Silent into

Originally posted April 15, 2015



As I crossed the border into Detroit border police looked at my coat and jacket suspiciously, why was I so cold? Why was I so cold? Chicago happened the way that Montreal did. Streets and street corners and stay places. They came. From there the ride shares and I make it to the fold of Illinois and Wisconsin. We contemplate drinking the last beer in the trunk of the car. We walk inside instead, move into our bedrooms unravelling sleeping bags from their tight red cocoons. There we are. Four people plus 30 some odd more in a well carpeted softly lit room. It is here that we spend most of our time. It is here that we spent most of our time in silence. I eat only out of bowls to comfort myself. I eat in the morning and not after noon, or is it two? Do we drink tea? I don’t quite remember. I remember Raleigh, and smiling at Rob, but I’m not sure if we met eyes or if I just looked at the back of his balding head. I look for it and can’t find Carrie across the room as we are separated by sex, not gender. We are separated in silence in meditation we are to be separate. Men and women have different energies. Therefore we are to be separated in silence. We are separated in silence. I am placed in the back of the carpeted room next to the coughing woman in the plastic lounge chair. I do not like being placed in the back of the room, I get used to it. I stretch my legs at night as we watch videos telling us what we didn’t realize we had discovered during the day. The carpeting is soft and over the course of the days I realize it is not polite to recline. I eat out of bowls, I remember again, I eat out of bowls and sleep poorly. My mind searches and crawls in the few hours I release it from the reins. I feel okay. My roommate stretches and I watch her. She is wearing green leggings and reaches past her toes toward the red headed woman who runs marathons. I can tell she runs marathons because her souvenir shirts say as much and she slams doors upon entry and exit. I remember seeing Stephanie from time to time from the back of the room. Is she wearing makeup during this? I like her mousey hair and the two buns on either side behind her ears. The woman teacher, the grey white woman teaches by asking us if we understand the technique.



I wonder if my hips will hurt. I wonder if the clothing will be loose enough on my knees. I wonder if sitting will be painful. I wonder if my back will hurt. I wonder if my abdomen is strong enough to hold up my body for the course of time sleeping away from my lover. I wonder how my body will feel I wonder where it will be warm. I do not wonder. I fear but only slightly. Construction will be ongoing. There is talking and noise, talking and noise. There is not doing. There is the tomb of my bed that I sink into leaving an impression of my body which is a depression. There is no paper being made there is no paper touching my fingers and becoming tree putty, no flour. Why is the burner always on? The rice bag in the cactus my tea cups I will miss. My dog. Who will watch his face in the side view mirror as inhales all of the fresh pollen of the countryside. How did we end up in this country side?





In the car I first listened to Margueritte, in the car but first on the computer, Duras. In the car we listen to it and therefore I listen to it because I have company. I have company in my listening and I am turned on to listening because I have fraternity in audience. I understand hands. I understand blue and night and black and water. I, think, I understand negative but, perhaps I do not in any language. There was not much more I got from listening alone. But the streaming words conveying by helped a bit. It is then that I translate it cut and paste in Google and find bramble. The mess of words is difficult to read and so I do not read the translation. I listen to it in the car and hear the car and look over, Sebastian holds the phone and I see car lights and wonder if looking straight ahead isn’t safer and the same. What moves me? This moved me why? Coincidence moves me for it alludes to the divine. Nathanaël’s translation downloads onto the screen. It is typed in a font I like to look at. The short film of blue hands and black night unfolds itself into a nostalgia for solitude. I long for the crystals that made my forehead burn white, and the thumbs when pressed to my breastbone whisper wind, sand, birth and sorrow. “Les mains négatives” moves me because the man was alone. Only because he was alone without company are the palms on the wall the same size they’re all the same size and yet perhaps placed upon the wall by different men, in that Hericlitian way. I wonder how he made the colors and found the cave and I wonder if I’m wondering this in an ethnographic way or as a poetess as someone curious about her own desires about the tracks in life that have drawn off her clothes and on a crown of flowers. Is there silence in prayer? Is fear prayer? How do we silence? Where is the rejoinder? I’m thinking here of Martin Buber. I am thinking about what kind of response we require, how particular each call is. I think of the mourning dove that lives in the cypress trees behind my back door. The first time I heard him I thought it was an owl and intrigue died a bit when I realized it was a pigeon. I saw the neighbor’s dogs chained in the back and I saw a dove start and I saw the only one of the doves call until one day I saw them both calling and they called and I called in the same way. They are accustomed to calling to each other. Were they calling to me? I think of a time when one tries to call out and no voice is uttered. Perhaps in the Zone del Silencio. Perhaps Melik Ohanian records nothing and therefore nothing is recorded. Perhaps he forgets to turn the sound on and mistakes this for the moving fields of energy that block communication. Jealousy and rage block communication, as does an eyelash in the eye or a sneeze. In New Zealand I captured my first film as a series of vignettes of moments of the cat running up the stairs of my neighbor coming home from the bakery at 5 in the morning when the loaves are done and his shift ends. Colin plays golf. Colin smokes opium. Colin flirts. I didn’t have the microphone on to record Colin blowing rolled cigarette smoke into the garden where only wax beans grew. Accidentally, the movie was silent. It wasn’t good and the visuals were not satisfactory to negate the use of sound. This is not a diary. This is me understanding through my memory. This is me understanding through my memory and my body and my experience what it is to be silent what it is to capture, what is the capture.





