"making surrealism each one's Other"

"Surrealism -- we cannot sense its destination otherwise -- is and has always been a collective experience. This is its first trait. Here we may suspect that Andre Breton's role was different from the one that is recognized through admiration, affection, or personal ill will as having been his. He was neither a master nor a guide, neither the leader of a party nor the head of a religion, any more than a simple arbiter or genius who would have taken the place of all others through his innocent superiority, founding a coherence and an existence where, without him, there would have been only the stirring of a few dreams or a configuration of ardent wishes. If he was predominant, he was only so outside the group, through his books, his prestige, and his radiant authority: his manner of being truthfully present everywhere. Perhaps, however, within surrealism, he had the particular power not of being the *one* any more than the others, but of making surrealism each one's Other, and in the attraction of this Other taken as a living presence-absence (a *beyond the day* at the horizon of a space unknown and without a beyond), of living it with friendship in the most rigorous sense of this exacting term: making the surrealist affirmation, in other words, a presence of a work of friendship.

Were the surrealists, then, no more than a group of friends? And should their mutual understanding, as well as their separations, be considered simply as the vicissitudes belonging to human relations, where what is involved is first a question of persons? Not in the least. Let us try to understand this more fully. Surrealism is always a third party in the friendship; an absent third term through which passes and through which issues this relation of tension and passion that effaces characters as it gives rise to and motivates initiatives and attractions. Whosoever falls short of surrealism (its coldest rules as well as its most burning affirmations) falls short of this friendship and excludes himself from any possibility of encounter, no matter whether he be companion or brother. It is not in the name of betrayed friendship that the exigency in play strikes those who place themselves outside the game; it is rather this exigency itself, making possible or impossible the relations that the rapproachements, encounters and exchanges determine at the level of the everyday, that leads them to a rigorous friendship, but a friendship always revocable, always short of what the surrealist demand might ask of it."
--Maurice Blanchot

Short Shadows*

1. Short Shadow

Under this equally
Sheltering image
We call each
Across
An ageless debris
Under this equally
Disturbed blue
Of a clear window it is early
Afternoon
Light fills the
Shelter of this image

Branches and we also
Have shadows shelters
For time
For we can not see an idea
Of our entire home
For time what we can not
Feel
Its windows
An idea of cities
Too immense for this

We also have shadows
We are also
Immense caressing
This particular night of
Ideas
Have you ever felt this if
You have ever
Felt this
The windows the
Thing in a dream
Is conspicuously invisible

A miracle of homelands
Shadows make their
Course
To shelter the passing
Windows of projections
He also
Makes images
Of things which could only exist
As images immense and
Uncapturable
Therefore locating

Uncapturable as
The memory is a thing and
Not a thing the
Mother of us all
Uncapturable as lips flee
All aspects in the dark
Of what we are

Or pretend is power
And not tenderness this
Feeling returns
Of the shadows of things
Crossing the sun
A cathedral in
Our dreams what won’t be
Imagined
This place without
Place
Makes for us
Other aspects of home

2. Address to Still

When is still still still?
After an advent of space
Nether of rust
Need
Of erase

Procure a feel
For paint immensity strips
Down
For a while in the light
Various stripes

Pushing at an edge of
Eye
When is eye eye?
When
Is eye still still?

We emerge in this immense waiting

3. That Shadow Portending
to Gregg Biglieri, Rob Halpern and Nick Lawrence

That shadow portending
Pretending
Out of the corner of the mind
There are
Stakes in the something
That also is

Pointing to our bones while
We fidget
Them like money
Pointing to
These breaks in the eye
So distant to be here
And vastly
Unawakened by crude

Commons of this cleave
Penury smudging the sight
Fickle and fiery
Is every loss gained
O pointing, portending
Economy’s effusive brains

4. Over-looking

Epilepsy flees this memory pad
Capitulating to an appearance
Of cartoons

As they flit over the face this is first
This grace
A counterfeiting of false flames
Aflicker in the eyes

A virtual snowfall
As they fell flakes engendered eyes
They have visions that this mountain range
And its shades
Will all have reverted to dust already

Over-looking untenable graves

*Short Shadows was composed Spring '05.

Lower Limit Hypnotic*

1. Eye Fixation

Would you like to find
a spot you can
look at comfortably
as you continue
looking
at that spot for awhile
do your eye-
lids
want to blink
will
those lids begin
to blink together
or separately
slowly
or quickly will they close
all at once or flutter
all by themselves
first
will those eyes
close more
and more as you get more
and more comfortable
that’s fine
can those eyes
now remain
closed as your comfort
deepens like when
you go to sleep
can that comfort continue
more and more
so that you’d rather
not even try
to open your eyes
or
would you rather
try and find you cannot
and how soon
will you forget
about them
altogether because
your unconscious wants
to dream.

2. Hand Levitation

Can you feel comfortable
resting
your hands
gently on your thighs
as therapist demonstrates that’s right
without letting
them touch each other
can you
let those hands rest
ever so lightly
so that the finger
tips just barely touch
your thighs that’s right
as they rest
ever so light
do you notice
how they tend
to lift up a bit
all by themselves with each
breath you take do they
begin
to lift even more
lightly and easily
by themselves
as the rest of your body relaxes
more and more
as that goes on
does one hand
or the other
or maybe both continue
lifting even more
and does that hand
stay up
and continue lifting
higher and higher
bit by bit
all by itself
does the other hand want to catch up
with it
or will
the other hand relax in your lap
that’s right
and does
that hand continue
lifting with these slight little jerking
movements
or does
the lifting get smoother
and smoother as the hand
continues
upwards
towards your face
does it move
more quickly
or slowly
as it approaches your face
with deepening comfort does it need
to pause a bit
before it finally touches your face
so you’ll know
you are going
into trance
and it won’t touch
until your unconscious is really ready
to let you go deeper
will it
and will your body
automatically take a deeper
breath when that hand
touches your face
as you really relax
and experience yourself going deeper
that’s right
and will you even
bother to notice
the deepening comfortable
feeling when that hand
slowly returns
to your lap all
by itself
and will your unconscious
be in a dream
by the time that hand
comes to rest

