Downtown Johannesburg. April, 2023.

Candor

By Anne Carson


A poem made for Roni Horn out of the titles of five of her sculptures.

Could 1

If you are not the free person you want to be you must find a place to tell the truth about that. To tell how things go for you. Candor is like a skein being produced inside the belly day after day, it has to get itself woven out somewhere. You could whisper down a well. You could write a letter and keep it in a drawer. You could inscribe a curse on a ribbon of lead and bury it in the ground to lie unread for thousands of years. The point is not to find a reader, the point is the telling itself. Consider a person standing alone in a room. The house is silent. She is looking down at a piece of paper. Nothing else exists. All her veins go down into this paper. She takes her pen and writes on it some marks no one else will ever see, she bestows on it a kind of surplus, she tops it off with a gesture as private and accurate as her own name.

Then 3

Consider Jane Wells. The paper she has in her hand is a letter from her husband’s mistress, Rebecca West. Her husband, H.G. Wells, a sexual socialist, liked his women to acquiesce in one another. There were many women. Jane kept track of their ups and downs, occasionally had them to tea, sent them congratulatory cables when they bore bastards to H.G. and received their notes of sympathy if she fell ill. “How ill you have been . . . how sorry I was . . . how glad I am . . .” wrote Rebecca West. I wonder how long Jane Wells stood studying this letter before she took out her pencil and added the few faint underlinings and exclamation marks that make it a document of a different kind. I wonder why she did this. Unlikely she expected anyone to ever read the page. But there were considerations of privacy and accuracy that moved her hand to perfect it in a certain way, to have her mood recorded, to whisper on paper some resistance to the falsity of the other woman’s sentences. “Candor—my Preceptor—is the only wile,” wrote Emily Dickinson. (Letter to T.W. Higginson, February 1876.)

Double 2

Consider Helen. Oh Helen was a package. She had all the men of Greece in love with her, fled to Troy, charmed everyone there too. It was partly her beauty, partly her accurate private mind. Homer doesn’t bother describing her beauty but he gives us a close-up of her mind. It was one of those long afternoons of the war. Homer cuts from the battlefield to everything quiet in Helen’s chamber:

Helen [was]
in her chamber weaving a great cloth
doublefolded and red and she sprinkled into it
the many contests of horsetaming Trojans and bronzeclad Achaians
which for her sake they were suffering at the hands of Ares.
(Homer, Iliad 3. 126–9)

Of course all the women in Homer weave, it is the quintessential female work—because a household needs cloth. Because the designs of women are as tangled and purposeful as webs. Because of that skein in the belly. Yet Helen’s weaving is special—double and red and weirdly now. Since antiquity critics have admired this reciprocal paraphrase of Helen and Homer. They are both in their different ways deeply unfree, deeply wily, makers of marks. Into his telling hers is “sprinkled”—funny verb, like salt or seeds—in a sort of infinite regress of candor. She is not just another object taken up and used by a man for the sake of his art, she glances out.

Too

“Jane” wasn’t Mrs. H.G. Wells’s real name, Amy Catherine was her real name. H.G. didn’t like Amy Catherine, he rechristened her Jane, a name he thought embodied domestic ability. They were married close on forty years and Jane fulfilled H.G.’s domestic expectations. Yet sometimes he says he saw “[Amy Catherine] look at me out of Jane’s brown eyes, and vanish.” (H.G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography.)

Her

For comparative purpose here is the text of a curse tablet on lead, measuring 8 × 3 cm, written on both sides, rolled and pierced by a nail, found buried in Boeotia, original date unknown, possibly 4th century BC:

[side A]
I bind down Zois of Eretria wife of Kabeiras before Earth and Hermes her eating her drinking her sleep her laughter her sex her playing the lyre her way of going into rooms her pleasure her little buttocks her thinking eyes

[side B]
and before Hermes I bind down her walk her words her hands her feet her evil talk her entire soul I bind them down

Yes I heard you thinking of me did you hear me laughing?
Hardground liftground and spitbite aquatint with drypoint
101.4 cm x 65.4 cm
Edition of 18
2022/2023

from Omens in hot bacon contradiction with David Krut Projects

https://davidkrutprojects.com/artists/60690/anna-van-der-ploeg

Rosmarie Waldrop

Google review of A4 Arts Foundation in Cape Town. Via Lucienne Bestall, 2023.

