Good evening.
Buenas.
What I seek is permission for a storyline.
Clauses of invention.
The chance to find cover in the episodes.
A cascading commitment to making shape and being shaped.
Here, I understand the power of feeling at home in a form,
or in form as such, and it doubles always
into foreboding, into an impending eviction.
So second nature to me are all the conflicts involved
in the process of composition, equal parts reverie
and self-loathing, as to trust the method of objective chance
that André Breton claimed makes a mockery of what would have
seemed most probable.
I give in to the doubling, to a place punctuated
with visual interludes.
And what I know is my own story appears largely
to subsist over time by means of a lens.
Small mementos from the past, perishable scraps
of history, little evidences of experience
both proper and foreign to myself
composed of drawings, prints, films, and photographs.
To find a foothold, I recall the ventriloquising passage
voiced by the fictitious narrator of Chris Marker's 1982
essay film, Sans Soleil.
The first image he told me about was the three children
on a road in Iceland in 1965.
He said that for him it was the image of happiness,
and also that he had tried several times to link it
to other images, but it never worked.
He wrote me, one day I'll have to put it
all alone at the beginning of a film
with a long piece of black leader.
If they don't see happiness in the picture, at least
they'll see the black.
A decade earlier, in 1971, Amiri Baraka had written desires for,
and attitudes about the engagement
in action of a personality as part of a total world
community, of personhood in the geopolitical
racialized imaginary from a largely Euro-ethnic base
of operations.
Baraka wrote that a counter form in the closed
field of white definition marks that
place where ethics and aesthetics, as Wittgenstein
said, are one.
By which Baraka meant the projection of experience,
hopefully beneficial in some way to the world.
So I begin with a photograph.
An Ektachrome slide of an immigrant couple
posing for the camera at Griffith Park
Observatory in Los Angeles, just before or after Baraka
published his counter statement.
The hazy blush of a polluted sky hangs
heavy over the decline of the sluggish hills,
rendering the Hollywood sign a blur at the summit
of Mount Lee in the background.
The couple comes here with a photographer,
likely a relative, too early in the day to watch the sunset--
maybe mid-morning, afternoon.
At any rate, posing between the 1930s street lamp
and, beyond the frame, the sundial and Astronomers
Monument from whose vantage point the portrait is rendered.
With the winter lawn singed beige and brown
by weeks of winter drought, the quad
that leads to the planetarium appears devoid of others.
For this couple, a husband and wife in their mid-30s,
there's a visual disagreement in the opportunity
for self-presentation.
With her puffy hairstyle and red, long sleeved mini dress,
the purse suspended from her left hand
obliges a delicate but studied gesture
that configures a feminine performance.
With cigarette in hand, he wears his hair slicked back and over
the pink shirt and floral tie, a poncho--
or ruana, the name of that item in the Andes
region of Colombia.
A testimony to immigrant achievement in the prosperity
promised by Los Angeles in the Cold War years
between 1960 and 1970, when a Latin American diaspora,
primarily from Mexico but also from Central and South America,
made its way to this urban refuge.
The husband's affirmation of his ethnic difference
further marks the couple in public space--
a defiance.
She refuses to comply as well, but by other means.
Her eyes avoid the camera's lens and our
gaze, as latter-day onlookers, as though she was already
skilled in so many narrative displacements
about the social divisions in California
and the cultural expectations and racialized meanings applied
to her body in the closed field of white definition.
Once, where she was from, she had
committed to habit and memory, accepted as fact,
the entitlements of lighter skin.
Once, where she was from, hierarchies of color
allowed for the overreporting of class status.
Here, any visual haziness in the potent system of subordination
sharpens into the field of perception,
made absolute and unambiguous, owing to something
here inaudible--
a heavily accented English.
Every encouragement to pass conceals
the heavily enforced borderlines of speech acts, even as time
and again she will have endured with the unruffled dignity
or aspirational pride of the petite bourgeois outsider,
allergic to victimhood.