*Texts lifted from Milton Erickson's *Hypnotherapy*

A Total Sense of Sense

for Paul Sharits

"Seeing, at last, your mind as it must be at times in unendurable anguish, a series of events leading to that sense of self as burden, artaud making art of it, misery, saw your minding of such in my own horror, shocked, shaking my head a crazy catalogue of images, classical symbols, cartoons of grief -- but it is not always so and it is that lack of it which has to stand for joy in the absence of blessings -- and there are, in rare instances, blessings and you are often there at those places and I have a total sense of sense and you are absolutely cream, having to step on plastic flowers, my mind bursting, blossoming -- someday I will tell you my dreams when it is quiet and I am more willing to let the tragic have its due warmth -- that comes later; now I am content that my dreams were dreams."
--Paul Sharits, 1966

“This very task of destruction poses again, in the last resort, the question of a pure immediate violence that might be able to call a halt to mythical violence. Just as in all spheres God opposes myth, mythical violence is confronted by the divine. And the latter constitutes its antithesis in all respects. If mythical violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law-destroying; if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them; if mythical violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates; if the former threatens, the latter strikes; if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood.”
--Walter Benjamin


In these greatnesses these smallnesses great blue an instance
Of standing armies and waves opposite
Blue law of blue undreamt

Stick to everything no thing plastic flowers absolutely cream
The colors you see you see to hear
Of standing armies and standing waves
The law new law of red not sensed

Like the fourth clause of Augustine
No man should punish who does not love already in his heart
Is thus unpunishing
War could then be just (only contradiction is just)

Of a proposition red made blue blue made red
Wholly of another law unwoken in these tones
No man should punish who does not love already in his heart
Is thus unwarring
War might then be just (only con-spiration is just)

In this dream of armies the war of the sky
And the earth again elemental gigantomachia machine
His white eschatology Benjamin or Augustine
Whomsoever loves eternally holds no peace for the just

Only for the wicked conserve the pieces
The pieces again alighting our time
On earth tears shed mantles between men
Partition apart a Messiaen of varied light

And colors like tears begin
The colors of a cabinet
Cubby-holed to see sound appear
The colors you see you see to hear
A non-sense of number
“A total sense of sense”



Float tones a thing of forms the thinking does for war war also does

A thing of bones to think the flicker oxygen takes hard to hover pink
Float tones a thing of forms the thinking does for war war also does

More disgust by anthem the wind what earthly sense is this to flower
A thing of bones to think the flicker oxygen takes hard to hover pink
Float tones a thing of forms the thinking does for war war also does

False flowers to flower the false a thing of tones to put pieces in
More disgust by anthem the wind what earthly sense is this to flower
A thing of bones to think the flicker oxygen takes hard to hover pink
Float tones a thing of forms the thinking does for war war also does

The inside again brains emote this thought of tones a might of babes
False flowers to flower the false a thing of tones to put pieces in
More disgust by anthem the wind what earthly sense is this to flower
A thing of bones to think the flicker oxygen takes hard to hover pink
Float tones a thing of forms the thinking does for war war also does

Each misses each like tears asunder the tears of all invested by when
Cunnilingus a lingual thing reconciliation born in the where of red
Born out by the multiple mind wind more disgust by anthem the wind
The mind’s alibi each tear discloses the in itself one-by-one the for
For each frame is when where we are in sense to be total to be a piece

Cunnilingus a lingual thing reconciliation born in the where of red
Born out by the multiple mind wind more disgust by anthem the wind
The mind’s alibi each tear discloses the in itself one-by-one the for
For each frame is when where we are in sense to be total to be a piece

Born out by the multiple mind wind more disgust by anthem the wind
The mind’s alibi each tear discloses the in itself one-by-one the for
For each frame is when where we are in sense to be total to be a piece

The mind’s alibi each tear discloses the in itself one-by-one the for
For each frame is when where we are in sense to be total to be a piece

For each frame is when where we are in sense to be total to be a piece






Wage the each instant the occurring born in where the wager of each at piece a now so there

Stained to a voice stayed to a touch of them flowers the wages of them to recover each sense of when

Of wend the total doing our pieces go to light surrender red defender defender red

Of blue of blue the opposite is when pure means of will to render wind

To wend the opposite to encounter frame my number your number sympathetic share

Conspire tears of blue of blue or tear here

In the inside of the face

Swelled then the opposite is when flowers bend urgent flowers mind content to render
them

Alone alone one one each each all all

One one one two two not two bluish fog of war so blended frame

Your frame of when your frame of when your frame of when your frame of when rushed to blue vertical red horizontal hold to defend

When frame is where number frame is where number frame is where number wends and split

The each for the all all of a piece the each for the each out of place to move space the each

To piece end war to piece piece end war end piece end piece war end war piece don’t end red don’t end don’t end red don’t end blue reconcile don’t end wend don’t end when to not stop the tears a furtive reel

A feel for sense of number for sense of number when a sense of when is enough

Conspire tears of blue of blue or tear here

In the inside of the face

Swelled then the opposite is when flowers bend urgent flowers mind content to render
them

“Take me
[understanding] from grief
and take me
to yourselves from understanding
[and] grief.
And take me
to yourselves from places
that are ugly and in ruin,
and rob from those
which are good even though in ugliness.
Out of shame, take me
to yourselves shamelessly;
and out of shamelessness
and shame, upbraid my members
in yourselves.
And come forward to me,
you who know me
and you who
know my members,
and
establish the great ones among the small
first creatures.
Come forward to childhood,
and do not despise it
because it is small and it is little.
And do not turn away
greatness in some parts from the
smallnesses,
for
the smallnesses are known
from the greatnesses.”

In these greatnesses these smallnesses great blue an instance
Of standing armies and waves opposite
Blue law of blue undreamt

War could then be just (only contradiction is just)

Thomas Hirschhorn's "Superficial Engagement" (Review: Part II)

2. Devoted Materialism: beginning in the form of a letter to Fanzine/Casey McKinney

“How with this rage can beauty hold a plea…”
--Shakespeare

“One must make a friend of horror.”
--Chris Marker quoting Marlon Brando quoting Joseph Conrad

“Mythical violence is bloody power over mere life for its own sake, divine violence pure power over all life for the sake of the living. The first demands sacrifice, the second accepts it.”
--Walter Benjamin

I have been thinking a lot about the problem of submitting a journalistic account or account otherwise of Thomas Hirschhorn’s recent show at Barbara Gladstone gallery in Chelsea, *Superficial Engagement* (2006). What I admire about Fanzine is the extent to which it presents itself conversationally, and to this extent communicates things worth knowing in fresh and accessible ways. Yet there is something that has not allowed me to be so conversational or journalistically inclined (and that has in fact made me dread my critical freedom) in the face of Hirschhorn’s recent showing. Why have I dreaded so? Is it because *SE* brings to a head the deepest ambivalences I have felt about the US response to 9/11 and subsequent events: ambivalences which situate the artist between the exigencies of political effectiveness and the necessities of transcendence -- our recourses to devotion, to the divine? Our resources.