The Confession of St. Jim-Ralph

OUR PATRON OF FALLING SHORT,
WHO BECAME A PRAYER


I used to sneak into the movies without paying.
I watched the stories but I failed to see the dark.
I went to college and drank everything they gave me,
and I never paid for any of that water
on which I drifted as if by grace until
after the drownings, when in the diamond light
of seven-something A.M., as the spring was tearing
me up in Cartajena, only praying
on my knees before the magnifying ark
of the Seventh St. Hotel could possibly save me,
until falling on my face before the daughter
of money while the world poured from the till
brought the moment’s length against the moment’s height,
and paying was what I was earning and eating and wearing.   
This to the best of my recollection
my uncle said in 1956,
moving against my father like a bear
on fire as the evening of his visit
killed the rum. He’d come from Alaska
or some place like that, the Antarctic, maybe,
and he left in a hot rage, screaming by the door
that nothing would save me from my awful father,
just as he, my uncle, had been saved
by nothing. Thirteen weeks from then, he died.
“This family’s full of the dead,” my father told me.
I was eight. I used to make excuses
to join him in the washroom as he bathed
in the mornings, soaping himself carefully
so as not to splash the automatic pistol
wrapped in plastic he rested near to hand.
At a certain point, the sun came through the blinds
and shafted the toilet bowl, filling it with light
as he spoke of killing everyone, often taking
the pistol from its wrap and holding its mouth
against his breast, explaining that no safety
lay anywhere, unless he should shoot the fear
that stood up on its hind legs in his heart.
Such things were always on TV—I thought
that one world merged in the next, and I resolved
to win the great Congressional Medal of Honor,
to make a name on the stage, and die a priest.


In the war the bullets yanked the fronds
from palms and the earth ate them up like acid
before our eyes. When dead men hit the ground
they came alive, they spoke in tongues, holding
babies that came from nowhere in their arms.
We were all afraid of the earth. My father’s fear
turned it like a plow, delivering
dogs and bugs, bright music, and a feminine
whispering of our names. My comrades fled,
but I was healed by everything that happened,
the midnight Rapid Transit stations
of hand grenades made moonlight as I moved
from life to life, getting off and shouting
whatever the signs said, getting on again,
received like lightning, changing everything.
My body disappeared. The enemy
knew me as a ghost who dropped a shadow
the size of night and turned the air to edges.
I am your grand companion of surprise,
big-time harbinger canceling everyone’s
business in a constant dream of all
the starring roles and franchises the great
Congressional Medal of Honor winners win.
Wounded twice, then decorated more
than any other in my regiment,
I stood at home plate, vomit on my blouse
and whiskey in my blood, and heard the dirt
of my home town falling grain by grain
out of the afternoon, while everyone’s
rahrahrahs affected me like silence.
The mayor handed me a four-by-four-
inch cardboard box a colonel handed him;
I threw it at the vast face of the crowd,
screaming I wanted only the Medal of Honor …
I lose the thread of my existence here.
I see me strange and drugged against my will,
telling my life story to a room,
traveling the aisles of an asylum
out there in Maine, among the aborigines.
They must have set me loose, or I escaped:
I see myself in a forest-bordered field,
unchanged and wearing my uniform—
free; yet somehow jailed by old desires
and saying what a soldier says: For home,
nothing. Comrades, for you, these hoarded rations.