The ineluctable nature of US American attitudes
of exception and white supremacy.
Where are you from?
When asked, she ironizes with imaginative lines of flight.
Sometimes the reply is simply South America,
a term whose perplexing political cloudiness played
evasive even as it assumed, rightly,
her opponent's liable ignorance of geography.
It preempts embarrassment of the other
and a need for explanations.
A little act of ingenuity and generosity.
Increasingly, and because this is California,
the rejoinder is Mexico, with the particulars, however, that
make a fiction plausible, that enhance a narrative of passing.
And so to avoid any association with her native Colombia,
that is, in the media grotesque with narcotics and criminality,
she adds from Mérida, Yucatán.
Her preference for passing--
not quite, not white, not quite not a Mexican national,
is a vernacular knowledge of her body as a sign of difference
that exceeds the body.
But she also knows, as Samira Kawash in another context
observed, the visible becomes an insufficient guarantee
of knowledge.
As a result, the possibility of a gap
opens up between what a body says and what a body means.
[FEMALE VOICE SPEAKING WITH AN ACCENT]
Similarly, an accent is a surplus,
so culturally determined in social space
it can never be understood properly on its own terms,
but rather only as a measure of other incompetencies--
competencies.
Poet Rosa Alcalá writes, an article in Time magazine
on voice activation technology discusses the failure of this
innovation to recognize female or foreign voices with thick
accents.
I sometimes worry that the ways in which we define poetry, she
continues, and separates it into exclusionary camps
is like creating a technology that
recognizes only a few representative voices,
or no voice at all, and can only accomplish
a limited set of commands.
My father died in 2016 and in the time elapsed
since his passing, the meanings of his loss
have become forever entangled in the mess that
is the time of the now.
What Naomi Klein refers to as the large scale
shocks to society, the opportunistic occasions
to advance an agenda auspicious for corporations
and the brutal accumulation of wealth.
To the conditions that gave way to a return
of the repressed, to the preservation of whiteness
and toxic masculinity, to the assault on immigrants
and Indigenous rights, to anti-Black violence
and other forms of racial aggression
and religious intolerance, to unpredictable levels of cyber
surveillance and the single-minded repeal of all
our social safety nets.
Not to speak of the environment.
There's a particular form of immigrant sorrow
that is loath to overstate the family narrative,
even as it finds no place for all
the fixed or misremembered scenes of prohibition
and shame, all the violence and survival, all the contingencies
and chances, the kindnesses and care,
as anything but empty if not in a method of kinship
with actors in the past and present,
for whom the odds of time and space have not been favorable.
Although my father was capable of gentleness,
and there were moments in my adult life
when we came close to being close, he was largely absent
and ever the silent witness of my mother's
aptitude for severity, beholden to aspirational decorum
and to those Catholic pieties that
serve as a cover story to disavow the precarious flux
of sexual and social life.
Even as my father and I were sort
of strangers to each other, I found a renewed indebtedness
to his lifelong commitment to dreaming
despite what was for him, a physician who never practiced
in the US, and therefore a subsistence wage
professional immigrant who abided in the perplexing
order of that uncertainty what was for him, the uneven playing
field and the undeniable consequences of disadvantage.
Insomuch as the concept of clear and open communication was
alien to my upbringing, the charge to find the words that
are true, to acknowledge the task as embodied,
however embedded in the undeniable privileges
in my possession, became a place of antagonism,
of early and belated instructions about how I was
to self-present and find mobility in the world by means
of a provisional persona liable to render a self--
myself-- as something legible.
It became as Philip Roth once remarked, a coup for me
of recognition as a task of having likewise, over and over
again, to fight for my fluency--
every paragraph, every sentence.
In the hospital on his deathbed, my father experienced abrupt
recollections from his youth, as when he had committed to memory
the Spanish Golden Age poet Calderón de la Barca
and the well-known soliloquy recited by the imprisoned
Segismundo in the baroque drama La vida es sueño.