The thing about *SE* – and why I feel it to be one of the artist’s most important works to date, and perhaps a significant marking point for art in general – is that it aligns itself with two aesthetic tendencies, and in doing so goes beyond these tendencies producing a third. The first of these tendencies is abstraction: the highly rational, beautiful, and “rested”-Classical. This tendency is embodied by a host of devotional reference points: Emma Kunz’s theosophical drawings, images from works of “color musicians,” as well as kitschy reproductions of 80’s “spiral art” and other post-psychedelic craft forms. Precariously, in a clash of culturally sanctioned forms (however marginalized, or outside) and mass-products, such references appeal to a power of the beautiful to calm, rest and inhere to it spiritual power – a metaphysical potential “to heal” Hirschhorn himself sites as one of the objectives of his latest work. The second tendency, a tendency arguably inverse of the first, presents through the most direct means violent actualities -- a severed head, or a barely recognizable human body standing in a pool of blood; and in so doing burdens the viewer’s gaze with overwhelming images and signs of manifest violence. This phenomena Jean-Francois Lyotard may likely call the ”presentation of the unpresentable,” and his contemporary, Emmanuel Levinas, an instantiation of the “there is” – the anarchic night of creation itself -- commesurable with ethical repsonsibility.

Considering the ethics of this second tendency – to present directly beyond ponderability, or comprehension: where to pre-hend, or grasp in advance of feeling, would be to violate the responsibility of voiding one’s gaze, witnessing beyond witness or looking awry -- it is crucial the extent to which many of Hirschhorn’s Afghani and Iraqui figures are dis-figured, that is, lacking faces as portals of commandment and absolute obligation; instead, what may remain of obligation is a transcendental lack-in-excess, the excessive (non-)presences of photographed corpses striking-out a merely human economy of legal-moral retribution. Not only in the images of mutilation, but in the sheer volume of blown-up headlines embodying a thick fog of media-warfare, the viewer is caught in the throes of a type of negative transcendence: a failure to transcend, to sublate or synthesize, a series of messages in excess of what they would say -- noisy in their contradiction, often tragically pleasant in their paratactical sense-making. Between sublimation and a transcendent negativity, “Chromatic Fire” and “Concrete Shock” (the names of two of Hirschhorn’s three rooms at Gladstone), between spiritualist “Abstraction” and immaneticist “Constructivism,” there is an ambivalence which may constitute a third tendency: to choose both tendencies, and in so choosing to put them into utmost tension with each other. An oscillation pattern we may write to infinity: to heal to overwhelm to not heal…

*

If there is any problem I have with claiming Hirschhorn for “critical theory,” as many critics have done productively and which much of the contemporary art world resists for its own reasons, it is that he is a devotional artist, an artist devoted to divine presence through a highly unique, and recent, form of materialism. This devoted materialism – a materialism as much after Mondrian, Malevitch and other Abstractionists as it is the philosophers Hannah Arendt, George Bataille, Gilles Deleuze, and Baruch Spinoza – would maintain the radical freedom of the artist as a noble actor within collective cultural struggle (“The decision to be an artist is the decision to be free. Freedom is the condition of responsibility”), while simultaneously realizing the suspension of this very freedom in the depersonalization of Abstraction for itself.

By a chiasmus of these two positions: radical agency and transcendental depersonalization, I wonder if we can not locate a radical position towards violence, one that has been opened up by the recent publications of Giorgio Agamben, in which the philosopher discusses what he calls “states of exception”. Particularly relevant to Hirschhorn’s recent work is Agamben’s reading of the debates between Carl Schmitt and Walter Benjamin concerning the “state of exception” in Germany during the first World War. If, as Agamben shows after Benjamin, states of exception are exceptions that historically ground the rule of democratic and totalitarian states alike then one should look elsewhere, in states beyond states of exception, to recover that which remains beyond the rule of both natural and cultural law: beyond “bare life” (Agamben) and “mere life” (Benjamin): the reduction of bodies to biological states of subsistence in the suspension of legal conventions grounded by constitutional law and international agreements regarding human rights.

For Benjamin, this state beyond states of exception is achieved by two means: by passional acts constitutive of “pure means,” or means no longer directed towards a juridical or moral result -- unpurposeful as such; and in “divine violence” that is “law-destroying,” that in its anarchism interrupts law as a source of juridical retribution and as the fulfillment of mythical fates. “This very task of destruction poses again, in the last resort, the question of a pure immediate violence that might be able to call a halt to mythical violence. Just as in all spheres God opposes myth, mythical violence is confronted by the divine. And the latter constitutes its antithesis in all respects. If mythical violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law-destroying; if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them; if mythical violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates; if the former threatens, the latter strikes; if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood.”(Benjamin, “Critique of Violence”)

The punches *SE* packs I believe to be ones “lethal without spilling blood” insofar as they put its audience face-to-face with divinity as presented by creative force and aesthetic determination. If these creative forces bear-out their effects directly in the printouts and Xeroxes of mutilated bodies and the confusion of headlines ripped from the contexts of various Western media sources, these forces may have a symbolic effect through their correspondence of contemporary mannequins and African sculptures both riddled with nails. While the first force puts the audience in the presence of the “unpresentable” (Lyotard) and the “there is” (Levinas), the second, symbolic one indicates a post-mythical function of art itself: to substitute a creative violence of works of art for a violence of territorialization and retributive warfare. This later violence, the violence of true Holy War beyond “fundamentalism” and cynical “secularism” alike, of divinity beyond mythos, is that which may trump the reduction of bodies to “mere life” and “bare life” the stakes of which we see playing out currently in Guantanamo and elsewhere. It is the violence, lastly, of sacrificial expiations, a pure immediate violence Benjamin’s contemporary, Georges Bataille, recognized as the very opposite of warfare itself in its glorious wages, its infinite use and malicious possessiveness: “In deadly battles, in massacres and pillages, it has meaning akin to that of festivals, in that the enemy is not treated as a thing. But war is not limited to these explosive forces and, within these very limits, it is not a slow action as sacrifice is, conducted with a view to a return to lost intimacy. It is a disorderly eruption whose external direction robs the warrior of the intimacy he attains. And if it is true that warfare tends in its own way to dissolve the individual through a negative wagering of the value of his own life, it cannot help but enhance his value in the course of time by making the surviving individual the beneficiary of the wager.”(Bataille, Theory of Religion) Against the wages of Iraq and elsewhere and the ravaging of the United States and its allies, Thomas Hirschhorn has waged his own battle: a battle that should not result in loss of "mere life," and that if it has anything to gain, may gain “sovereign violence” (Benjamin) once again through the sacrifices of profaned creation.