“Everything is crushed” (Les mains négatives,Duras, tr. Nathanaël).



Open your hands and find nothing. What is memory distilled but to reach out to squish a mosquito and relish at the sight of blood in your fingers and in the same way release your fist to find no blood on fingers and find you didn’t catch him you didn’t kill him. He is still flying somewhere and hopefully your attempt scared him from ever biting again. Perhaps Zone of Silence moves around. Perhaps you can or cannot photograph or cannot record the sound of a desert vacuum. Either way there is a plot of land that exists in silence. It is to be found for the sound waves come barreling towards you, the intrusion of these waves on your eardrums, tender caverns, wail out in affection. The original call is an infant for her mother. She learns her voice through her desire. I do not like to think of puppets, with teeth blackened in Japan (In Praise, Tanizaki) or puppets through Nietzsche’s life work (Ventriloquism, Goldblatt). Though the metaphor of marionette is at times appealing, the image of one practicing such an act before it is performed is too near to molestation and perversion. I mention this distaste because I see maternity played out as a puppet show, all soft felt plush and double stitching. The mother that is activated by her own fertility, and spoken through by the production of an infant’s nutrition. A child cries out for her mother before she cries out for her lover. A lover that, as far as experience has shown me, causes her to cry out continuously. Our hand-painter however cries out perhaps to a lover or perhaps to his God. The unrequited realization of a love renewed with each tragedy for a power than can relieve it.



These hands

the blue of the water

the black of the sky



Flat



Placed spread upon the gray granite



For someone to have seen them



-Duras, tr. Nathanaël



Imagining a spirit that, driving the waves that carved the very cave in which he stands, he calls out for his lover, his god to relieve him from his anonymity.



Post script In Nathanaël’s lecture on Shadows, she notes the gender in the original French of the one that calls and the one called out to. Without this information, I read it both as amorous and prayer-like. With this information, I read the translation as son to mother, son to mother-god, man to female beloved.

The conservatory at Lincoln Park

We lock our bikes handle bar to rear tire and walk easily inside the conservatory. Vanilla, an orchid, climbs up the walls of the rear room, dry and bright. Circling again past the coy, fiery painted carp, we admire the ferns and walk out onto the lawn, past the empty enclosures that sun rhinoceros, and on toward a bench. The bench is dry and wood and later, when Sebastian leans back on it, falling from a big sigh, he notices the bricks beneath it read Albion Shale.

Scanning from the Friedrich Schiller statue in the south just West of the Eli Bates fountain where marlins are being wrestled and storks attempt in their bronze to rise up with the recycled water, I spot her. I do not notice her specifically, but her children. A young girl and a young boy and I wonder if they are twins, to satisfy the rare and strange occurrence of seeing two sets in one day. The other pair were found red headed and disappointed at the fence of the empty rhino pen.

As they scamper it is clear that the girl is older. She walks steadily, he totters. She no older than three, he something half of that. Their mother, dressed in a black top moves to her hands and knees and begins to, with fierce feline snarls, I imagine, play into the belly of the girl. The girl giggles and rolls backward onto the grass. The boy, awaiting his turn giggles and falls back too as the mother approaches his belly in the same way: her mouth open, from which I imagine, a growl emerges. This game continues and she takes turns, the belly of her daughter, laughter, the belly of her son.

She has slender, long arms that prop her up nicely, her spine level as her daughter gets up to mount her. The game continues. Sebastian shares a memory of playing Tigers in the dining room with his aunt. Parents do not do enough crawling around with their children, we mourn, as other children quietly run into the scene. I wonder how far apart in age the children are. Was the time between them planned? It seems, from thirty yards away, to be the perfect gap. The children seem to be sharing the attention well and she, full of energy and joy.

The grandmother stands up and walks across the bike path onto the grass where the young girl meets her, and the mother meets her and they fiddle with something. Jonathan! she calls, after a minute or so. How secure she is, I think, to let her young son walk about without her piloting his every discovery. Jonathan! she calls again. She drops whatever white thing she holds and her long slender arms bend in v's, her legs in jeans bend in v's and she darts from the carriage to the fountain in an instant. She lifts Jonathan by his waist, he hanging his body over the outer edge of the fountain looking down, looking into the well of water at coins and his own reflection. On her hip she carries him to the carriage and buckles him inside.

Sebastian smiles at me, he now laying just beside the bench in a snow angel on the grass. I begin to cry, and then to weep at the beauty of the dance that played out before me. I want that very much, I think. I want no thing at all more than my version of exactly that. The grandmother pushes the carriage slowly, steadily ahead, and the young girl points to a something in the flowers. Her mother turns to look. They stand for a minute before the mother swings the girl up hugging her, legs squeeze in return around her waist.

