is the equator a he

centrifugal question not even posed but deduced from the prompt for last night’s sculpture class, which was to capture the form of a distended water balloon in terracotta. the teacher said something about drawing a line from the balloon back to the Renaissance masters, and Reginald Marsh was connected to this, too, only when I went to Google him this morning I instead looked up the actor, Frederic March

scorched earth

when we stop tethering our "value" as people to interactions with others, so that the very concept of "worth"—what Joan Didion considered "self-respect", and Toni Morrison examined in her final writings on "self-regard"—is detached from the ways that they leave us or we leave them—when we are able to finally dissipate the heavy weight of conditioning and projection through a gathering-in of essence that is as much a puzzle as a practice, we are also, fundamentally, buckling down on our bones. beginning again from ground-level, we are asking our bones to be strong enough to support us, to facilitate a full plasticity of self as we retool its musculature. we are asking the osseous to serve as subjectivity’s pliant anchor and physical source. in reaching for a root, we hope to transcend external substantiation, ditch the mirror, abandon those places where we go for comfort that we know are not forever. bones, of course, have a timescale more eternal than our economized thinking can induct on its own. so we must be patient with the secretive forces of the skeletal.

that being said, I am sick of my skeleton’s deterministic, dharmic casing: sick of explaining away my losses, failures, and disappointments as necessary, of having to accept, because it really is truth, that the thing that I believed I desired was not ultimately in my interest, or mandatory to my success, and that its denial, while painful, is appropriate, even fortunate. as we turn inwards for guidance, as we arrive at higher needs by stripping away our surface wants, the question arises of what to do with the temporal world we have just ejected ourselves from, but that remains within view. in our new state of "congruence", how should we treat those things (persons, objects, narratives) in which we no longer seek validation but have perhaps kept around, with the permanence of battle scars, for apotropaic solace? there often remains a tinge of doleful fidelity to that which we hold responsible for provoking our withdrawal from attachment, as if the fact that we can navigate a minefield of triggers with dexterity makes it neutral, safe and sound. yet even the most well-tuned mind can swell reflexively at the first sign of friction, for that sign will activate the larger matrix of our interpersonal impressions. experiences are inevitably undergone with only certain pieces of information accessible—so when their layers have been revealed and defused, how do we relate to them from a more "bone" perspective? 

bone being terra, we have the option of going "scorched earth". singeing one's territory to ensure that whatever it might bear can no longer be of use to us, so as not to be useful to an adversary on approach, is a storied military tactic illustrated in a literal, elegiac sense across Anselm Kiefer's Holocaustal landscape paintings. Kiefer sets fire to his native German turf to combust the possibility of conquest, even as generations after might re-seed it with hope. Leaving a Doll's House (1996), Claire Bloom's famous account of her marriage to Philip Roth, is probably the classic example of a "scorched earth" memoir. in this real-life counterpart to the fictional book that Meryl Streep's liberated lesbian releases about her ex-husband (Woody Allen) in Allen's film, Manhattan (1979), English actress Bloom dismantles the superlative and self-controlled veneer of Roth the artist by profiling the unctuous duplicities of Roth the man. reviewers thought that Bloom—who at her prime starred as another "shrewish" matron in the 1980s TV adaptation of Brideshead Revisited—was far too generous to Roth; they wondered why she stayed with him for so long: in her marriage and in her recollections of it. for even as the book's publication unleashed a torrent of ill-will from its subject, Bloom could have skewered him further. why did she make excuses for his ugliest behavior? 

Bloom's light touch, her choice to sear but not char Roth’s authorial image, reminds me that Rauschenberg erasing de Kooning was a "scorched earth" gesture, of closing out with a transformative holding. the younger artist's torch-act, or negating excision, reduced his predecessor's imprint to pencil pentimenti, but not, or not just, to clear the way for his own work. for Rauschenberg as for Bloom, his artwork was the scorching’s negation of all but the intrinsically visible. what survives conflagration must be bone-deep, innate to the dynamic at hand—and not yet ready to go any farther. likewise, when Kiefer presents the fields of Eastern Europe as bloodied, with a pittance of beauty for its ash-remnants, he is restricting the beautiful to the bounds of his image; it would be too soon to give that beauty free rein. scorching is a razing of that which is closest to you, what you took for yours. I see it as a means of claiming autonomy by laying the contents of that claim corpselike, out in the open. no one who crosses your path, threatening incursion, can till for their benefit what you have sacrificed from your preexisting order. scorching is the deliberate spoliation of what once cropped up as nourishment and a curtailing—for a period—of all that might still grow. we choose to scorch so that the choice and the domain of choosing is ours, alone. 