Punishment Park (States of Exception)

On recently watching Peter Watkins' '71 film, *Punishment Park*, a post-Vietnam documentary-style account of the (fictional) partisan hearings and punishments of late 60's "radicals," I thought of obvious parallels to the current geo-political situation (Patriot Act, Abu Grahib, Guantanamo...) and the debate between Carl Schmitt/Walter Benjamin concerning "states of exception" recently taken up again by Giorgio Agamben and others. Here are some notes I took weeks ago, with the film in mind as a teaching companion to Agamben's short, but seminal book:

Degrees of Exception:
1. Suspension of constitution.
2. Suspension of legal processes founded by constitution.
3. The suspension of laws founding the police as force of law, the law enacted thru punishment.

Thru these three completely related degrees of exception, the prisoners of Watkins' *Punishment Park* are reduced to what Agamben calls "bare life": a state of "natural law" before, after or in the suspension of laws "human". However there is a psychological cunundrum in Punishment, a canundrum we must accept in order to embrace the reality of its diegesis. And this is that the characters *unanimously* choose the park – thus opening themselves to be punished to any end without a constitution or other legal grounds for their punishment. For this viewer, watching the characters choose their punishment (as opposed to not choosing at all, and thereby going to jail) was not unlike watching when in horror films the characters decide to split into groups, or go out on a limb only to meet the monster, ghost, badguy, etc. In choosing punishment park, Watkins' characters affirm both the lawlessness and total juridical-social power of their judges. The only resistances that remain for them: reasonable dialogue (with completely unreasonable parties); to sustain a rhetoric of the courtroom (without legal precedent or established procedure); hysterical outburst, name-calling, childish self-objectification (something Jean Baudrillard, coincidentally, advocates for political struggles in an age of "simulation"); consent to the labyrinthine (however non-Kafkan, insofar as an unpredicatble purposefulfulness remains) law of the oppressor (who should only modify the rules of the game as the game is played) and an accompanying hope for freedom thru this means (to reach the appointed flag if they survive heat/cold of desert, dehydration, natural perils, personal disability); to kill, revolt, act psychotically; to appeal, by whatever of these means, to the camera -- the camera of the film being also the diegetic camera of a BBC television team making a documentary about punishment park: curiously, Watkins’ camera team remains "objective" until the final moments of the film, when a voice I assume to be the filmmaker’s addresses the police and national guardsmen, chastising them for their treatment of the prisoners; and this moment of witness pointing to an extra-legal and moral authority beyond the situation of the characters (the Brits? the rest of world outside U.S.) seems one of the few hopeful throughout the film...

I am particularly interested in the decisions the characters make in this film, and Watkins' creation of a hyperbolic situation both of (in)justice (on the part of the tribunal/police) and false agency (on the part of the prisoners). One that, insofar as it frustrates, brings out contradictions of/in "the law" and the way society functions thru a series of ideologies (the partisan tribunal representing these ideological strongholds)... Yet it is disappointing in its either/or-ness, its binarity. Where thought is not at a level of dialogue, or rhetoric, but in the inability for speech to succeed in the face of a certain despairing situation of the law, and in which hope would seem to lie only outside that situation -- not in the "state of exception" (where law reigns absolutely) nor in the social contract (dialectically substantiated by the exceptional state), but elsewhere -- in an eschaton, in revolutionary violences very much like the ones Watkins' characters are ostensibly being prosecuted for. It is this vicious circle which ultimately frustrates, and its resemblance to our current situation, where everything the characters do -- act reasonably, act out, appeal to an extra-legal situation -- only seem to result in the continuation of a self-fulfilling program of radical misjustice. It leaves me wondering, with Agamben, where a force beyond the law, beyond the state of exception, remains active. What Benjamin himself called tragically "the current messianic elements" and "the straight gate of the Messiah".

The Fate of Number

for Alain Badiou

BEACUSE THE SOUL AND BODY
OF THE IMAGINATION
ARE BEYOND ECONOMY
LEGALITY AS MEANS
MORALITY AS ENDS
SO MUCH DO THEY LOVE
THEIR MEANS WITHOUT QUALIFICATION
THEREFORE PASIONATELY

*

So the mind
must make
one
and can't make one.

So we must
love
each other
and love the abstract.

So this is a notion
of what subjects are
together, intersubjective
ground of love.

So there must always be
love for the mind.

So the mind is
what we love,
powers of mind.

So the eyes are the first sign
we see
of the mind, the eyes
and their cancellations,
their voiding.

So there are words.

There is perhaps a one that is not one.
The mind is such a one.
The mind as imaginal, a soul as such.
That thing most capable of love, these things.
The heart, the mind, the breath.
The heart's hallucination.
It's subtlest images, in the mind.
Of the mind...

*

A LIMIT INSCRIBED IN PLATO
(A PLATONISM WITHOUT GUARANTEE)

Why can't one one be one one be?
Why can't one one and one one be two?
Why can't one and one and one be one?
One and one, perhaps only one?

There is no numericity
in the outside again,
none inside.

Just the movement of the all
and each.

Multiplicity
destroying number
in order that it may be saved...

Intuiting Beuys (Project)

To produce intuitions (a purer knowing?) from meditations on individual drawings from Madrid Codices (1974). Through a form of repetition not unlike that Leonardo uses to begin in inchoates towards discovering forms, or Beuys uses after Leonardo at the level both of word and drawing.

Here I am most interested in the conveyance of energy as graphic mark, whether letter or drawing -- or sound as Beuys recognizes it to also make marks in air, to leave acoustical traces... If there were such thing as an ontological acoustical trace, Beuys wld definitely leave it thru his drawings...

Beuys' drawings seem not just figuratively, but literally of tracings. As tho the holographies, the holographic tracings, of different bodies, objects, schemes, words. A holography or typology of energy patterns. Marks constituted by different energies overlaying each other -- interpenetrating, intussucepting. Coeval and yet heterogenous, as such.

Others Letters: Ryan Chowdhury...

