Writing
Some statements about work, or something, below.
4.21.20
Salt.
I am six, yelling goodbyes to each wave as it crests, fully lost in by the aural assault of infinite ocean. Salt spray and wind force my own desperate words back into my throat. Swallow, or don’t.
I do not know---is the ocean one self or a thousand, each wave a new Being-- ten thousand fold. I am one thing, a thousand, waiting for something I can’t yet articulate. Goodbye, then, a thousand-fold. Or once. I am not sure.
I run towards them--- it--- knowing the crash that comes next, body- enveloped, knocked over and breathless. For just a brief moment, gravity is overwritten. Salt. Chaos. Body, cells, self- fully-- briefly, unbound, unknown. East, West, left, up-- arbitrary cardinals in an unmarked plane of being.
Spin-cyle. Stop. Am I clean?
No, I am bleeding. Perhaps this is the same.
Breath, pulse.
Gravity. and---- air.
I am aware of my limbs, mouth, lungs, for once. Simultaneity of being and unbeing; explosive multiplicity
Wind and water: unmake me; I am yours amidst the weight of want and momentum. This is brief and unapologetic existence.
Swallow me whole. I promise never to look back.
SaltSP
Salt.
I am six, yelling goodbyes to each wave as it crests, fully lost in by the aural assault of infinite ocean. Salt spray and wind force my own desperate words back into my throat. Swallow, or don’t.
I do not know---is the ocean one self or a thousand, each wave a new Being-- ten thousand fold. I am one thing, a thousand, waiting for something I can’t yet articulate. Goodbye, then, a thousand-fold. Or once. I am not sure.
I run towards them--- it--- knowing the crash that comes next, body- enveloped, knocked over and breathless. For just a brief moment, gravity is overwritten. Salt. Chaos. Body, cells, self- fully-- briefly, unbound, unknown. East, West, left, up-- arbitrary cardinals in an unmarked plane of being.
Spin-cyle. Stop. Am I clean?
No, I am bleeding. Perhaps this is the same.
Breath, pulse.
Gravity. and---- air.
I am aware of my limbs, mouth, lungs, for once. Simultaneity of being and unbeing; explosive multiplicity
Wind and water: unmake me; I am yours amidst the weight of want and momentum. This is brief and unapologetic existence.
Swallow me whole. I promise never to look back.
SaltSP
12.5.19
Nothing new, or certain, remains.
Silence is not absence, but a vacuum, infinite and spectral and spectacularly violent. It envelopes and berates and exhausts, indiscreet. Roaring and rearing, it and engulfs our bodies with or without permission. We are subject spectral to its strength.
Direction is all.
We try to catch our breath, but it is stolen away with everything else we know, or don’t yet want to know. We are without sustenance but alive, if that’s what you call this. Craving sacrament strange but of our own construction.
It will not pass.
My body is broken and it is not my own. It settles somewhere ten feet above the earth and watches, waits, to be grounded. I do not call it down yet. I am but only one half of myself, and besides, I cannot (yet) reach to cut the cord nor bring it in. I am no temple because I am too often a kite, tied to the Other Self and waiting on the wind or the fall, whichever comes first. Waiting---- indefinitely, irresponsibly, and without apology or presence of mind.
Take, eat.
But only if you have clean hands; do it quickly, and without sound. Swallow your protest whole. The calories do not count against your trespasses.
Stillness deafens silence, and, besides, is more peculiar. Heavy and labored in its own weighty absence. Potential and laden, eternal, nothing and everything that ever was, caught in a hiccup or less than a breath.
To breathe is to commit to existence. We digest the atmosphere slowly and all at once, swallowing whole in want of instruction. It does not come. We are dormant in our knowledge of our own habits. We wait.
Wash your hands, your feet. Body, mind, self, other. Everything within reach. Scrub; faster. Blood is sustenance. You will not be clean yet, or, perhaps, ever. You will wash all the same. It is necessary.
Dust to dust.
S.P 12.19
5/2/19
The hardest part of living is sometimes accepting my own solid presence.
Mass and molecules; memory incarnate.
Atoms, flesh, and else which make up body. I-- we-- should be fluid, condensation, vapor infinitely expanding and collapsing.It would seem more likely. . And yet--- a body all the same. Unwanted, perhaps-- here, even so. Stillness. Sort of. Potentialenergy, bone-bound.
Every body-- every living, dying, digesting, cell of body-- borrows the space it occupies, respirating its rent. We consume,gather, collect, touch, sustain, deteriorate.
Self-preservation, endless and oblique. Something to do.There is order and then there is chaos, or so we proclaim (somewhat presumptuously) over that which we do not understand.We try to maintain them into oblivion. Solace in strategy. Magnetic repulsion manifest. We fear and know the loss autonomythat comes. In our blind panic we manufacture markers of our own significance. Immersion. Pilgrimage. Womanhood.Sacrament. We ritualize what we do not understand to make palpable the unchangeable.