this parching of past and present primes the earth for future construction, once it has been restored to the individual's orbit—your bones. the fact that there can be no sweetness, no fruit, borne from an immediate attempt at post-scorch flourishing helps to succor the frustrating amenability of a determinist outlook. if the determinist model posits that events happen for a reason, scorching ensures you are responsible for that event's corrosion, and that its grander reasoning culminates only on your terms. idioms like arte povera or Chinese architecture (Yuanmingyuan) avail ruin and desiccation as found material, a creative strategy that, in our century of surplus stimuli, has become an artistic first principle. but scorching does not reward casual something-from-nothing synthesis as mere transmutation; it defines transmutation through the patient anticipation of a "rightful" return. Rauschenberg played the long game against Ab-Ex, leaving us as his descendants to wait out the re-flowering of what in it was good. the laws of nature mandate that destruction beget the new: that, after nuclear explosion, terra eventually buds, and that even those bones caught in crematoria recompose into form. inside fires set and fires endured, between scorching and recomposition, those bones will be your home.

picture: Thy Golden Hair Margarethe, Kiefer, 1981.

train song

 so good I am getting rather bored of it.

the greatest thing

 

Cora p.

exiting my building around four pm on Thursday I go with Emilia to drop off her resume at the Bode cafe and to see the Cora Pongracz exhibition at Essex St. gallery (which is on Hester). 

downstairs in the display room, we stop for a while beside one of Cora's less memorable photographs, of a pedestrian or an object, a window maybe. I recall it being installed near an interstice where two walls open into the gallery's back office. such that when I began to feel conscious of our conversation rising to graze the ceiling's audial springboard, I stepped sideways and peeked behind this gap to see if anyone was there to monitor us. 

in storytelling—say, in Borges—the sideways shuffle has a particular purpose: it propels a character out of mundane expectations, into a more tenuous, suspenseful domain entirely at the whim of the author. there, the writer can fully show his hand, introducing to the plotline a twang of the auspicious, peculiar, and even humorous—all deliberate. I was reminded of this technique of the potentiating lapsus yesterday evening as my mother recounted a favorite incident from her medical training. making her rounds in the old country's hospitals, she would pull back a curtain to find kaffeeklatsches of doctors whiling shift time shoveling melon and cottage cheese in their mouths. 

to my mother, the cottage cheese gatherings betrayed the old country's culture of indulgence and inefficiency. but she also understood them, in transpiring literally behind the veil of normalcy, to represent that society’s aura of magical dysfunction, dyspeptic surrealism. it never occurred to me to connect the fact of having listened to her relay this story frequently as a child with the good many lunch periods I dedicated after leaving home to mulling over ergonomic comestibles as an aesthetic genre. I spent my late teens studying the clerking classes of Central London as they converged on Pret and LEON and Itsu—and other stores seasoned soul-numbing "fast casual". I wondered if and how hurried shop patrons, myself included, might ever initiate a sideways step, or pull back a curtain, to subvert their scheduled pockets for refueling and embrace a more phantasmic narrative. (that was what I liked in the work of Mika Rottenberg—who was then having a survey at Goldsmiths CCA).

but at Essex on Thursday it was too late in the afternoon and my shuffle need not hasten an escape from the everyday, seeing as my everyday is, now, a point of passage for energies in culture, my artistic duty being to conduct and translate air-current sent through my studio’s wind tunnel. when, for a brief second, I met the eyes of the gallery back chamber's scrivener-occupant, he wasn't eating anything but concentrating on his computer. ("quiet quitting" has come to an abrupt conclusion; everyone is doing their best to avoid the catching cold of layoffs). we would have to leave the peculiar twang of excursive discovery to Cora's pictures. 

here is what Emilia and I talked about, standing before them:

in tacit comparison with the gallery's soundscape, Emilia describes my apartment and its balcony studio as an airport-like vortex, always carrying a low din, full of treehouse noises. I tell her I call it a wind tunnel, and as if to excuse the positive nature of something under my care but for which I cannot take credit, I say, I’ve never known another kind of living besides in urbanity, where there is always lots happening, or always lots for me to channel, like: may I put you through to…I conjure the woman phone-operator of yore. I ask her what it’s like in Indiana, if it's quiet where she comes from, and she says that in her hometown, instead of New York's imposed clamor, stimulation is something to actively seek out, that she was always seeking out things by which to be distracted in the outdoor environment, in whatever was local. (I think of how you see the pursuit of distraction-via-surfeit here in domestic ostentation, in elite enclosure, where stuff is not to see but to have; in the fridge-stocking sacramental equivalents to des Esseintes' encrusted turtle—another topic, altogether).