3/8/06 on Jim Behrle, Rhys Chatham @ Tonic, the Grand Ducal family of Luxembourg, and Iraq

"Thanks for the link. Phunny
stuph. Chatham
was great fun--warm
& fuzzy
guitar minimalism,
pulsing down
that mass-
tonal highway. Rock
musicians
as members
of the high school minimalist band.
A piece called
"Out of Tune Guitars",
for,
guess what,
6-7 hastily detuned guitars.
Fuck--
I'm checking a
society column, what's the
current slang for "ennui"?
& how come the
British, Swedish & Belgian
royal families have official web sites,
but not the
Grand Ducal family of Luxembourg?
What are they hiding?
Where are they hiding?
Did you know
Prince Harry (3rd in line
for British throne)
might go
to Iraq to fight?
What if he got
abducted & had his head lopped off on
videotape-- 1789 comes
to England,
about bloody time.
Speaking of which, do
you think
I could get a Fullbright
if I applied to study in Iraq? One idea is
I could just go
there &
retype Kipling's
"White Man's Burden,"
except heavily redacted. [...]"*

*my lineations

"The mind gives an order..."

"Why does this strange phenomenon occur? What causes it? O Lord in your mercy give me light to see, for it may be that the answers to my question lies in the secret punishment of man and in the penitence which casts a deep shadow on the sons of Adam. Why does this strange phenomena occur? What causes it? The mind gives an order to the body and is at once obeyed, but when it gives an order to itself, is resisted. The mind commands the hand to move and is so readily obeyed that the order can scarcely be distinguished from its execution. Yet the mind is mind and the hand is part of the body. But when the mind commands the mind to make an act of will, these two are one and the same and yet the order is not obeyed. Why does this happen? What is the cause of it? The mind orders itself to make an act of will, and it would not give this order unless it willed to do so; yet it does not carry out its own command. But it does not fully will to do this thing and therefore its orders are not fully given. It gives the order only in so far as it wills, and in so far as it does not will the order is not carried out. For the will commands that an act of will should be made, and it gives this command to itself, not to some other will. The reason, then, why the command is not obeyed is that it is not given with the full will. For if the will were full, it would not command itself to be full, since it would be so already. It is therefore no strange phenomenon partly to will to do something and partly to will not to do it. It is a disease of the mind, which does not wholly rise to the heights where it is lifted by the truth, because it is weighed down by habit. So there are two wills in us, because neither by itself is the whole will, and each possesses what the other lacks."

-- from Augustine's Confessions
Book XIII.
Chapter 9

3 Sketches for Sharits / "How with this rage can beauty hold a plea?"*

1.
A Total Sense of Sense (END WAR)

In soliloquy
For color
We are doubled

Triply for speech
What we would say
Saying

Of the colors in soliloquy
Or of a piece
The pieces

What pieces
Were you holding
So quick and not quick

The calm
Velocities of colors
Kunz cunnilingus awash

A total sense of sense
In this
Your utter plastics utterly not

For war
The stillness
Of those flickers ripped

From the colored
Ideations
Remaining arrest

What is dreamt of the colors
In soliloquy
Or of a piece

For speech
What we should say
Saying

2.
Mandala (for two or more voices)

Devoid delaying
Lacrimose injunction
Imageless motion
More than branch
Voicelessly Devoid
delaying Lacrimose
injunction Imageless
motion More than
branch Voicelessly…

3.

A blue word a red one a green
So go these tone rows
The blues

A blue word
A yellow an orange
If dreams were only dreams, their due warmth,

We hath not seen
We have dreamt bottomlessly
The sounds swelling, their due warmth their vigils

Call light to light
Separate dark from demonic dark
Paraclete

Go down
To these tones of red in a row
Pinkish-red of sex dreaming again

Of rest in this war, this human war
And the cosmic,
Dream the bottomless subject

& beyond.
If one could only rest
History would be purchased

And memory protected
By forgetfulness,
Art would once again be…

“It can be understood that the now
is the permanent point of origin
for the ecstasies of time.”

*Next Monday, March 13th I will be reading at the 11th Street Bar (on E. 11th btwn Avenues A & B) with Forrest Gander and Karen Garthe as part of the Reading Between A and B series, curated by Jonathan Thirkield. "3 Sketches" are three lineated drafts or "sketches" towards a longer work for Paul Sharits, who in 1966 made his seminal film-"mandala" ostensibly to "end war": *Piece Mandala/End War*. Alongside a politics of direct action and address, the dissemination of knowledge and a ruthless critique of the atrocities in Iraq and elsewhere by the hands of the United States and aligned international forces, I wonder if "peace" should not also still be sounded after a tradition that enfolds any number of poets and artists, not the least of which include: Sharits, Jackson Mac Low, Pauline Oliveros, Gertrude Stein, Agnes Martin, Piet Mondrian, John Taggart, Olivier Messiaen, Terry Riley, Steve Reich....

Between the need for participatory intervention and ecstatic overdetermination in the mediatized face of violent malice "how with this rage can beauty hold a plea"?

Into Bride: Inventing a Resurrectional Cinema (Paper)

If I had the time here, I would like to provide a taxonomy of Maya Deren’s cinema – a cinema that for many of us who make and care for post-cinematic media may be said to be the mother of us all. Something that has seemed curious to me for a while now is that Deren’s work is not addressed by Gilles Deleuze’s *Cinema* books, those hieroglyphs the philosopher himself describes as “an attempt at the classification of images and signs.” The closest Deleuze may come to addressing Deren, arguably, is in his analyses of Beckett’s *Film*, in which Buster Keaton finds himself in an objective cinematic space that one might call Derenesque. Then again, we may also begin to imagine what Deleuze may have had to say about Deren when he discusses those inverse geniuses of the Hollywood musical: Kelly and Astaire.

This extraordinary exclusion (or occlusion) is surprising to the extent that Deren – as a critic, poet, and filmmaker – like Deleuze, privileged cinematic images *as* ideas and not merely as the expressions of a psychological content or data. Among the image-ideas Deren presents through her works, the most insistent of these seem the images of movements, movements eventually extensive with dance and ecstatic psychoses. This concern for movement – for movement *of* and *in* cinematic space – originates in Deren’s first mature work, a work the filmmaker herself describes as an “emotional complex”: her ’43 collaboration with Alexander Hammid, *Meshes of the Afternoon*.

One of the ostensible concerns of this symposium is for “gendered spatiality”. For the remainder of this presentation, I would like to briefly consider how space is gendered in Deren’s *Meshes of the Afternoon*, and how Deren’s film exceeds problems of gender as problems all too often of the merely identificatory and human.