With four monstrosities in uniforms
like mine, I pulverized guitars and wept
for the merriment of many. Brothers,
when shadows lengthen, and they lower down
the American flag and close our government,
another country rises like a mist
by garbagey coliseums on the warehouse
side of town to listen to that rock
and roll: God speaking with the Devil’s voice,
unbreathable air of manacles, a storm
to bless your multicolored lips with sperm.
We sundered them until they brought their bones
forth from the flesh and laid them at our feet,
screaming their lungs shut tight as fists,
shedding their homes forever, leaving name
and tongue and mind and sending us their heads
through the mails in the night. We ran it past the edge,
we gave them something everyone could dance to—
whatever is most terrible is most real—
the Bible fights, the fetuses burning in light-bulbs,
the cunnilingual, intravenous
swamp of love. Three times I died on stage,
and the show went on while doctors snatched
me back from Chinatown with their machines.
We struck it rich. Without a repertoire,
without a name or theme, we toured the land
and eighty thousand perished. We were real,
but not one company recorded us:
everywhere we went they passed a law.
We toured the land—sweet, burning Texacos,
the adrenaline darkness palpitates frantically,
the highway eats itself all night, the radio’s
wheedling bebop fails in the galactic
soup near dawn; the Winnebago shimmers,
everything tastes like puke, the eight-ball
bursts, nobody
knows how to drink in this fuckin town …
One night I heard our music end
abruptly in the middle of a number
and looked around me at a gigantic silence.
I felt the pounding, saw the screams, but all
was like the long erasure of a wind
calming and disturbing everything
on its route through stunned fields of hay.
My bodyguards tried with huge gentleness to lead
me off, but I threw myself outside, rolling
through a part of town I’d never seen—
the flat gray streets looked Hebrew, and the windows
held out the paraphernalia of old age,
porcelain Jesuses gesturing from the shadows
of porcelain vases, surrounded by medicines.
A rain began. I strained myself to hear
the trashcans say their miserable names,
but nothing. At the brink
of stardom high over the United States,
untouchable as God but better known,
I stumbled over streets that might’ve been rubber,
deaf as a cockroach, finished as a singer.


Brothers, I spilled myself along the roads.
Mold grew on me as I dampened in alleys.
I began in ignorance. How could I know
that whoever is grinding up his soul is making
himself afresh? That the ones who run away
get nearer all the time? Look here or there,
it’s always the horizon, the dull edge
of earth dicing your plan like a potato.
Does water break the light, or light the water?
Which do you choose: what is or what is?
I painted myself black and let that color
ride through virgins like the penises
they dream of while their fathers sleep. I lied.
I cheated like a shark. I robbed the dead.
Nothing healed me, just as nothing healed
my uncle of himself—but he was healed,
while I grew phosphorescent with a kind
of cancer that I carried like a domino,
a tiny badge discovering me …
Oh please my love I want to rock and roll with you
Feel it feel it
feel it all night like a shoe …
Ten years I wasted all I had, and then
ten years I lived correctly—held a job
in a factory that made explosions,
where deafness was an asset. I did well,
I never missed a day, I polished late,
honed my skills, received promotions—in the end
I built explosions for atomic bombs,
forty-three I built myself, which one of these
days will deafen you, as I am deafened.
I wrenched the fraternal orders with my tale
of sorrowful delinquency—the Elks,
the Lions, Moose; those animals, they loved
the crippled rock’n’roller with the heart
wrung out as empty as his former mind,
and variously and often they cited me.
I walked the malls with an expanded chest,
took my sips with my pinkie cocked,
firing dry martinis at my larynx
and yearning for the strength of soul it takes
to suck a bullet from an actual
pistol, hating my own drained face
as I intimidated mirrors, or stood
in a jail of lies before the Eagle Scouts,
an alarm clock going off inside an alarm clock
in a lump of iron inside a lump of iron:
hating myself for having become my father.
At night I prayed aloud to God and Jesus
to place me on a spaceship to the moon—
leaven, I told Them constantly, my mind
is tired of me, and I would like to die.
Take me to ground zero take me to ground zero
where in the midst of detonation it is useless
to demonstrate quod erat demonstrandum,
this was my ceaseless prayer, until my lips
were muscles and my heart could talk,
telling it over and over to itself;
until they fired me and drove me to the edge
of things, and dumped my prayer into the desert.
Drinking cactus milk and eating sand,
I wandered until I saw the monastery
standing higher and higher, at first a loose
mirage, but soon more real than I was.
There I fell on my face, and let light carry
me into the world—just as my uncle told it
nine million years ago when I was eight—
and the prison of my human shape exploded,
my heart cracked open and the blood poured out
over stones that got up and walked when it touched them.
High in the noon, some kind of jet plane winked
like a dime; I saw it also flashed
over the vast, perfumed, commercial places
filled with stupid but well-intentioned people,
the wreckages and ambushes of love
putting themselves across, making it pay
in the margins of the fire, in the calm spaces,
taken across the dance-floor by a last romance,
kissing softly in a hallucination strewn
with bus tickets and an originless music—
and now death comes to them, a little boy
in a baseball cap and pyjamas, doing things
to the locks of the heart … This was my vision.
Here I saw the truth of the horizon,
the way of coming and going in this life.
I never drifted up from my beginning:
I rose as inexorably as heat.



