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What's behind the wall?
Sound in walls and sound in books and sound bleeding through Did you make that thrum? Or is that the building? Tearing down the evidenced box is heady. Tearing down the ugly map. Adam liked it, but I don't. I don't at all. Geographical location is not something I need here. There is mystery, and it's been lost a little. Don't represent. Don't catalogue. Don't 'science' it. You're a poet more than a scientist, a dreamer more than a technologist. I know you don't really care about how things work, you love not knowing. You use interpretation and language and nuance, not numbers and systems. There is magic, and it hasn't been found yet. Keep some things back. Be secretive. Be discerning on your audience's behalf. They don't need everything. They don't need to know everything. Do what you do with students' essays - edit. Do what you've done with Chris's film - edit. Be ruthless, in a kind way. You don't need to tell a story. There is narrative, without you doing that. Though you can still choose to. Marcy said 'we're beyond narrative' - well, I'm not. I want dreams and stories and mysteries and secrets and ghosts and wonder and mechanisms. I want theatre. I want revelation, or concealment, or both. I want intrigue and haunting and shadows. Further reading: Rudd, A. (2009). In Defence of Narrative
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I am quiet
Dark Knowing Secretive I know things I show you which way to go But I shuffle and you must shuffle me back I lie in layers Just containing Just displaying Then I shuffle You can spy through me You can magnify, enlarge And zoom and swoop over my lines But then I'll close and you'll be lost I'll close my secrets back into the darkness and tuck my lens away under the black You'll have to prise me open if you want my help But I'll have shuffled Layers conceal most of what you're asking for I'll illuminate a spot for you Though maybe not the one you wanted Probably not the one you wanted Tilt me, that might help. Tile my layers. Or close me again and I'll shuffle We can just repeat this Until Until Until Flat black stripe on cheap wood,
You flap, or rather you could But for your fixings. Plywood forms You’re teasing - round and yet not round, Wobbly wheels; first indication. I feel indicated. I wobble. Tablecloth tacked up, dirty and frayed; you aren’t a den anymore. I can’t make dens anymore. I don’t see them; I see a tablecloth. I see a wood panel, blu-tak. I want to play. I want to play but I am weighted, I drag the cloth down. The paper is just paper; Tearable. Terrible. Black. It’s like Nosferatu, the hand’s shadow on that belly.
That belly which is isolated from the rest of the body, The messes of the body, The messes to come. But for now, dry; No slime of ultrasound, no blood of birth. Just sound, approaching. The hand seems reluctant at first, alarm and pitch increasing as it nears. The instrument is unreliable, Like you, mother. Are you a siren? Tapping your language into me like fingerpads on taut skin, Like when computers were human. If you are siren then I am light, or sound. A universal language. A language of flame, unnatural, Where vowels are emphasized and meaning shifts, The comparator blinking our differences As we burn. As you sound, and I burn. Mother, your sand patterns skitter on my surface. Sound into my matter. The ghost in my machine. Paper Landscape on Skype like Vanishing Twin Syndrome,
the one eradicating the other. Amy pivots, four-pointed images like VR on wallpaper, on screen, on wallpaper again. Male hands, sequentially covering rings, the double-click regular but separate, face unseen, then reversed, living and clacking and whirring, combining and layering. Everything contains a rectangle. Doesn’t it? Image as sound as image. In Greece they danced, in Tokyo they sat. You can’t fill a room with smoke anymore. Light beams from Turkey into Summerhall, a cinematic wormhole, like matches lit in darkness, echoed later against a curved wall, and left, afterwards, like puncture marks in exhausted celluloid. Inspired by Collective-iz at B.E.E.F. in Bristol, January 17th 2018 Words are things
As thingy as any other thing Using the wordness of words to communicate the thingness of things Is problematic Like trying to convey a single word by taking a photograph Before a thing passes through the double-slit of language It just is. Afterwards, It is something: only that thing, no other thing Defined. Decided. Mother (nature)
Spurting sentiment Messy, wet nostalgia of suckling The first surfeit of unaccustomed food The first warm connection Brown teat in white mouth Industrialise! The White Revolution! Down with the vegan agenda! Mammy Mehturt, wolf-suckle, heavenly cow Mercurial milk of The Best and Most Agreeable Wet Nurse Beware the black snake, uninvited milk-sibling Beware Hera, her anguished scatterings of stars Capital streams into pinching pouches, unpaused Untouched, aseptic Unchallenged contextomy Untouched by the filth of human mindlessness Milk of human blindness Mechanically ejaculated Hidden in pyramids A substance geometry, like Adam’s concrete Modular, space-saving, profit-tightening Dumb, passive cow, teats heaving? We can’t sell that – get a cat in A chromatic aberration, Goethe’s prism encased Refracting the colourless (white) within A canvas for a thousand flavourings, or white, or every other colour Colours at the edge of spiritualism, colours under my pressed eyelids Imaginable and unimaginable Dreamlike Absurd A palette for a thousand nightmares, the bomb’s corona mushrooming onto pageant suits of white, or every other colour The Dairy Queens’ camera-ready grins of white, or every other colour The blinded eyes of white, or every other colour Or black, like daybreak Lit from inside the glass like Hitchcock #2
A ruin, a relic, a cut, removing stories. Train tracks, unfurling; a waiter, retreating; stillness, looping. Mechanisms whir. #1 My grandmother’s bedside drawer, itchy with rose. The locked door to the parents’ bedroom. A stranger’s packed case. A train journey. A coffin sliding towards the incinerator. Flowers at a roadside. |
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