It's Time to Grow Up

There was an old person whose habits,
Induced him to feed upon rabbits;
When he'd eaten eighteen,
He turned perfectly green,
Upon which he relinquished those habits.

Edward Lear

Common Stock, We Work Around the Clock

"yet I am ruled by my emotions, though I murder them at birth... That I, the civilized, scrupulous sportsman, was behaving like an ice-cream merchant with a knife"- Rogue Male, Geoffrey Household

And all of the suspense was a hoax. Because it turns out ghosts don't sneak up on people.

Anna Atkins, Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions. (1799-1871)




digital collection by: NYPL

A Rectangle Becomes A Person

And pride makes us drag our bodies on the ground, a firm act of defiance against the useless limbs; through fields and into living rooms, to drink tea in dirt stained dresses. We sit in silence, the guests evade stony glances. Words are secondary. Instead we send Mescalero smoke signals and offer no more apologies.


H. C. Andersen Medusa, Agnete Lind Picture Book, (1854).

Circumnutation: Pursuing the Sun

Bloomwilt, bloomwilt, bloom
The devil will find work for idle hands to do.

Heart Reign Hand-off

There is no telling which is deserving of the Iron burden.
If I took care to study the options delicately, it would be clear that both parties were guilty of infractions. I would like to be the hand to wield the Chinese key; the deliverance from a dark heavy fate. If the key is lost, there is only to fashion its likeness. Two wear a mask of iron, neither born to be so smooth and cold, neither proud of their results. I ask only to be forgiven for my clumsy fingers; the unintended contribution to your grief.


Stills: The Man in the Iron Mask (1939)

Garden of Orchids

Chapter One: The Genesis of a World
"Two Suns met. What had been, ceased; what was to be, arose. Fatal to both progenitors, the event dated a stupendous cosmic birth"-Mars as the Abode of Life Percival Lowell (1908).

So ends the week of collisions: Head with concrete, teeth with tools, dark bodies with dead suns, text and screen.

Der Orchideengarten (1919-1921).

Body of Yogurt

Primus by Osip Mandelshtam

"I'm raw and uneducated,
it's easy for me to become yogurt,"
said the raw milk
to the boiled.

But the boiled
answers tenderly,
"I'm no mollycoddle,
I have skin!"

Illustration by Mstilav Dobuzhinsky (1875 - 1957).

They Draw You Out

With caution, I enter a room, from ceiling to floor, filled with glass globes. I approach the globes, organized neatly on shelves, in some sort of catalogue. Careful inspection reveals that the glass encasements contain memories. Reminiscence most private and also ones favorably shared. I see my 6th birthday party, when my Aunt gave me the glittery rainbow butterfly t shirt, and our trip to the park when I skinned my knee. I see me defending my sister from the top of the metal slide as a set of bullies taunts us from below. I continue down the shelves and come upon a globe of my first day at a new school, next to it, the day I got the stomach flu and threw up on my desk. Further along my goodbyes to my best 3rd grade friends, as I prepared for yet another new school.

The glass encasements continue and each memory is increasingly removed from its predecessor. I am on the steps of my first apartment complex, crying for the loss of a favored necklace from a late dear relative. At the graduation that would have been my own, staring into the faces of those I once knew well, but have grown distant. To a sterile room with desks and nervous young BFA hopefuls. In a tiny attic room reorganizing new purchases, and musing over the train ride, the bridge and the damp smell around us. In the side chapel of a church centuries old: to encounter a glass coffin, where a withered knight lays adorned with strings of delicate flowers, where I lost my breath once.

They come in much quicker succession. A successful snow dance. A silly movie with friends. A snowball fight with children much younger than myself on the way to school. Hiding out in a shed for one cold night. The view from the top of a mountain. In a tree house watching a meteor shower.

The hallway is seemingly endless, I cannot anticipate its contents.

Three globes that stand out near each other contain a sunny day on a swing set with Popsicles, A rare opportunity, and a giant tree dressed up like a monster. Not too far past them is a summer vacation; The Climax to a novel.

Not every glass holds a treasure, some are moments of boredom, and others I won't speak of for fear of tears. As I look upon the memories, each is a homage to the persons invloved, a private time, or at the very least a celebration for the brevity of that moment.



Distillation Series: Thomas Doyle, Escape/Scatter (2006).

Close up:
"Like black boxes bobbing in the flotsam, these works wait for discovery, each an indelible record of human memory."

Will Not Wrestle Doves

PHILIP GUSTON:

"There is something ridiculous and miserly in the myth we inherit from abstract art. That painting is autonomous, pure and for itself, therefore we habitually analyze its ingredients and define its limits. But painting is 'impure'. It is the adjustment of 'impurities' which forces its continuity. We are image-makers and image-ridden. There are no wiggly or straight lines..."

We all need to be free. There is something overwhelming about the attempt to conquer something you previously viewed as The Desirable, to turn things up on the side like that is the task of only the seekers of loneliness. And yet there remains the reality that it just needs to be carried out.

Just as a painter becomes weary of the repetitiveness of style, so also do I see my own inhumanity at an inability towards the most basic feelings of empathy. Philip Guston had to become a cartoon to challenge confinement. What will you and I become?

Philip Guston, ‘Untitled (Cherries)’ (1980).
Philip Guston, 'Painting, Smoking, Eating' (1973)

Philip Guston, 'Multiplied' (1972).

There Are Also Black Sails

This morning I journeyed with a friend deep into the realm of a most fierce, but utterly delicate self-proclaimed monster. He, in his demonic severity, proclaimed his love for a feathery moth with an acute aversion to light. The monster called out to the moth, but the moth of course, was unable to speak, due to her shy nature. And so they continued to live together but apart, in an endless labyrinth of misconception.


"Insatiable Minotaur! My Dreams chafe against his horns... A king’s ultimate responsibility is to be sovereign of his own being. And yet, it’s impossible!"-Julio Cortázar

Gustave Doré, 'Minos' (1857).

Sonnet of the Sweet Complaint

Never let me Lose the Marvel
of your statue-like eyes, or the accent
the solitary rose of your breath
places on my cheek at night.

I am afraid of being, on this shore,
a branch less trunk and what I most regret,
is having no flower, pulp or clay
for the worm of my despair.

If you are my hidden treasure,
If you are my cross, my dampened pain,
If I am a dog, and you alone are my master

Never let me lose what I have gained
and adorn the branches of your river
with the leaves of my estranged autumn.

-Lorca

How Well Her Name An Army Dost Present

A cat's hazy cry
in nowise odd; sly
whose sodden yowl
does despair me so

Buried In The Hold

Three pairs of eyes dart quickly from side to side. He must also witness the physical and mental deterioration of a friend who is suffering from an unnamed disease.


"Each time, she finds herself tormented by her terrible fear of the rattling skeleton of a huge gorilla, which she believes inhabits the house at night."- Unica Zurn, Dark Spring
Drawing by Unica Zurn

Hollow Head Above Water

Lay your head down, old fashioned.
I'd like to be someone who you could learn to love again
you know how it is my friends

Put A Handle On The Past

give them heart hinges and get on your way!