Brothers, I reached you, and you took me in.
You saw me when I was invisible,
you spoke to me when I was deaf,
you thanked me when I was a secret,
and how will I make of myself something
at this hour when I am already made?
Never a famous hero, a star, a priest—
my mind decides a little faster than
the world can talk, and what I dreamed was only
the darker sketch of what I would become.
It’s 1996. I’m forty-eight.
I am a monk who never prays. I am
a prayer. The pilgrim comes to hear me;
the banker comes, the bald janitors arrive,
the mothers lift their wicked children up—
they wait for me as if I were a bus,
with or without hope, what’s the difference?
One guy manipulates a little calculator,
speaking to it as to a friend. Sweat
is delivered from its mascara,
sad women read about houses …
and now the deaf approach, trailing the dark smoke
of their infirmity behind them as they leave it
and move toward the prayer that everything
is praying: the summer evening a held bubble,
every gesture riveting the love,
the swaying of waitresses, the eleven television
sets in a storefront broadcasting a murderer’s face—
these things speak the clear promise of Heaven.

Portrait by Ian Grose, September 2023.

comb, stone, rose, home

/

In 1967, Alison Knowles, a Fluxus artist, composed one of the first computerized poems, The House of Dust. It was conceived in collaboration with James Tenney, a composer-in-residence at Bell Labs in New Jersey, and an expert on the IBM compiling system known as FORTRAN.

It consists of the phrase “a house of” followed by a randomized sequence of 1) a material, 2) a site or situation, a light source, and 3) a category of inhabitants. For example:

A house of discarded clothing
under water
lighted by candles
inhabited by people from all walks of life



https://www.artbytranslation.org/abtweb/publications/HOUSE_OF_DUST_JOURNAL_25_08_2016_BDEF_PREVIEW.pdf

INTERVIEW WITH HARA TAMIKI (1950)

I: Death.

HT: Death made me grow up.

I: Love.

HT: Love made me endure.

I: Madness.

HT: Madness made me suffer.

I: Passion.

HT: Passion bewildered me.

I: Balance.

HT: Balance is my goddess.

I: Dreams.

HT: Dreams are everything now.

I: Gods.

HT: Gods cause me to be silent.

I: Bureaucrats.

HT: Bureaucrats make me melancholy.

I: Tears.

HT: Tears are my sisters.

I: Laughter.

HT: I wish I had a splendid laugh.

I: War.

HT: Ah war.

I: Humankind.

HT: Humankind is glass.

I: Why not take the shorter way home.

HT: There was no shorter way home.




From Men in the off hours by Anne Carson.

In Love with Raymond Chandler

Margaret Atwood, 1992.

       An affair with Raymond Chandler, what a joy! Not because of the mangled bodies and the marinated cops and hints of eccentric sex, but because of his interest in furniture. He knew that furniture could breathe, could feel, not as we do but in a way more muffled, like the word upholstery, with its overtones of mustiness and dust, its bouquet of sunlight on aging cloth or of scuffed leather on the backs and seats of sleazy office chairs. I think of his sofas, stuffed to roundness, satin-covered, pale blue like the eyes of his cold blond unbodied murderous women, beating very slowly, like the hearts of hibernating crocodiles; of his chaises longues, with their malicious pillows. He knew about front lawns too, and greenhouses, and the interiors of cars.

This is how our love affair would go. We would meet at a hotel, or a motel, whether expensive or cheap it wouldn’t matter. We would enter the room, lock the door, and begin to explore the furniture, fingering the curtains, running our hands along the spurious gilt frames of the pictures, over the real marble or the chipped enamel of the luxurious or tacky washroom sink, inhaling the odor of the carpets, old cigarette smoke and spilled gin and fast meaningless sex or else the rich abstract scent of the oval transparent soaps imported from England, it wouldn’t matter to us; what would matter would be our response to the furniture, and the furniture’s response to us. Only after we had sniffed, fingered, rubbed, rolled on, and absorbed the furniture of the room would we fall into each other’s arms, and onto the bed (king-size? peach-colored? creaky? narrow? four-posted? pioneer-quilted? lime-green chenille-covered?), ready at last to do the same things to each other.

