Category: Perception

What, Counting

in this space before what goes

In this time among these machines that want nothing, that take and absorb the images and sounds and other residues of our lives, their harvest, I want. But am so often dulled among their droning that I may not name it. 

What, then? Has that been also reaped? I am counting before it goes, wanting to say. Something but the taint of those scythes is in the words, too.

Let us count before we go, some other way. The machine will not know to measure waiting by the heartbeat, ear pressed to beloved chest, the rasp of final breaths or by the caw-caw-caw across the sky outside this window in the still of midafternoon, above and beyond the droning, beeping whirr of them, indifferent to the stretched stillness, pulled taut until the next caws back. 

Spiral

Regarding the next breath

The artist did a series of spirals. I don’t know what she was thinking before she went down this road but begin somewhere is a familiar feeling. I am often haunted by this one. Anywhere will do, but where is still a pertinent question. You can start at the outside and dive in, in, in––follow the logic to the question of black holes and the possibility of the singularity and related questions about the connecting thread between dimensions, or universes, if you take as a fact the possibility of many in one. Or you could start at the center and spin yourself away, beyond the frame. 

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Inspired by the spirals of Louise Bourgeois.

Solute

To dissolve some absolution

Always wants. An attempt to loosen the fibers that seemed to contain the riddle of becoming. From that bonebound island I thought I knew what I was and knowing only wants, dreamed that if I were only more, I might hold those skies, that ocean, and swell to blooming so I could let it all go into the living. I used to imagine you a landscape I might photograph in pieces to print on transparencies, hold the light of you up to your light to translate for you this wonder at your nearness. I remember where we stood above the sea holding hands up into sunset as if to catch whatever heavens might finally rain.

But what do you want, always?
What does Always want?
I am impatient to know.
Please speak slowly.

I lack fluency and miss the nuance of your most important phrases.

The phrase “bonebound island” comes from The Notebooks of Dylan Thomas.

Mind, Gap

Life as story and the body of work

Test, label, claim. Lose again. Markings on a page. Carry on, eating through the next one, in bedraggled astonishment. Fold after fold, brain after the pattern of its existence. The brain a character in the story we tell. About ourselves. Every story we tell a story about ourselves. Or the brain is the story, depending on point of view.

Bodies. What problematic texts you are, with your endless contradictions and shifting parts. At every turn, you are at best barely contained and forever deconstructing your own perimeters to devour some other body in constant rewrite.