More than foraging

On the morning of May fourth, two pick-up trucks pulled up the gravel drive to the point where I was crouched and wrestling with our blue tarp, coaxing it to dry. The first up, driven by a pony-tail behind plastic rimmed glasses, told me her truck didn't lock and suggested she might leave herself parked there beside us to be safe. I thought, "sure" and then said "sure." Like a half dozen folks before her, she continued on the trail up the hill with an empty bread bag bunched into her back pocket, her camouflaged companion in tow.

May fourth hikes itself gently, my partner, our dog, and I admiring the monochrome canopy and undergrowth that glows under the West Illinois sun. We see ponytail and companion a number of times, with other jeaned and belted men under billed hats, all toting bread bags now damp and heavy as if carrying dogshit. We walk into a parking lot where Sebastian tiptoes behind a ruined building to pee. I, holding the dog, read a laminated poster advising safe carry procedure for hunters and their firearms. One should never run with a rifle, nor point it at anyone, loaded or unloaded. One should never use their rifle as a crutch to lean on.

Gone too far and no longer on the trail, we turn and retrace our steps, the view always new from the other direction. Ponytail and her companion are not far along on the trail when we stop for an amicable exchange. They are hunting morels around the base of elm trees. The elm trees are easy to spot, like that one over there, with the bark peeling. A beetle infestation has killed the elm population in forests all over Illinois. Back in the day, one could find eleven pounds of mushrooms around the base of one great tree, best during the rain when most others are inside. On his encouragement, she took me to the base of an elm and with her walking stick pushed the ground vines and leaves around. She spotted a big one. They grow up on thick hollow stems and blossom into lobes of brain peaking out just above compost.

I was haunted by my righteous voice as I stopped and peaked and yearned toward the base of all of the grey-ish peeling trees. Look at your desire to consume. Let go of your desire to collect, to have, to gain. To earn, to receive, to be prized. It burned and yanked at me, the desire tugging back in the other direction toward the bark and base of trees dying at the feast of imported beetles. Sebastian held the dog while I traipsed in some yards and alas, I found another. I found my first morel and in the discovery lay the gratification of a sort I was trained toward for twelve years in school. Be told, repeat as directed, receive praise.

The desire to find consumed me. Sebastian wanted a turn and was compelled to find one of his own, as well. So we walked and the monochrome sprite of May was lost on us, and the quirks of our husky's endeavors were lost on us. We saw only bark and the base of trees. Knowing which bark was elm was the first question we asked of the forest. Vertical bark, greyish, stone like, shallow to the trunk, peels at times with a chestnut brown skin like that on the coat of an almond. An elm. It was early for leaves but perhaps we saw the beginning of leaves and looked for them when asking the bark if it was what we were hoping it would be.

The pull of desire anchored straight to my ribs, the upper ribs beneath my clavicle and centered. I was, like a skier behind a boat, standing and dragging by the same force. Had I not been standing, walking on, I would have been dragged under in an arc beneath the water until against the river stones of the Mississippi River I found a grave to rest upon. I set deals with myself and the righteous officer that policed my want to want. This will be the last tree. The next tree will be the last tree. We found a treasure trove up a mossy rise and one by one we collected the morels into our tea towel bunched and hanging. A scrotum of fungus. Sebastian collected many and so did I and we decided that with some butter, they would make a fine dinner. A self congratulations ensued for much of the walk and more young chlorophyll effervesced without a nod.

It is alright to want, I soothed. Yearning provides, not the same but in line with, what desire takes away. 

Shoes that Walk or An Attempt at Exhaustion

Sharpening a pencil

Clarity.

Clarity through grief.

Right grief.

Grieving rightly.

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My maternal great-grandfather made a living as a feather dyer. Its not clear whether Grandpa Frank dyed in Austria, or if he picked up the trade upon settling in Tribeca in 1942. The huge vats of dye stuff emitted noxious fumes and respiring into lung cancer, eventually took his life. This trade is in me somehow. This instinct of coloration and soaking in tubs lingers inside of me. I follow the blog of natural dyers, of quilt makers, and weavers. I imagine projects of this sort made out of sheep’s wool. Projects to be worn. Projects to be woven.

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I am working on visualizing “mass”. Mass displacement, mass incarceration, mass murder. These numbers are read, in the five and six digits, but difficult to conceive of. Impossible to hold in our singular flesh such a crowd of suffering bodies. This is a ceramic project that formally, physically, symbolically suits. Innummerable casts from the same mold– outputs similar but varying objects, riddled with imperfections, most of which are looked over in the context of the multitude. All of the objects are porcelain, all of the objects are white. How do we read porcelain when it is whole, shattered, or dust? How do we punish imperfect objects? By glancing over them, dismissing them, damaging them further? How do we punish whole groups of people in our society and others? By glancing over them, dismissing them, damaging them further.

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Complementary color paintings situating emotions and their opposites