--Meshes may very literally be said to be gendered insofar as the three figures we see in the film (excluding Deren’s shadow, which picks a flower off the road in the opening shot; and her multiple body doubles) are Deren herself, Hammid, and a cloaked figure who wears a mirror on its face or, as is more likely the case, with a mirror *for* a face. Beyond this enigmatic and foreboding third figure we are, then, dealing with a binary relation: man/woman, and man/woman specifically in erotic encounter.

--It does not become clear that this is an erotic encounter until we see the couple ascend a staircase to a bedroom where the two lie down on a bed, and where the man caresses the woman, and the woman responds, amorously at first, however eventually by drawing a knife murderously from under her pillow. What occurs after this is interesting: upon the drawing of the knife we see a photogramme of Hammid, his medium close-up double exposed with a shot of a mirror the knife appears to shatter. Cut to the mirror-shards falling into a tide, sticking to the sand, and finally a subjective shot from the man's perspective of the woman dead on a chair with the mirror shards covering her body and scattered around her feet.

How can we read what I can not help but read as a suicide?

In Artaud’s seminal work on Van Gogh he speaks of the artist ‘suicided by society’: that is, put into a situation where her own vitalities, forces, and desires are turned against her by the reactive forces of her society. The result of this inward turning we may consider a specific category of suicide itself, if not suicide’s essence, and the very opposite or inverse of Spinozan conativity -- that is, the costriving of beings towards production, reasonable discource, and joy.

Elsewhere, in terms of the situation of women “suicide bombers” or "Martyrs" (as they are called by their communities) I have wondered if the elusive “emotion complex” of Deren’s Meshes embodies what I will call, for lack of a better term, suicidal becoming or emergence in reverse.

--Thru Nietzsche’s Zarathustra we get the dice throw as an ethics of decision and consequence, where the thrower wills what she is and, perhaps more importantly, what she does, for all time, that is, for eternity. However this eternity is not Plato’s eternity of transcendental archetypes, but what Deleuze recognizes as the “disjunctive synthesis” of instances constitutive of Universal Becoming as Cosmic Duration.

--Like Nietzche, through his notion of “creative evolution,” Henri Bergson (one of the few philosophers to whom Deren refers in her published writings) imagines a similar eternity whereby life forms continually become actualized – invented or anewed -- within a duration both universal and heterogeneous.

Deren’s Meshes deals radically with gender insofar as it imagines radically the situation of a woman suicided. This woman I actually believe the filmmaker to repetedly resurrect thru the subsequent movements of her films, and most clearly in *Ritual in Transfigured Time*, where Deren presents the transformation of what she calls “widow into bride.” Is the widow of Transfigure not the widow of herself, the woman who dies, suicided in Meshes, and who remains at the close of Meshes to be resurrected: by movement, by dance, by spirit-possession, and, mainly, by cinematic space itself?

Meshes (and all of Deren’s films for that matter) finally present a beyond of gender as Deren posits that beyond in creative difference, and this is insofar as she imagines the suicide of her protagonist (and a possible being-suicided) as the very inverse of genetic coming-to-be. Deren herself expresses this wonderfully in a 1955 letter to James Card: “As the girl with the knife rises there is a close-up of her foot as she begins striding. The first step is in the sand (with suggestion of sea behind), the second stride (cut in) is in grass, third is on pavement, and the fourth is on the rug, and then the camera cuts up to her head with the hand with the knife descending towards the sleeping girl. What I meant when I planned that four stride sequence was that you have to come a long way – from the beginning of time – to kill yourself, like the first life emerging from the primeval waters.”

*Presented at "The Inventing Space of Cinema," curated by Caroline Koebel, March 1st 2006 @ SUNY-Buffalo.

The Movement of Movement

--for Maya Deren


The mother
Of us all
Mother
Is movement
1st movement
1st as dance
Is naked
The naked
Form of movement
A space where things
Can no longer be put
Simply put, is time

Transfigured
For the body the
Body arrested
Transfigured
To rest
In the edit
Cut
Cut to dance on film
Is something different
Inventive
To edit this
To fall or ascend

Or grace
Some affirmation the mother
Of us all
Born in that movement
1st movement of movement
The empty body
The body
Before the body
The body after the body
Was the body
Lightened, ever lightened
By air and light.

Thomas Hirschhorn’s “Superficial Engagement” (Review: Part 1)

Art is higher than reality, and has no direct relation to reality. Between the physical sphere and the ethereal sphere there is a frontier where our senses stop functioning. Nevertheless, the ether penetrates the physical sphere and acts upon it. Thus the spiritual penetrates the real. But for our senses these are two different things—the spiritual and the material. To approach the spiritual in art, one will make as little use as possible of reality, because reality is opposed to the spiritual. Thus the use of elementary forms is logically accounted for. These forms being abstract, we find ourselves in the presence of an abstract art.
--Piet Mondrian, from Art and Reality

To go deeply into something, I first must begin with the surface. The truth of things, its own logic, is reflected on the surface.
--Thomas Hirschhorn, from the press release for Superficial Engagement

1. As of flatness: a devotion
Return to Matt Ronay’s comment at PS1 this past December: that death is our lasting sexuality after Iraq and 9/11. Is trauma then totally interiorized, left, as we are, to the horrors of the imaginary inside and without, to an inwardly imagination converting terror to terror, and terror also to love (cruel or otherwise)? Loving only the mutilations of the Universal, the whole “human war,” our slogan may be a prophetic one of the imagination’s call: “to heal or to war.” A mystical slogan no doubt, however one not finally against beautiful rationalizations or the affections of reason.

If, as Hirschhorn says in the Gladstone press release for Superficial Engagement (hereafter: SE), the only way to go “deeper” (to assume truth as depth) is to spend more time with “surfaces” – to seek truth in the horizontality of a total surface which becomes, given time and attention, a depth in truthfulness (a truth of the false or simulacral: the truth that horizontality, too, can bear witness) we are in the thick of the thick (the thick of a thickness intensified in spreading). “We” (those of us who attended Thomas Hirschhorn’s recent show) remain in the throes of a directness, an immediacy perhaps: direct actions, direct communications, a "too-much" of presentation; the directness of Punk/D.I.Y. ethos, of Constructivist “anti-aestheticism,” and of war’s total, mediatized face – for all to see (or miss in seeing the all). To pixellate (post-Video and long past transcendentalist Abstraction, Mondrian, etc.) is also to flatten. Pursuing this truth in flatness, the grainy truth; the truth of photographic circles of confusion or low res. internet printouts and Xeroxes set into more or (decidedly) less global circulation.