Surrounded by walls, Segismundo wonders, ¿Qué es la vida?
Un frenesí.
¿Qué es la vida?
Una ilusión, una sombra, una ficción.
Y el mayor bien es pequeño.
Que toda la vida es sueño, y los sueños, sueños son.
What is life?
It's madness.
What is life?
An illusion, a shadow, a fiction.
And all kindness is nothing.
Interlude of a life dreamt by a dream inside another dream.
I gained the dubious ability at times
to so create a network of alliances
as to dodge the sight lines of oppression
and the physical or psychic battery of its vengefulness.
The ferocity of family prepared me, perversely,
for the equally unpredictable violence of system.
For the times it has sought to render a body hypervisible
in the way, especially, that sex and ethnicity refuse
the false solaces of categories or when
it, system, prefers the technologies of indifference
and disregard.
Here the lines by Dodie Bellamy come to my rescue.
She says, I'm alone, thrust upon my own alterity,
but who is ever not alone?
To me, being queer, she says, means
doing without the false solace of categories.
Habit and nuance give way to the presentation
of a person, biological inheritance,
and learned enactments wherein, as in the poem
by Robert Duncan.
Often, I am permitted to return, rehearse, regard, resemble,
even as the union of inner weather and outer shell
did not always provide the skills to navigate
the unrelenting grip of cultural authority and its dismissals.
So I came, then, to see childhood, my own,
in images like those by Graciela Iturbide, as inquiries
into the division of private and public life in terms of age,
into the developing mind and body suspended
between the spontaneous life of the imagination
and the margins of social constraint.
I saw it in the image of three boys depicted at a window,
pressing their faces behind a curtain, one
of them raising a toy pistol to the side of his head
as if to illustrate Walter Benjamin's observation of how,
for children, the home often becomes an arsenal of masks,
and how the child, hidden behind a curtain himself becomes
a blank thing moved by the wind, a ghost enclosed
by the material world.
A world that is tremendously accurate and approaching him
in a way that is ineffable.
The photographer had encapsulated the early fear
and fantasy of the inanimate.
Those diminutive terrors by which child and adult
coexist in incommensurable fields of understanding.
In another, she monumentalized the antagonisms
of child and guardian that is the line that
divides formative identity from those of paternal intent.
Suspended in the contradiction of vulnerability and victory
of retrospection and the radius needed
to calculate the plenitude of experience, as ever,
subject to scale.
I began to see--
I began to seek a society of alternate belonging.
The varieties of masculine expression,
bodies in public space, the structure of social appearance,
internal and external differences
that make a subject indistinguishable.
And moreover, to confirm my liminal status
as an outsider-insider.
And there were counter forms.
Take this promo poster of the Syrian pop-punk trio,
The Plugz.
Bandleader Tito Larriva is flanked by Barry McBride
and Chalo Quintana.
Commenting on the scene's appeal for the many Latinos involved,
Larriva exclaimed, I think the fuck you attitude of punk
was great for Latinos.
You could assimilate into a new culture that
was evolving without compromising who you were,
or having to be segregated.
Sean Carrillo reminds us that when the LA punk scene was
born, Latinos were integrally involved
and throughout its lifespan, the contributions of Ron Reyes
and Dez Cadena of Black Flag, Gerardo Velazquez
of Nervous Gender, Joe Ramirez of the Eyes,
as well as the Brat and the Odd Squad, among others,
were an undeniable part of its history and growth.
A list of those others, I would add, include Alice Bag,
or Alicia Armendariz, of the Bags,
Eddie Muñoz and Louie Ramirez of the Plimsouls,
Charles Ramirez a.k.a.
Chuck Roast of the Suburban Lawns, and Juan
Gomez of the Human Hands.
