Category: Perception

The Size of a Day

Time for vigilance.

Then comes a big day. The kind suspended in stop-motion with a sound in the ears like the high notes of a distant organ, with bird quaking in chest and stomach sliding sick-slick with anticipation against the ribs. For saying Okay and Breathe and Please. For hyper-awareness of need, for the moment to respond to events already in motion. To accept all offers to be carried, prayed over, protected where you go alone. These big ones have a way of reminding what a day is. The others are no smaller, only less well known. 

Conversation With Unknowns

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.

The Influence of Moonshine

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.

Feather Star

And other ancient mysteries.

Just the other day, we were discussing how it might be a good idea for us to pay close attention to the most enduring species, given our current trajectory. And then you showed up, looking like an underwater plant. Spineless, with branching appendages, radial arms, each like a feather. Where did you keep your fists, and how did you get this far without the opposable thumbs we so prized? What about your capacity for reason? Did you even have reasons? Name one, we challenged, but you were silent.

What you did was something else, and we couldn’t look away. You went on and on, catching what drifted before you. What you lost––namely, arms––you regrew. There is something here, we think. About the way you present as a walking plant, hiding in plain sight. We were trying to name it when you moved away. We were surprised by your speed. We wondered about your purpose but had to surface for air. 

Then we went inland and sat by the banks of a river, the site of another flood. Being creatures prone to contemplation, we often sat at the edges of water bodies, looking for some way to understand the movement between life and loss. When the waters receded, we would see the crowns of drowned monuments, and these would knock against ancestral bones. And we would think of things to notice. Like how the river must know every stone it touches, and these. They went on, knocking, and we left.

***

Inspired by feather stars.

Wayfaring Strangers

Subway meditation.

That this feeling might be bottled and passed like emergency water. How to describe the taste of this sacrament. It has something to do with the shared steam of this space between stops, thigh to thigh, hand over hand even with the gentle deference of strangers; the false metaphor of personal space, how easy it is to hold at a distance, but impossible here. Whatever territory there might be is no island but an occasional bubble in this sea and we dive from this common reef and back again, open doors take these bodies given up with a nod to this passage, and in between stops none of us are anywhere but here. This is no epiphany, it would not be so bold, it only strains the suggestion of one incubating in the chest, but holding back, too humble to intrude on the next inhalation. Who needs another revelation now? There is only the weight of our bodies, this body, the man in scrubs sleeping on his feet with his hand on the bar above, we know what this is, but Shh. There are meals to make, knots to pray out of, debts that will never be paid, and let’s not get into all that right now, not here. Only hold.

Visitor

Suspensions in time.

Visit: to go and see. How casually we speak of the act, and yet. To see anything as it was before is to replace memory for presence. Some images have a way of offering reminders. For example, here is the edge of a sleeve, slightly frayed. Here a new scar. There, a cracked pot under a drain. I thought I knew this place, but where are these objects in time? I cannot place them, so I hold here, suspended.

Attentions

Notes on how to read.

There is a mind that keeps close watch on the dew-slick grass, hopping low, head turned to hear what crawls, to find what fuels the next flight. After this, a watcher in the window, low chirps from whiskered mouth, the fine hairs of the tail feather-tuned with exquisite precision. Another eye will notice how that which manages to still be finely tuned to details in their liquid form while retaining the soft pliancy of a chest-sleeper is enough to swell some subcutaneous expanse behind the ribcage, preparing to soar from what seems to contain its swell. There is temporal awareness, temporary sight. And there is space, breathing enough of nothing to make room for the next renewal.

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