Tag: change

a short history of subtraction

with misunderstandings re: freedom

First attentions focused on survival, and survival appeared to require a truth. It would be singular. Properly applied, it was supposed to offer liberation. Instead, it invoked additional struggle.

Then came another approach: disappearance. Stones managed it, and certain fish. Entire civilizations, even. With so little remaining after the act, results are inconclusive.

Some seek security by sharing every feeling. Others store provisions in hidden rooms. One strategy involves carrying everything. Another takes nothing at all. No method proved universally reliable.

On the other hand, there are many ways to die. Neglect remains popular. Repeated transplantation has produced mixed outcomes. It is possible to survive by developing shallower roots.

The gliders seemed promising. They moved across the water without disturbing it, attended by doubles made entirely of light. From a distance, the arrangement appeared effortless.

Several years were devoted to the study of reflection. Several more to subtraction. One working hypothesis suggested that freedom might consist of becoming lighter. This hypothesis eventually collapsed.

The way of the ray turned out not to be available. It could pass through what those of earth were required to carry. Below: buried bodies, hidden boons, forgotten names, and other dense materials.

At first this seemed tragic. Later, less so.

The discovery arrived gradually, as weather does. By accumulation. Particles gathering at altitude, suspended in vapor, waiting to rain.

By then many necessary pieces had already been removed. They remained scattered across the hills. Under the pink moon, they resembled sleeping animals.

Recovery efforts continue.

loose change for the shallows

toward a voice before sense

Love, try again
now with the weight of
your tomb set down.

Only air on your shoulders
this time—then water,
a constant motion.

Tonight, plant a crab in the sky,
then the archer. Notice the bull
looking back into a gazing frog.
Make them glow. The tide—dive
after these phosphorescent fish,
recklessly forgetting the rattle
of old sense, tossing it back
to these shallows, loose change
to echo your other name,
the one you knew when language
moved in shining schools between
surface and depth,
where you flashed your multitudes
through bathwater, laughing—
vessel, your eye, your mouth.

o child
the whole of you
a single sound

yes

Cyanobacteria

Innovating breath

Although they, too, would later be lumped––by clumsy taxonomies and antimicrobial prejudice––into a category of creature commonly jeered as pestilence, these tiny pioneers had the chutzpah to dare to take into themselves what all others knew as poison and we now call breath, and life, and living. At the arrival of the great oxidation event, one might imagine the others on the planet lamenting the end. Meanwhile, these guys were like, and now. . . here’s green!

Passage

What crosses the page.

How is it that we move from first love to loss so completely, and what makes the new state as real as the first? The world has a way of calling out the will to speak, to wrap some form around the formless, to create horizons at the edges of a given space, from which to trace the arrivals and departures of the sun. Or suns. I do not know which. The poem is passage, not discourse, the endurance as much as the cocoon.

The Artist is Surprised

With Anne Truitt.

Although there was no objection to the idea of a self, hers tended to elude her. I’m curious, she said, and decided one must be here, somewhere. But where to start? Perhaps a record of everyday things. Let’s see what happens, and what happened yesterday? Last year? Does the one from today have any relation to the one from last winter? 

The works, when she regarded them, stood clear and solid, each holding a space of its own. The same could not be said of the artist. Each has her preoccupations: certain colors, shapes, proportions. One day an insight comes: there is an energy you can use to endure your life, and there is a force for changing it, and these are not distinct, but drawn from the same well.

I am not so much an artist, she decides, but out of my life these objects are surfaced. It is possible, after all, to become what we have not before been able to be. I am here, she told us, to be surprised.

***

Inspired by, and with borrowed phrases from Anne Truitt’s Turn: The Journey of an Artist (1987). 

Material Concerns

In the garden of mirrored monsters.

In the end, it was the materials that killed her. But isn’t this always the case, these days? she might have said, taking aim at another plaster sculpture. In the beginning, her thing was to hide bags of paint inside, to bleed an aftermath. 

When she was done with shooting, she became mother to the monsters. It was a dream vision. Why? someone asked. They locked her up. In lieu of an answer, she returned to her creatures.

See the sphinx, a flower blooming from one breast, her insides shards of mirror. But why? Inquiries persisted. The monsters grew. To heal, she said. A joyland, she named it, locus for a new kind of life.

What kind? someone wondered. 

One where when your face breaks, it bursts into a tree.

Someone called it an apocalypse in paradise. She did not object.

***

Inspired by the work of Niki de Saint Phalle.

Fragilities

Considering emergent occasions.

Common practice refers to any “I” with consistency, but there is no monument here, only these constant aberrations. A body may be well one moment, wounded the next, then ill. Same for soul, spirit, mind, and whatever else we try attaching to this ongoing flux.

Also common, at least after a certain point, to wonder each morning, how now? Check pulse, blood pressure, eyes. Are the dark circles back? I remember the years I could not look because I knew. How cold, this seeming indifference. I was angry at her, for being so much less than solid. And possibly more, too; more than I wanted to imagine. I wasn’t myself, we commonly say, looking back on moments like this. And yet, I never asked, who are you? I never asked, how is your name? or what form shall we take, next?

We move more gently now. I check the pressure, coaxing encouragement. C’mon, I whisper, while I wait. Don’t let up. The translation might be a little prayer, some invocation to this small, quaking of tentative flesh and fluctuating fluids, to hold. We are still emerging.

***

Inspired while reading John Donne’s opening meditation in Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1624).