Psalm: Our fathers
By W.S. Merwin


[This is a long poem with many lines that follow the same structure. This is a selection from my highlighted notes]





I am the son of grief after the brother was lost but I have opened an eye in the life where it was he who lived

I am the son of three flowers the pink the rose and the other or its effigy in skin for neither of which was I taught a name and I shudder at their withering all three but they will survive me

I am the son of the glove of an upper river and the glove of a tree but there were four rivers all told around the garden and I tasted of salt from the beginning

I am the son of four elements fire darkness salt and vertigo but I dance as though they were strangers

I am the son of the bird fire that has no eyes but sings to itself after waiting alone and silent in the alien wood

I am the son of terrible labors but triumph comes to the flags that have done nothing

I am the son of nobody but when I go the islands turn black

I am the son of remorse in a vein of fossils but I might not have been

I am the son of division but the nails the wires the hasps the bolts the locks the traps the wrapping that hold me together are part of the inheritance

I am the son of indifference but neglect is a stage in the life of the gods

I am the son of blindness but I watch the light stretch one wing

I am the son of things as they are but I know them for the most part only as they are remembered

I am the son of farewells and one of me will not come back but one of me never forgets

I am the son of stars never seen never to be seen for we will be gone before their light reaches us but the decisions they demand are with us now

I am the son of love but I lose you in the palm of my hand

I am the son of hazard but does my prayer reach you o star of the uncertain

I am the son of blindness but nothing that we have made watches us

I am the son of untruth but I have seen the children in Paradise walking in pairs hand in hand with himself

I am the son of hazard but go on with the story you think is yours

Spitzkoppe, 2018. by Daniella Mooney.

EPITAPH: EVIL

To get the sound take everything that is not the sound

drop it

Down a well, listen.

Then drop the sound. Listen to the difference

Shatter.



From Men in the off hours by Anne Carson.

EPITAPH: ZION

Muderous little world once our objects had gazes. Our lives

Were fragile, the wind

Could dash them away. Here lies the refugee breather

Who drank a bowl of elsewhere.


From Men in the off hours by Anne Carson.

FIRST CHALDAIC ORACLE

There is something you should know.
And the right way to know it
is by a cherrying of your mind.

Because if you press your mind towards it
and try to know 
that thing

as you know a thing,
you will not know it.
It comes out red

with kills on both sides,
it is scrap, it is nightly, 
it kings your mind.

No. Scorch is not the way
to know
that thing you must know.

But use the hum
of your wound
and flamepit out everything

right to the edge
of that thing you should know. 
The way you know it

is not by staring hard. 
But keep chiselled
keep Praguing the eye

of your soul and reach--
mind empty
towards that thing you should know

until you get it. 
That thing you should know.
Because it is out there (orchid) outside your and, it is. 


From Men in the off hours by Anne Carson.
Death in Childhood
By Robert Hass

Which cover lightly, gentle earth!
—Ben Jonson



He was a solemn and delicate little boy.
His father was a physicist, and I could see
on the day that I watched him on the beach
in La Jolla, that the shell in his hand was no toy
to him. He had learned to look at things.
Also to treat information with great seriousness.
So he studied it carefully and explained to me
that the successive ridges on the curvature
were the stages of its growth, and what form
of carbon calcium was, and how evolution
had worked its way up to invertebrates.
He would brush back a shock of blond hair
from his eyes to look up and see if I followed him.
The hole in his heart was not what killed him;
it was the way that his lungs had to labor
because of the defect. The surf was breaking
through irises of light, quick small rainbows
down the beach as far as one could see.
He had to have been a very avid listener.
It seemed to me to mean that he’d been loved,
and wanted to be like his father, which was why
it was so delicious to him to be talking
to almost any adult about all there is to know.



From Summer Snow by Robert Hass.

From The World’s Wife, by Carol Ann Duffy. c/o Hannah Carrim.

The Return of the Prodigal Son

by Heiichi Sugiyama



On earth three men are running
one has seized the moment to run away from home
one loses himself in pursuit of the thing flying in the sky
one dashes straight ahead, aiming to go home
will the prodigal son be allowed to return home?