The idiosyncratic short-lived quintet from Los Angeles,
the Human Hands were, from left to right, Juan Gómez, guitar,
bass, vocals; David Wiley, vocals, guitar,
saxophone and percussion; Bill Noland, keyboards, coronet,
vocals; Dennis Duck, drums and percussion, keyboards, vocals;
and Rick Potts, bass guitar, saxophone, saw, and vocals.
They might have passed for office clerks, record store
employees, or aerospace engineers who
sought the aural nightmare of sonic shapes
in comic book colors, unyielding of the climate's hard edge
and in spite of their relish for cartoon
logic and the false problem.
Trains can't fly into the air.
Planes can't swim into the sea.
Trains can't jump over buildings.
Planes can't crawl into tunnels.
Trains vs. Planes.
On April 6, 1980, in the Los Angeles Times,
writer Terry Atkinson offered the following assessment--
Human Hands is a quintet for Pasadena
that has become one of the punk circuit's leading attractions.
This despite the fact that the group is hardly
a typical hardcore outfit.
Instead of spiky hair and black leather jackets,
this punk band features an almost aggressively normal
look.
Lots of horn-rimmed glasses, haircuts
that might have been done by the neighborhood barber,
and clothes apparently bought at Sears.
Though the group's music contains
its share of slashing punk anthems,
its scope also includes influences
like Brian Eno, Talking Heads, Wire, and even Stockhausen.
As if to overcompensate for their ordinary surface of,
I tried so hard to look like myself, lead singer David Wiley
snarls, but then I look so different,
I look like everyone else.
I've got the new look.
Does it look good to you?
I've got the new look.
It's really nothing new.
A band's band, further showered with critical favor
in the years they played the circuit,
the Human Hands produced a catalog
of tracks that never found their home in album format.
Time passes, and I learned that after moving back to his native
Phoenix, David Wiley had died of HIV in 1986 and Juan Gómez went
on to other bands, the Romans, among them,
while serving also in his parallel life as a very
esteemed librarian at the Huntington in Pasadena.
But from 1980-- from 1978 to 1981,
the band engaged in the willful inversion of punk
noir aesthetics, of indictment that
informed much of punk's more politically
inclined lyrics of the time.
Gómez and Wiley, who wrote most of the songs,
countered outrage with joy by holding tight to desire
and to the bodily absurd.
I used a needle and thread to sew a stitch in my head.
My dreams came apart at the seams
until I took a tailor to bed.
And keyboardist Bill Noland penned
a track whose lyrics endure and are as fine
as any short poem of the moment, certainly one
I wish I'd written.
It's a poem about the world as potential,
as it wasn't in childhood, to terrify and to touch
and to edify a knowledge as enclosed in books
or otherwise curved, but never entirely containable
no matter how long we wait in the shadows
in order to trust in the day.
It's called Lurk.
Something made me crouch, like little night noises
that crease electric wires.
Hallways and metal rooms.
Convivial nighthawks reach me with their voices
while inside, they've got shelves
with bookends of human heads.
The heads still live and talk about the books next door.
They compete for your attention regardless
of what you're there for.
School bus pulls up outside and we look for a seat.
Door seals us in metal room.
We get ready for the day.
All that I can see and all that I can hear
are surrounded by these walls.
Born at the crossroads with the punk performance art scene
and music scene of Los Angeles in the 1970s and early 1980s,
were budding intellectual passions
for experimental theater.
It included, for example, the Actors Gang, and its version
of Alfred Jarry's Ubu the King, directed by recent UCLA
graduate, the actor Tim Robbins.
As well as the electrifying social experience
that was Luis Valdez's Zoot Suit, performed at the Aquarius
Theater in Los Angeles in 1979.
Notably performed in the distinctive vocal and physical
stylizations of actor Edward James Olmos, the mythical stage
creation that was Zoot Suit's El Pachuco endures
in video documentation and in author Luis Valdez's own 1981
film adaptation of his 1978 play.