This is what it must mean, then, to be human. We yell it into the wind and wait.
We come from, sustain ourselves by, place. Natural, perhaps-- but manufactured too. Placeness as yet undefined in ourunderstanding of self. Our bodies biograph our own manifest landscape, gathering, building on, damaging. We are written byour spaces.
Dust to dust.
We gather from it, turn it over. Mutual sustenance; symbiosis of the yet and the not-quite. The weight of It All. The weight ofeach other-- or perhaps just of Other. Too much; necessary because of how we live, or how we think we have always lived.Necessity is only a single sensibility, after all.
The colloid of memory collapses infinitely. It occupies no space. Presses on. Conferring value, somehow, or disintegratingbefore our eyes. Sometimes changing. We mark it, memorializing ourselves and our parents and grandparents and great-unclesin it, things we think we remember. We try and contain it to quench our need for order. This is my history we say, and so itmust be. We speak quickly so no one hears our own doubt.
History. It nods acknowledgement to our calls if we are lucky and then changes faster than we understand, then slows,imperceptibly-- and sometimes we trip right over it. Ours but not-ours, to have and to hold. Collective, yes, but deeplyprivate. Accumulating in corners of our habitats and minds and the seams of our sweaters, runs of hosiery.
A thousand dresses that are not my own. Homespace, former, archived. Memory as object or camera as sleeping-space. Or something else. Object as desperate document for that which we cannot archive of ourselves. Immeasurable yet ever-present. The absence ofsomething that is More. It becomes the mythology we tell ourselves and our children as we drift off to sleep.
Myths create noise. We are our own histories written in flesh.
Body and blood, given.S. P
The hardest part of living is sometimes accepting my own solid presence.
Mass and molecules; memory incarnate.
Atoms, flesh, and else which make up body. I-- we-- should be fluid, condensation, vapor infinitely expanding and collapsing.It would seem more likely. . And yet--- a body all the same. Unwanted, perhaps-- here, even so. Stillness. Sort of. Potentialenergy, bone-bound.
Every body-- every living, dying, digesting, cell of body-- borrows the space it occupies, respirating its rent. We consume,gather, collect, touch, sustain, deteriorate.
Self-preservation, endless and oblique. Something to do.There is order and then there is chaos, or so we proclaim (somewhat presumptuously) over that which we do not understand.We try to maintain them into oblivion. Solace in strategy. Magnetic repulsion manifest. We fear and know the loss autonomythat comes. In our blind panic we manufacture markers of our own significance. Immersion. Pilgrimage. Womanhood.Sacrament. We ritualize what we do not understand to make palpable the unchangeable.
This is what it must mean, then, to be human. We yell it into the wind and wait.
We come from, sustain ourselves by, place. Natural, perhaps-- but manufactured too. Placeness as yet undefined in ourunderstanding of self. Our bodies biograph our own manifest landscape, gathering, building on, damaging. We are written byour spaces.
Dust to dust.
We gather from it, turn it over. Mutual sustenance; symbiosis of the yet and the not-quite. The weight of It All. The weight ofeach other-- or perhaps just of Other. Too much; necessary because of how we live, or how we think we have always lived.Necessity is only a single sensibility, after all.
The colloid of memory collapses infinitely. It occupies no space. Presses on. Conferring value, somehow, or disintegratingbefore our eyes. Sometimes changing. We mark it, memorializing ourselves and our parents and grandparents and great-unclesin it, things we think we remember. We try and contain it to quench our need for order. This is my history we say, and so itmust be. We speak quickly so no one hears our own doubt.
History. It nods acknowledgement to our calls if we are lucky and then changes faster than we understand, then slows,imperceptibly-- and sometimes we trip right over it. Ours but not-ours, to have and to hold. Collective, yes, but deeplyprivate. Accumulating in corners of our habitats and minds and the seams of our sweaters, runs of hosiery.
A thousand dresses that are not my own. Homespace, former, archived. Memory as object or camera as sleeping-space. Or something else. Object as desperate document for that which we cannot archive of ourselves. Immeasurable yet ever-present. The absence ofsomething that is More. It becomes the mythology we tell ourselves and our children as we drift off to sleep.
Myths create noise. We are our own histories written in flesh.
Body and blood, given.S. P
12. 5. 18
Absence; amassment. Nearing both ends of the infinite spectrum of existence and nonexistence, and yet both, impermeably and indelicately, intertwined. As humans, as people-- objects ourselves-- we have an immeasurable relationship with the tangible and intangible, with memory and presence. We collect things. We lose things. We forget. We have rituals; we bastardize them-- we keep them going all the same. We the people are creatures of misremembered habit, of stuff, of body, of self and non-self alike.