HOKUSAI

Anger is a bitter lock.
But you can turn it.

Hokusai aged 83
said,
Time to do my lions. 

Every morning
until he died

219 days later
he made
a lion. 

Wind came gusting from the northwest.

Lions swayed
and leapt
from the crests

of the pine trees
onto

the snowy road
or crashed
together

over his hut,
their white paws

mauling stars
on the way down.

I continue to draw
hoping for 
a peaceful day,

said Hokusai
as they thudded past. 



From Men in the off hours by Anne Carson.

From Tokyo, Kawaguchiko and Kyoto. MI-Lab Mokuhanga Residency, 2017.

Nick Offerman
Working with Wood, and the Meaning of Life


“I would, I’d start off with a few lines from — there’s a poem. It’s a little long. Called “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front.” And it’s just wonderful. I have a wonderful letterpress version of it hanging in the bathroom at the shop. But here’s just a few lines that delight me. “Laugh. / Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful / though you have considered all the facts.”

And then: “As soon as the generals and the politicos / can predict the motions of your mind, / lose it. Leave it as a sign / to mark the false trail, the way / you didn’t go. Be like the fox / who makes more tracks than necessary, / some in the wrong direction.”

I love those instructions, and I just — if nothing else as a Mary Oliver’s instructional, “Be joyful / though you have considered all the facts.” [laughs]

…

And I’m just going to grab one example, and that is the word “fidelity.” It all is part of this set of values that attached — When Wendell first struck me, like a thunderclap… with that word and that value that I said — that was my way into him. And what he’s talking about, specifically, with fidelity, in a modern sense, it brings to mind a marriage… But what he’s talking about is: Who and what are you loyal to? Who do you care about? Who is in your neighborhood? And that includes people and animals and rocks, and grass and air.

And that story made me pay attention to that word, “fidelity.” And it made me say, okay, what — I’m a dancing jester.”

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front: https://cals.arizona.edu/~steidl/Liberation.html

Full transcript: https://onbeing.org/programs/nick-offerman-working-with-wood-and-the-meaning-of-life/

Securing back mountings in place while epoxy sets, Auckland Studios. Cape Town, 2020.

Each a loose page copied. Gent, 2022.

Audre Lorde

Aiguilles du Midi, 2022.

Dent du Géant, 2022.

Acknowledgements
By Danez Smith



you save me half a bag of skins, the hard parts, my fav, dusted orange with hot
•
you say we can’t go to the bar cause you’re taking your braids out
i come over, we watch madea while we pull you from you
•
you make us tacos with the shells i like & you don’t
•
i get too drunk at the party, you scoop my pizza from the sink with a solo cup, all that red
•
you, in the morning, bong water grin, wet chin
•
you, in the lawless dark, laughing like a room of women laugh
at a man who thinks his knowledge is knowledge
•
i text you & you say, i was bout to text you, bitch
•
you cook pork chops same way i do, our families in another city go to the same church
•
you, rolling a blunt, holding your son, is a mecca
•
you invite me out for drag queens on the nights i think of finally [ ]
•
you pull over in Mississippi so i can walk a road my grandfather bled on
•
you gave me a stone turtle, it held your palm’s scent for a week
•
i call your mama mama
•
you request like a demand, make me some of that mango cornbread
i cut the fruit, measure the honey
•
you & you & you & you go in on a dildo for my birthday
you name it drake, you know me
•
a year with you in that dirty house with that cracked-out cat was a good year
•
at the function, i feel myself splitting into too many rooms of static
you touch my hand & there i am
•
do you want to be best friends?
a box for yes, a box for no
•
did our grandmothers flee the fields of embers so we could find each other here?
friend, you are the war’s gentle consequence
•
i am the prison that turns to rain in your hands
•
you, at my door the night my father leapt beyond what we know
you, dirt where i plant my light
•
the branches of silence are heavy with your sweet seed
•
you smell like the milk of whatever beast i am
•
your poop is news, your fart is news, your gross body my favorite song
•
you, drunk as an uncle, making all kinds of nonsense sense
i listen for the language between your words
•
& when we fight, not a ring, but a room with no exit
we spill the blood & bandage the wound, clean burns with our tongues
•
if luck calls your name, we split the pot
& if you wither, surely i rot
•
we hate the same people, we say nigga please with the same mouth
•
& before we were messy flesh, i’m sure we were the same dust
•
everywhere you are is a church, & i am the pastor, the deacons, the mothers fainting at the altar
•
as long as i am a fact to you, death can do with me what she wants
•
my body, water, your body, a trail of hands carrying the river to the sea
•
i ink your name into my arm to fasten what is already there
•
i would love you even if you killed god
•
you made coming out feel like coming in from the storm
•
you are the country i bloody the hills for
•
you love me despite the history of my hands, their mangled confession
•
at the end of the world, let there be you, my world
•
god bless you who screens all my nudes, drafts my break-up text
•
you are the drug that knocks the birds from my heart
•
ain’t no mountain, no valley, no river i wouldn’t give the hands for comin’ to you sideways
•
o the horrid friends who were just ships harboring me to you
•
& how many times have you loved me without my asking?
how often have i loved a thing because you loved it?
including me
•
& i always knew
•
with yo ugly ass