Clad in solid black drapes and matching fedora, gold crucifix
worn over a high collar crimson shirt,
El Pachuco submits a smooth display of diagonal attitude
and self-possession, immortalized as much
in Ignacio Gomez's iconic 1978 poster and Aquarius Theater
outdoor mural.
Poet Joshua Escobar recently reminds me
that El Pachuco, a figure demonized
at the height of 1940s racial tensions
and in the widely covered legal trials afterwards,
becomes terrifically inverted through Valdez's stagecraft.
A wildly liminal figure able to slide between foreground
and background to instigate and protect,
whose voice nearly exceeds the framework of the play.
His most memorable lines were those
delivered in Brechtian self-referential and rhyming
self-address.
Ladies and gentlemen, our particular reality
will only make sense if you grasp the mystification.
The Pachuco style was an act in light.
His language was a new creation.
His will to be was an awesome force--
his reality, existential.
But he was an actor on the street,
both profane and reverential.
It is a secret fantasy of every vato, living in or out
of the [? ticanada, ?] to put on the zoot suit
and play the myth.
I speak as an actor on the stage.
The Pachuco was existential, for he was an actor on the street,
both profane and reverential.
Words that echo a method already employed as early
as 1967 in Delano, California by Luis Valdez and El Teatro
Campesino.
Following the United Farm Worker's leadership
of Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta
and the stage guidance of budding director Valdez,
Mexican-American farmworkers further
enhance the ability to organize and advocate
for change in labor practices by means of popular stagecraft.
Rasquache and Existential--
Tomás Ybarra-Frausto linked the rough and tumble performance
style of El Teatro Campesino to the delight and refinement
found in what is more generally deemed banal, lowly,
or uncouth.
Although witty and ironic, the ethos of Rasquache was rarely
mean-spirited, even when Valdez and his company lampooned
the contradictions proper to evolving Mexican-American
and Chicano cultural values, as in Los Vendidos--
The Sellouts-- first performed in 1967 for a Brown Beret
meeting at Elysian Park in East LA--
later a 1972 Emmy award-winning Public Broadcasting teleplay.
As El Teatro Campesino transition
from its makeshift rural stages to an urban environment,
its creators posed questions about the place of volunteerism
in the circuitry of social production,
and about commitments to ethnic self, family, society,
history--
insofar as the promises of these values
are the absurd stuff of tragic comedy.
El Teatro Campesino had made charm and swift comic timing
crucial to its own pedagogy of the oppressed,
deflating the power of so-called social fact
by empowering laborers to indulge in the productive play
of role reversal.
Valdez claims, put the rancher on the stage,
but we'll do the acting.
In the style of the skeptical Pachuco archetype
of what is required to be an actor on the street,
El Teatro Campesino's through-line
can be read allegorically as one that
asks the existential questions driving the secret fear
and fantasy of action and agency,
especially when the cultural manifestations and living
styles practiced by a people are subsumed in a recovery
process that later renders them symbolic
of a preordained authenticity.
For a subject in social production,
there are no guidelines for the collective enterprise that
echews a view of the past as fixed and unchanging--
a museum--
but rather optimistically, as the open-ended possibility
of the ephemeral archive.
Hazy sun seeps through a window, enhancing
the indoor fluorescent light as it
imbues the scene with a lulled manila glow.
The large window pane at the upper right
is framed in relation to the lighting fixture overhead,
angled at the uppermost left.
These spatial elements occupy the greater area
of the picture--
the room itself staggered into planes and angles,
as in a stage set--
even as you begin to configure the couple seated side
by side on a couch, each immersed in reading, possibly
out loud to one another from the printed matter
held in their hands.
The lean youth wears a white T-shirt
and brown corduroy jeans that match his Adidas suede
sneakers.
He leans closer, just barely to the friend
with whom he shares a flocked upholstery
couch of a neo-California colonial design.
That's his jacket and spiral notebook strewn
on the floor next to him.
