Aural imagery
I saw a sound. It rattled the bones of the last days of a time. That time of frayed signposts. Or times. The time was current. The time moved past futures. The time was possible, and all of us at stake. Now I watch for it everywhere, in hope of hearing. It is everywhere, but my eyes are not so good, having been too thoroughly trained by all that would erase her appearance.
What before blooms.
Under cover of not yet
shrouded by sleep
moon watching
the dream bar
to end dark
what haunts
into us
even this
now.
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.
A map to the door of a fragile heaven.
This body is a landscape on the move, morphing to elude the easy mark. This animating force is interstitial pressure systems of fluid and light, now dark. This body is history, a possibility. It means to remember with total abandon, something denied.
The vines of my tongue become tethers from which these limbs swing from the branches of a mother rumored obsolete but see my knee where it bleeds, cutting my skin against the rough bark of her refuge, finding mine––now a universe unto itself, now a fragment to rupture the worn sky.
***
Inspired by the work of Felipe Baeza.
With June Jordan.
You had some nerve, some told you, to speak love into the war, to flaunt that voluptuous hope in all her fullness, wearing not a stitch of modesty. Not even cynicism, or nihilism; neither was she utopian, and although they tried to call her ignorant, her brilliance shone.
They urged you to cover her up, but you wanted to let her dance. You gave her new songs and the earthquake moved you, the way every atom of life and its killing was suddenly known in the leaning faces of strangers.
Coming clean in a disaster is still a possibility, you insisted, and dreamed a blues to meet the moment when the ground breaks itself open, dreamed it a birth breaking open, a mouth to catch a final breath and release––and what came forth from that exhalation? They asked you about your aim and you told them. I aim to make love a reasonable possibility.
***
Inspired by Josh Kun’s (1995) BOMB interview with June Jordan, discussing the libretto she wrote for I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky (with composer John Adams).
The artist paints volumes.
Because one might hold too much, you offered seven. Each is a chapter, you said, of the paintings. Here is a labyrinth for excavating memory. Here are objects of desire.
Is this nostalgia? One asked, regarding certain details. You thought this strange, considering how close they were to the moment at hand. But you conceded a sense of longing, not for a particular time, but for a past. It interested you to imagine the possibility of a sense of distance between now and what came before.
Where only the poetry of the future will do, you mean to make it out of memory. And what are memories, but what we make to hold and assemble, renew and forget, and what is the medium of the history of these futures at the precipice of this moment? I have not resolved it yet, you said, I am still looking.
***
Inspired by the work of Meleko Mokgosi.
With Italo Calvino.
The cities were born a little at a time––not unlike poems, you said––of various inspirations. You had a habit of collecting odd strangers and mythical heroes, and notes on places that you had been, might be, would tend to imagine. What happened was not a book exactly, but a geography to move in. You mapped cities of memory, cities of desire, cities and signs. There were continuous cities and hidden cities. These cities were braided: cobweb cities across an abyss, a microscopic city, spreading.
Watch that one, you said, and as it grew, it revealed concentric cities like tree rings. Sometimes, you said, you would come across a city that would write itself.
Into what? We wondered, and you said yes.
***
Inspired by Calvino’s Invisible Cities, in honor of his birthday.
The artist makes room.
Your aim was an art that would not behave as art. While dying, you made your untitled rope piece, layering industrial latex like paint over string and wire suspended from the ceiling. It resembled a decimated fishing net after a storm, or the work of an overworked spider gone mad. You welcomed unseen others into a shadowy space, inviting us to attend to what crawled, flickered, and flashed. You did not specify how long to look, or where. How is it possible, we wondered, to feel so in the way in a mostly empty room?
Touch, you said, and meant it. Who could do that now, with all the insurance? Come in, you said. But try another door. You left it to us to find it. There are other openings, you said, and more hollow spaces than we were accustomed to noticing.
What do you know? One skeptic asked and you said Nothing.
***
Inspired by the art of Eva Hesse, and by Mignon Nixon’s article “Eva Hesse Retrospective: A Note on Milieu,” (Spring 2003 in October).
With Antonin Artaud.
All he wanted was a change in the human condition. They can laugh at me, he said to the mirror. When it came to the question of what a human might be, he didn’t claim to know. Over time, he grew distant from those who did, and these were many.
All he could say, when it came to describing his predicament was, it’s possible. He sought reconciliation––between matter and mind, body and soul, fact and idea. But people loved their borders, and he kept being detained at the boundaries of his body.
Then he turned on words, preferring only sound detached from the old symbolisms, and he let these run through him, imagining that their resonance, after all, might affect some inside-out change.
Really? Someone asked.
It’s possible, he seemed to respond, and he did not say a word.
***
In honor of the birthday of French artist, poet, dramatist, and writer Antonin Artaud, I spent some time this morning in Naomi Greene’s 1967 article in Yale French Studies, “Antonin Artaud: Metaphysical Revolutionary.”
Thoughts on perception.
Continuous stream in perpetual motion,
no levees until we build. The mind wants
a fixed pattern, some mollusk shell against
the swell. So, we make and remake ourselves,
these others, our tools these numbers,
tests, images, sounds, scents, records
like Remember this. Color me a Milky Way
in turquoise, violet, rust, crimson tides of
possibility, a membrane across
these newborn eyes.