As of flatness looms Mondrian and other Modernists for Hirschhorn. Benjamin Buchloh recognizes in the artist the inheritance of an attempt to posit the art object in its formal purity (and thus “reality”) in order to transcend the particular subject both as author (artist) and receptionist (viewer): to de-identify through Abstraction towards Theosophical-utopian resorts (Mondrian of course holding dear his copies of Madame Blavatsky and Rudolf Steiner; Hirschhorn Mondrian and other Modernists, including, most recently, the “healer” and draughtsman, Emma Kunz, and “color-musician,” Richard Land). But there is another flatness (or a complementary one) that the artist cannot help but negotiate. A “flatness,” “frontality,” “iconicity” of the art object directly presenting, if not communicating, a series of signs as facts, a telepathy or psycho-kinesis of facts if you will… --this art which refuses to aestheticize its political effectiveness (and is hence typically Modernist in its negativity), and when it does forsake this effectiveness does so towards a critique or deconstruction of aesthetic categories and "tastes".

What could be more directly communicating of revolting signs than a severed head, or a barely recognizable human body standing in a pool of blood; what more than a host of texts lifted from various prominent (and not so prominent) media sources… hanging together, a sublime mess, through Hirschhorn’s signature materials: packaging and other common household tapes, nails, screws, cardboard boxes – a detritus of loose and timely material adhering? And this directness (for lack of a better term), a directness so apparently lacking from mainstream political discourse (or art for that matter) is affective, which is to say an emotional thing striking at the heart of the gallery goer, the goer moralizing (and yet in perfect ambivalence about the purpose of art as an instrument of “Moralism” or “sublimation”) before the propinquities and adjacencies of the artist’s “mess”. A mess determinate, yet irresolvable, if to resolve is to terminate any means of productive emotional and critical response, an engagement anything but superficial.

Such an affectivity, that Hirschhorn has produced an affective environment beyond mere “installation,” may account for the fact that everyone has a reaction to his work (whatever which way they are moved). I have certainly found this to be the case in other reviews and in conversations with friends and total strangers about Hirschhorn, including many whose first encounter with the artist’s work was his most recent showing.

The artist is, then, neither a mirror to reflect the world in which she lives, nor a hammer with which to smash said mirror, so much as the bearer of common and extraordinary problems (common problems, then again, often being the most extraordinary) of culture at its most extreme points of pressure, and of the ambivalences these plays of pressure produce irresolvable beyond their presentation. Which is to say, Hirschhorn is valuable to me insofar as his work produces an irreducibility of imponderables. And that these imponderables demand response at the limit where thoughts become feeling (affect) and feeling thought (in between them remaining, perhaps, a profound emptiness; the space in which thought as feeling actively occurs, is born out). As much as ever (and after the 80’s hegemony of critical theory, whereby theory could only stand to frustrate or, worse yet, moralize aesthetic actions) we need the arduous messes of artists such as Hirschhorn.

After Waves*

to Aaron Miller
after Gary Hill and Paul Sharits

Children repeat
This wave after me
This image is something
That changes waves
A grainy voice
Should glisten
On this sea

Turns of phrase

The image is something
That changes shape
The image
Something that
Shapes change
A voice
Seen should
Listen to me

Turning grain after grain

Repeat this wave
Repeat after me the
Image is something
Heard distantly
Here is why
We have some stake in color

Heterodyne ~ turn these waves off

Flick them on turning
Phrase after
Phrase
Images should be
Heard
And not seen
Not on these dark waves

These waves turning on and on

Children repeat
To make a change
There is
No reversing
These waves
Only enacting world

These phrases turning like waves

They tune to
Our dreams hetero-
dyne
That a boat was too
Small on that
Sea
That
A phrase was too small
For its frame

From this distance turning grain after grain

As the waves turn off and
Off
Repeat this wave
This word after waves
Heterodyne
A voice is something that
Distorts words
Making them occur

Repeat this image a grainy voice flicks

Children repeat this effect after me

*composed Winter-Spring '05

"a total sense of sense" (the Senseless)

"Seeing, at last, your mind as it must be at times in unendurable anguish, a series of events leading to that sense of self as burden, artaud making art of it, misery, saw your minding of such in my own horror, shocked, shaking my head a crazy catalogue of images, classical symbols, cartoons of grief -- but it is not always so and it is that lack of it which has to stand for joy in the absence of blessings -- and there are, in rare instances, blessings and you are often there at those places and I have a total sense of sense and you are absolutely cream, having to step on plastic flowers, my mind bursting, blossoming -- someday I will tell you my dreams when it is quiet and I am more willing to let the tragic have its due warmth -- that comes later; now I am content that my dreams were dreams."
--Paul Sharits, 1966

The Thunder : Perfect Mind*

Take me
[understanding] from grief
and take me
to yourselves from understanding
[and] grief.
And take me
to yourselves from places
that are ugly and in ruin,
and rob from those
which are good even though in ugliness.
Out of shame, take me
to yourselves shamelessly;
and out of shamelessness
and shame, upbraid my members
in yourselves.
And come forward to me,
you who know me
and you who
know my members,
and
establish the great ones among the small
first creatures.
Come forward to childhood,
and do not despise it
because it is small and it is little.
And do not turn away
greatness in some parts from the
smallnesses,
for
the smallnesses are known
from the greatnesses.

*from *The Nag Hammadi Library*, trans. George W. MacRae, ed. Douglas M. Parrott (my lineation)...

Innocence (a proposition)*

for Robert Creeley

“… but blinds as it blinds
itself through
what it illuminates.”
-- Jean Francois Lyotard

Some times I know
What it is
To be exposed

What I am to be
This dark singing
Under a lamp.

It is not
To do anything
Not what

We would want
To do, as in
Any impulse

But by necessity
To feel everything
Outside inside

The “dark singing
under a lamp"—
as are such burdens.

I know it is to be
Born out by that
Total regard

Of what it is to be
Seeing also
In a light’s edges.

Song,
Of necessity turning
Cast us back

So to think
The lines
Themselves.

*composed Winter-Spring '05

Bouquat On* (Review)

For the past seven years, Abby Walton (along with collaborators Beth Houfek, Sarah Saltzman and others) has been throwing a Valentine's party (qua gallery-sized "installation"/qua all night dance-off) she calls a "bouquat." Says Walton, the bouquat originates in parties her parents and their friends used to throw around Valentine's day in Columbus, Ohio. In the past the bouquat has had the (often twin) themes of: swans (Swanny Boquat), bears/berries (Beary Bear Boquat), weather/fast food (Windy's Taco Tornado), mandables and chocolate (Cocoa Clap). This year's bouquat is called Taj Mahal Twilight, and features (who can guess?) the motifs Taj Mahal and stars.