She sports a black leather coat, shin-high white-strapped
sandals and a deep, red-patterned mini dress
accentuating her smooth, crossed legs.
With her hair styled in an up-do,
her face betrays a self-conscious, or undecided
smile.
Does she ponder her companion's remark,
or is it something about the pages in front of her
that occupies her thoughts?
Or rather, is it the sudden presence of the photographer
clicking the shutter?
Are the ocher hues in this interior
due to an overcast layer through the foliage,
or to the 40-year fade of a slide transparency?
The moment hangs on such questions of physical relation
and style across time, as it does
on the different shades of their skin
and the indeterminate time of day.
In the early 1970s, photographer Oscar Castillo was in his mid
to late 20s, not much older than the two
students in the photograph.
Chicano identity, too, was still in the making,
working through its own internal conflicts and its association
with the struggle of other oppressed peoples.
A few years before this picture was taken,
the former Los Angeles Times journalist Rubén Salazar
reported that quote, relations between Mexican-Americans
and Black activists in California colleges
and universities, which are cool at best,
have deteriorated as a result of a Chicano walkout during
an educational opportunity workshop at UC Santa Barbara,
end quote.
Castillo, an alumnus of San Fernando Valley State
College, later Cal State Northridge,
was seasoned in the Mexican-American student
movement that advanced civil rights even
as it ignited youthful conviction across university
campuses.
Students had already called for a curricular restructuring
so that the education universities provided
could speak to the knowledge and histories
of underrepresented communities--
the rise of Chicano studies.
Castillo was among the handful of photographers
who had documented the Chicano Moratorium,
the Anti-Vietnam War demonstration in East Los
Angeles that led to police hostility
and subsequent outbreak resulting
in considerable property damage, 400 arrests, and three
fatalities.
Most shocking was the death of Rubén Salazar,
who had sought respite in the Silver Dollar Café from
the violence being waged against the protesters outside.
In the already disproportionate police offensive,
Deputy Sheriff Thomas Wilson fired a tear gas projectile
at Salazar's head.
The journalist was killed instantly.
Appropriate to the subject of reading
is the permanent marker graffiti on the wall
behind the studious couple--
Victor de El Centro; Manuel Carrillo de Aztlán.
For me, the photograph similarly holds a place for what Ramón
Gutiérrez calls the spatial concept of community.
Just prior to the protests, or the collective demonstrations,
and despite the inter-ethnic arguments of the kind
represented by the walkout at an educational opportunity
workshop, instead the picture insinuates the promise
of less visible moments of intimacy and alliance, that is,
of politics by other means.
To the extent that the picture hinges on the desire
to take action, are the youth studying, or drawing up plans
for an imminent demonstration?
The then and there of the picture
can only be as undecided as that inscrutable smile,
or as inadvertent as the connection still activated
within the frame.
Proper names on the wall behind them,
everyday life at California Polytechnic University,
the gladness of working together and the complicity
of joint effort, and the social possibility--
our present-- awaiting those eventual graduates
beyond the amber glow.
In that glow, or glimmer, is marked
the poetic justice required to tell narratives of sight
and sound in transformation.
To be in surplus of a scene is to be simultaneously attached
to the setting and estranged from it.
Looking back at episodes past both
lived and unlived I can view such excess as a value,
as that which makes something accessible to experience out
of a general diminishing, a glimmer reflecting
that unremarked violence at the picture's margin that
gives surface reality a natural semblance, a neutral one.
My conflict is this--
the impossibility of a viewpoint poised at the places
that determine for me and inclusion
in, or an exclusion from, categories greater
than the individual, but that so dislocate me
from my surroundings as to resist too
easy allocations of meaning--
an ethics.
There is no mystery other than the values
of a self, attributes, there is no-- excuse
me, there is no mystery other than the values
a self attributes to the situational world
where, under a dimming glow, symbolic actions have
a stake in escaping the instrumental life.