Daniella at Adam’s Calendar. Mpumalanga, 2023.

“Spiritual awakening is frequently described as a journey to the top of a mountain. We leave our attachments and our worldliness behind and slowly make our way to the top. At the peak we have transcended all pain. The only problem with this metaphor is that we leave the others behind – our drunken brother, our schizophrenic sister, our tormented animals and friends. Their suffering continues, unrelieved by our personal escape.
In the process of bodhichitta, the journey goes down, not up. It’s as if the mountain pointed toward the center of the earth instead of the sky. Instead of transcending the suffering of all creatures, we move toward the turbulence and doubt. We jump into it. We slide into it. We tiptoe into it. We move toward it however we can. We explore the reality and unpredictability of insecurity and pain, and we try not to push it away. If it takes years, if it takes lifetimes, we let it be as it is. At our own pace, without speed or aggression, we move down and down and down. With us move millions of others, our companions in awakening from fear. At the bottom we discover water, the healing water of bodhichitta. Right down there in the thick of things, we discover that love will not die.”

Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times pp. 91-92
Glitch
By Nick Laird


More than ample a deadfall of one meter eighty to split
my temple apart on the herringbone parquet and crash
the operating system, tripping an automated shutdown

in the casing and halting all external workings of the moist
robot I inhabit at the moment: I am out cold and when
my eyes roll in again I sit on the edge of the bed and tell

you just how taken I am with the place I’d been, had been
compelled to leave, airlifted mid-gesture, mid-sentence, risen
of a sudden like a bubble or its glisten or a victim snatched

and bundled out, helplessly, from sunlight, the usual day,
and all particulars of life there fled except the sense that stays
with me for hours and hours that I was valuable and needed there.

Shower over North America on the night of November 12-13, 1833, from E. Weiß’s Bilderatlas der Sternenwelt (1888).

On Seeing and Being Seen
By Ama Codjoe
I don’t like being photographed. When we kissed
at a wedding, the night grew long and luminous.
You unhooked my bra. A photograph
passes for proof, Sontag says, that a given thing
has happened. Or you leaned back to watch
as I eased the straps from my shoulders.
Hooks and eyes. Right now, my breasts
are too tender to be touched. Their breasts
were horrifying, Elizabeth Bishop writes. Tell her
someone wanted to touch them. I am touching
the photograph of my last seduction. It is as slick
as a magazine page, as dark as a street
darkened by rain. When I want to remember
something beautiful, instead of taking
a photograph, I close my eyes.
I watched as you covered my nipple
with your mouth. Desire made you
beautiful. I closed my eyes.
Tonight, I am alone in my tenderness.
There is nothing in my hand except a certain
grasping. In my mind’s eye, I am
stroking your hair with damp fingertips. This is exactly
how it happened. On the lit-up hotel bed,
I remember thinking, My body is a lens
I can look through with my mind.

The transformation of the greatest story never told into the greatest letter never written gate (Paint on carved plywood, 123 × 215 cm, 2023)

Shown at the Investec Cape Town Art Fair, February 2023 with Reservoir Projects. Others works by Inga Somdyala, Dale Lawrence and Bella Knemeyer.



https://www.reservoirprojects.com/

La vie sur terre at Cinema Ballerini. Brussels, 2023