Emilia says that this search for stimulation in the Midwest, and everywhere, is all cope. that our existence is cope, that we run on cope cope cope, pumping the noiseless through empty stomachs with more noise. I imagine us filling our vase-vessels with filler flowers, and say, I think I wrote about this somewhere, only to see when I pulled up the document that I had made a slightly different point, both the converse of and complimentary to hers. I had swapped cope as a practice for "blip" as an experience, arguing for the blip's importance as something that acts upon, that happens to you, versus the cope's call to engagement, willed yet unfortunate. I show her the relevant excerpt: [discussing a painful experience...] suffering is so much blip—ultimately, everything blip. Life, for most, being a seesaw between blips you make it past and blips you carry somewhere on your person, blips you can’t let go of so they are subsumed into your mass…

then, readying to leave the gallery, we pause at the staircase’s threshold to jointly contemplate a perfect 1964 Untitled image by Cora, a compound of our twin theories. in it, a girl's elbows sit like pillars on her knee-pedestals, the remainder of her body cut off, a de-sexed Venus de Milo (another favorite of my mother's). her figure is a trunk, she has both sustained an encounter (blip) and responded to it (cope)—in her abstracted self, holding her own weight, but also outwardly, by facing us.

loam (ad copy)

people are fighting terribly over earth when they will soon be surfing water. people are interested in suffixes, people are observing of arcs altogether too obvious. what I find of interest is the possibility that an apotheosis of the suffix is a means of belying or perhaps even intentionally safeguarding the fact that we are in a great state of prefix. it is always nice to see such sleights of apprehension made operative in language.

as for personal matters: yesterday afternoon my friend Emilia came by my house and sat for a while with a vase of daisies on the table. I told her I bought them at the start of this week to usher in new beginnings, which are symbolized by daisies as death-harkening. (this was something I remember learning early on as a child, passing Pushing Daisies posters graffiti'd in the subway, wondering what was going on in this ModCloth elysium sitcom, which naturally had an air of the unreal about it). after she left, I drew the Death major arcana card in the Trusted Tarot iPhone app. 

Emilia says I subsist on daisy petals and homeopathic purplish vials. maybe so, or at least whatever I subsist on is the Narcissus (daffodil) mirror-image of certain commercials (BetterHelp, "Press Play" spots from Gilead for HIV drugs). 

I miss the very tender, ethereal Marc Jacobs Daisy perfume ads from the early 2010s, many of which have, over the years, been scrubbed from the internet. their gentle tone of pubescent anomie endures in certain online fashions, much the way Viktor & Rolf flower bomb scent strip emissions stick around long after their magazine tacks have been lifted. yet while the original Daisy branding was nourishing and life-giving in its pared-down, light-washed delicacy, its most recent fall 2020 update seems all too saturated: the sky too blue, the grass too green, too Sound of Music teletubby in its messaging—having been released amid our forced embrace of virtuality. in general, commercials, and many other forms of media, have always dogged the living with ambient death; we experience them like hangovers, simulating fast decline into senescence. heightened tolerance encourages thirst and prolongs wear-off. thus I try to make a regular practice of the over-sensory hang-over's ascetic transmutation, wherein surrender to deathly ambience becomes Quantum Awareness. an epiphysis (pineal gland) ignited with multiplicities of virtualized or physically encased energy can, in the moment of encounter, be simultaneously turned towards nature: brushing through a meadow of daisies, as husks of all that is both infinite and temporary.

also, on Wednesday, standing with Emilia on the roof of the Swiss Institute during a torrential rainstorm I referred to some other Aquarian age ideas concerning individual versus collective imprinting. when we went to dinner afterwards she venmo'd me with the tagline "Aquarium" which I thought was hilarious, because I had been fantasizing that morning about ditching everything to visit the Aquarium on Coney Island—like I did as a kid and like Julia Roberts on her lunch-break in Closer (2004), when Jude Law tricks Clive Owen into meeting her there. Closer is a movie about internet connectivity, miserable romance, uneven artistic passion, and Americans in London, meaning it's a movie I know how to make, but wouldn't or haven't yet. 

now it is Friday, day seven of a candle ritual I have been performing. the candle will rest til burn-out on the counter opposite the daisies, opening roads, I hope for the best.

third-eye cubby corner

If you go down to Hammond

You’ll never come back…

Generous, sensual, even when aggressive: I am still not a person of scruples. Yet you will rarely see this manifest anywhere but in art, as in: writing allows me to cheat. To cheat at prose by taking off…the deadbeat dad of definition, explication, clarity. She renounces responsibility to structure for the wilds of illimitable play being the gist of what my eighth-grade science teacher noted regarding my baroque style of lab report. He told my parents that I described dissecting worms with the lexical élan of Daphne du Maurier novels. What they did with this information was enroll me in more worm dissecting classes. My worms were, like Daphne’s, humans and decaying social tissue. Placing each subject on a neutral glass slab, I would dismember it for parts unspoken.

So you see how…running multiple fronts of linguistic devilment we may bestow reality on the irreal barbs that otherwise pepper only our mostest intimacies. Writing allows me to cheat myself out of an awareness of all which has been said since word began…to stave off the scurrying rats of redundancy along the backroads of Just do with shadow puppets of my own largess…And in doing so, even coming somehow to tolerate the reviled selfsin of words reused on accident, for here, in the clearing…in the "second place" created by language…I may walk the streets possessed, a dog leashed to one wrist and a device in the other hand typing worldblind into [app] because word has come and to it alone I must attend.