the lens. Apply the medium upside-down. Apply the medium while suspended from the ceiling. Apply the feet to handheld instruments, lend the ear to color, taste the next note.

Yes, but to what end?

To not ending.

What Resists

Instruments for fluid forms.

When the source of the moment is the vessel and not the stream, and the tool at hand is a knife and not a cup, it’s so difficult to harvest anything. All I wanted was a coherent paragraph, some excerpt to offer a guest. But I’m all vessel today, and have perhaps absorbed too much, and attempts to slice water are studies in futility.

I will say this, though. It is frustrating insofar as I continue trying to cut anything. Abandoning this, the continued movement of the knife becomes a way to trace the resistance of fluid. My cutting impulse begins to still, and what replaces it is something else. Whatever it is, it won’t be named.

I think of the wonder on an infant’s face when she first discovers the resistance of the surface of water. The slapping and splashing that follows, cooing between laughs. Over and again, she brings it down to feel what pushes back, as the echo of her laugh reverberates into any nearby vessel, shaking all that is barely held, now spilling again.