The quality of light and subjectivity
that is a provisional glimmer reminds us
that the world can readily be stripped of its halo.
When all that is solid melts into air, marks,
and we are made to see the real conditions of our lives,
the syllabic self seeks reflection
in settings of experience and experiment.
The cover of ground, if only as a temporary residence.
That transience may quicken us to substitute the vanishing
with so many constituent parts, reanimated.
The artwork or poem, even when deprived of a halo,
even when released from its fixity and essence,
is not without a radiance of a convenient forgetting,
as when in any quest account, the amulet found
is really a refinding--
Freud.
In its unhurried measure, inasmuch as speed
for speed's sake endangers the sensual opportunity
of the world and, everyday-- because so beckoning--
its recurring custody--
the words exact a style of integrity.
You can hear its command.
Do we want humanity at the service of justice,
or justice at the service of humanity?
In Wartime Kiss, Alexander Nemerov
describes the act of making history,
of being in the presence of the past,
as a search for fragments, for images, for archival documents,
for connections that feel like a disturbance
on the surface of things.
Mexican artist Magali Lara provides an attendant animation
of that disturbance in terms of self estrangement,
the custody that which is prone to perish
and guaranteed to die, a cellular striving ever
to be more when patterns of the organism
structure the imagination.
Life or lifelike varieties in mutual and ever regenerate
transfigurations.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
My desire is to assemble scenes and daydreams in search
of a surrogate autobiography.
Memoirs by other means, group portraits with liminal figures
that make possible an understanding
of our involvements with others, both familiar and unfamiliar--
an ephemeral archive.
I want this immigrant couple from the perspective
of the present and the vantage point of Griffith Park in 1970
to gaze back at me with the historical consciousness
of a present that views the past only as an image which flashes
up at the instant when it can be recognized,
and is never seen again.
The experience of departure, disappearance,
and the fleeting social relations
that is a premonition of demise, adjoin to Walter Benjamin's
well-worn but always stunning formulation, whereby
to articulate the past historically
is to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up
at a moment of danger.
I want the alternate futures that
might have been possible for them
once looming below in the city expanse
to stagger now the conclusions of our historical circumstance,
the present, as being anything but composed
of so many loose ends, false starts, scrap
remainders of experience, or public opinion, the stuff
of self-conscious gestures, cruel ironies,
unsubstantiated exchange or contrast, a frame through which
to view the horizon of relations.
Wittgenstein famously described certain phenomena
as such a wonder at the existence of the world,
that one is inclined to use such phrases as,
how extraordinary that anything should exist,
or how extraordinary that the world should exist.
The philosopher of family resemblance
came to see that these nonsensical expressions were
not nonsensical, only that he had not yet
found the correct expressions.
What he sought in those terms was
to go beyond the world, that is to say
beyond significant language.
Ethics and aesthetics for Wittgenstein
were this hopeless, absolutely hopeless inclination
to brush up against the walls of our cage.
That is, to ask whether it is possible to be
both autonomous and foreign to myself,
diagonal and self-possessed.
But it never really works.
The liminal figures I evoke in my doubling evanesce
as suddenly as they appear, convenient placeholders
of inaction or the projections of an empathic experience,
now foreboding, now hopeful.
One day I'll have to line the words and images
of my surrogate cells into a talk that, like Magali Lara's
animation, so reflects the irrepressible life as
to ask whether those apparitions make legible an emotion,
or so ground it as to be sufficient to its life form.
To wonder, with my liminal figures,
about the everyday evictions from an already impermanent
home that makes of my racial selfhood an uncanny kinship
with others.
If I fail to see myself in the picture, at least
I can find provisional solace again in the amber glow,
in a fight for fluency, in the finding and re-finding,
in the quest for the correct expression,
my disturbance on the surface of things, an ephemeral archive,
all that I can see and all that I can hear
are surrounded by these walls.
How extraordinary that anything should exist.
Thanks.