In addition to making elaborate wall and ceiling hangings, wallpaper, baked goods, kissing booths, and playing dance music (generally Hip-Hop and more recently Reggaeton) each year Walton and her collaborators also provide party favors after their theme. This year's favor is a collaboration between myself and Walton, a horoscope which I post below.

Combining folk-"craftiness" with art school "knowing" the bouquat (like much of Walton's work) is an original negotiation of recent gallery-sized installations/environments (of Whitney Biennial or Chelsea galleries) and the more traditional design sensibilities of the party thrower. What makes a difference in this later category is the sheer amount of work and attention to detail the artist gives to the bouquat, an event for which she prepares the entire year round, and for which she is helped by many hands (gathering materials, printing, baking, hanging).

Among other projects Walton is currently at work on, you may also check her ongoing self-portaiture (she has taken a Polaroid of herself nearly every day for the past 5 years), and her "Ponathons," a sewing circle where instead of sewing the participants make miniature pom-poms from a variety of yarrns and other materials. Walton is also the maker of any number of limited edition books, including our collaboration Tears Are These Veils (Wild Horses of Fire, 2004).
ARIES - March 21 to April 20.
There is no more need to war. Your spirit itself is a sign of moving, fatalistically current. Blinking, believing you are. You are the planet closest to the sun and said to be reddened. Tonight you will discover things as they are.

TAURUS - between April 21 to May 21.
You have so many means to be bright. And wistful on this current day of stars. On this current day when you are going to belong to someone. Beauty holds its own rejoinders.

GEMINI - May 22 to June 21 Mercury.
Don’t divide men. Men and women Mercury. Your mirror’s too tidy to be the twin. To be the twin of discourse, of conversation. Your place or mine? You give birth to yourself but there is another who awaits you nearby.

CANCER - between June 22 to July 22.
Perpetual betrothals. Moons suggest the words of your ascensions, the degrees of your downs. Your magnetic directness is a telepathy of noon-tide. Kisses are now or never.

LEO - July 23 to August 23. Their keywords are I will, Sun.
Your keywords are I will. You will be my courage. My gravity. We must split. And sever tongues. To become the set. Is always was. To play at grace. To love becoming one only.

VIRGO - between August 24 to September 22.
I have analyzed once and for all. The moon and the stars. The stars inside. Your love is not just for the future. It is the true love of experiment. A present surpassed by your patience.

LIBRA - September 23 to October 23.
If only you were the world. The world would be a balance. Of the pachyderm on the tortoise and the tortoise on a pearl. That is, you are the green world. The green world of latest things. Everyone reveling in your love.

SCORPIO - October 24 to November 22.
Be thankful. You who desire Pluto. Sometimes you would like to use whips and sometimes a feather boa. Mainly you see the thing you want, however far away. And don’t tend to hold on too long, equivocity being your advantage.

SAGITTARIUS - November 23 to December 21
You see all. That much is clear. Not only your waking dreams, but a vision of the one you seek tonight. And beyond the night, the all. Opening yourself to someone new.
Riding events to their end.

CAPRICORN - December 22 to January 20
Instruments are not of the essence. They only seem of the essence when you want to predict the stars. Let go of someone old (dying stars) and embrace someone new.

AQUARIUS - January 21 to February 19.
Make your feelings known. But do not know only your feelings. When there is another near you to love. Knowing what they feel too.

PISCES - February 20 to March 20.
Believe in pieces and peaceably believe. You will go home together. You will go home across time with your beloved.

No Idem Mother*

Rotate come track the camera around
Come walk the camera around him with child
Come track the camera walk around him an innocent one
An innocent one will pray come track that prayer
Come track that prayer prayer until time ends
Come track until she extends time her life in prayer
Her life in prayer come track her prayer extend the life of mother
Extend her hand vision mother camera pace around these loving two
Light as air he picks up the child her kiss and his embrace as light as air

Effortless to pray for the dead to pray for the dead the dead will come again clocks clocks must pick up where they left off

Where they left off come pace the camera around that lightest prayer for mother

For mother wish this night this night away until day until daylight shines through these windows come track those weeds the wind down


Come walk with the camera camera around around one room one room for the two her kiss as light

Effortless extend her hand as vision this will be a day the body stays stays on earth this will be a day the eyes await

Awaken as in the days of old camera pace in one room in one in one room with the two in one room with the two two candles by the window will show no way through darkness tonight keep pacing keep pace until today the light through the two windows

Two go down go down together together in prayer pacing around the light a kiss the lightest kiss the light on the wall in the room pacing the room of two their light

Spring or fall light one can not tell summer light wind down by the reeds the two one can not tell weather moves over the dunes to find them pacing effortlessly

Effortless as the sea the wind in the reeds the two the two is she dead or are we mother born by prayer by the two two windows filling the room with light the mourners


Rising effortless as the wind from the sea lifting rising to make their tears commence prayer is a habit and a movement make it happen make mother rise again

Make mother the camera here and pacing walk pacing walk around this room room of two in prayer eyes with tears two eyes with tears two windows

Come track until she extends her death in life clocks stop clocks stop until she renders her death in life a kiss
the kiss of one born the kiss the kiss of one dead rising effortlessly as the wind from the sea with tears in her eyes cheeks cheeks and teeth

A new mother not an imitation a new mother a new mother who renders this death in life her tears to be renewed as in the days of old

Her tears our tears for time for time to be renewed the fleeting of of this death in life how light shines on the walls from the windows the reeds how they gather perceptible wind


How tears gather how the mourners gather tears lifting so effortlessly so light to render this kiss this kiss is life rendering death

Pray how the body comes and pray how the wind comes by these tears obey the body the wind in the reeds this camera pace the two pace the two in a circle in a circle the center of the world that has no circumference multiple centers for the eyes this death in life how the body comes how her life alights wind

Light thoughts light think light the child the child thinks light prays her kiss so light this shot around so effortless a central event this camera track circle pace a light the child’s kiss

Labor on the waves a play of light dies it renders life dead and living play on the waves the way reeds tend

We tend toward wind camera pace renewal of the eyes light in the eyes this death in life she breaths again she gasps she kisses no imitation

No mother in resemblance go down the two to reed beds go down the two to win this innocence child pray kiss child pray

*composed Winter-Spring, '05.