My work examines, occasionally criticizes, and visually evaluates the flawed but ever-present tendency to hold onto things, dignifying object as record, or relic, of absence-- absent self, absent person, present/absent ritual. How, asks the cheshire cat, is the raven like a writing desk? How indeed-- and how the object like everything is isn’t— a record, of sorts, of what is not there? What relationship does the creek water in Grand Prairie— it was it Mitchell’s?— have, perhaps, to celery and marionettes, my own grandmother’s dresses, and her own mother’s, saved for 60 years, and to the four cast iron horses, the only thing her husband asked for by name the last year of his life? What agency do we give object, ritual, in our private and public lives, if any at all? Why do we remember things, seek them out, memorialize them, hold onto them?
I consider, often, the nature of record. Record-keeping. Mis-record. We humans keep record of millions of minutia; time-sheets, transcripts, receipts from a loaf of bread bought five years ago, uneaten. Accumulating and ammassing to a little more than-- or less than-- nothing at all. What is a life in terms of records of daily transactions, birthday cards, the sacred and the secular reduced to a pile of arbitrary words, inglorious remnants of events misremembered, increasingly arbitrary as time distances is from their origin event. Memory in the abstract marked by the amassing of increasingly useless markers
Absence as presence; the intimate space. Remnants of a life manufactured by a million people at once, where we’ve come to this seemingly universal agreement that socks, of all things, are necessary, and safety-pins and q-tips. Imagine; of all the ways we could have lived, and we collectively decided to create a life-pattern that requires the use of socks. Pillow-cases, mascara, mouse-pads, all here in this realm because we ask them to be. Waiting. Potential energy and arbitration at once. Record.
Some of my work deals with the body-- occasionally as object, but just as often as the intangible absent thing, a self not present. The body as an absent presence through impression. While not there at all in form, body, the idea of it, remains. Pillows, pillowcases, now and then a weighty, intimate record of the human form. Of presence; of absence. Mandated, intimate carriers of the weight which we bring to them. The action goes unreciprocated.
I investigate the pieces of our lives that we keep, to mimic order, to quantify memory, and as records and markers of that which is intangible. Be it ritual, intimate spaces, or simply the things with which we find ourselves enamored— or at least unable to part, my work attempts to draw from body and object as records of rituals and spaces occupied unspoken, occasionally marginal, and absent. S.P
Absence; amassment. Nearing both ends of the infinite spectrum of existence and nonexistence, and yet both, impermeably and indelicately, intertwined. As humans, as people-- objects ourselves-- we have an immeasurable relationship with the tangible and intangible, with memory and presence. We collect things. We lose things. We forget. We have rituals; we bastardize them-- we keep them going all the same. We the people are creatures of misremembered habit, of stuff, of body, of self and non-self alike.
My work examines, occasionally criticizes, and visually evaluates the flawed but ever-present tendency to hold onto things, dignifying object as record, or relic, of absence-- absent self, absent person, present/absent ritual. How, asks the cheshire cat, is the raven like a writing desk? How indeed-- and how the object like everything is isn’t— a record, of sorts, of what is not there? What relationship does the creek water in Grand Prairie— it was it Mitchell’s?— have, perhaps, to celery and marionettes, my own grandmother’s dresses, and her own mother’s, saved for 60 years, and to the four cast iron horses, the only thing her husband asked for by name the last year of his life? What agency do we give object, ritual, in our private and public lives, if any at all? Why do we remember things, seek them out, memorialize them, hold onto them?
I consider, often, the nature of record. Record-keeping. Mis-record. We humans keep record of millions of minutia; time-sheets, transcripts, receipts from a loaf of bread bought five years ago, uneaten. Accumulating and ammassing to a little more than-- or less than-- nothing at all. What is a life in terms of records of daily transactions, birthday cards, the sacred and the secular reduced to a pile of arbitrary words, inglorious remnants of events misremembered, increasingly arbitrary as time distances is from their origin event. Memory in the abstract marked by the amassing of increasingly useless markers
Absence as presence; the intimate space. Remnants of a life manufactured by a million people at once, where we’ve come to this seemingly universal agreement that socks, of all things, are necessary, and safety-pins and q-tips. Imagine; of all the ways we could have lived, and we collectively decided to create a life-pattern that requires the use of socks. Pillow-cases, mascara, mouse-pads, all here in this realm because we ask them to be. Waiting. Potential energy and arbitration at once. Record.
Some of my work deals with the body-- occasionally as object, but just as often as the intangible absent thing, a self not present. The body as an absent presence through impression. While not there at all in form, body, the idea of it, remains. Pillows, pillowcases, now and then a weighty, intimate record of the human form. Of presence; of absence. Mandated, intimate carriers of the weight which we bring to them. The action goes unreciprocated.
I investigate the pieces of our lives that we keep, to mimic order, to quantify memory, and as records and markers of that which is intangible. Be it ritual, intimate spaces, or simply the things with which we find ourselves enamored— or at least unable to part, my work attempts to draw from body and object as records of rituals and spaces occupied unspoken, occasionally marginal, and absent. S.P