Iāve been reading a book about Philip Guston lately. I like finding out when great artists are riveted, almost to the point of worry, by other artists. For Guston, it was Rembrandt. His later period in particular: this is when the Dutch painter saw contours as optional, sometimes completely forgoing the edges that distinguished subject from space. There was something about this that made Guston feel Rembrandtās portraits were ānot a painting, but a real personā, as they had the rare ability to bypass what Guston called āthe plane of artā. Rembrandt did this with subtlety and grace. To me, Max Keeneās work achieves something similar. But what it gives way to is not something material, like a person, but more vague and abstract: the deportment of memory.
The paintings in Back of House contain skilful renderings of figurative forms: a shoe print, ancient statues, wrenches, bota bags, a running figure, to name a few. Itās a playful range that seems more like a random selection from the mindās archive of encountered images: an ordinary object, a moment in time. But what transcends Gustonās āplane of artā has more to do with Keeneās style, which seems to want to capture the nature of the unconscious realm itself: a single dilating room where images flow into and against one another. Keeneās chosen tool, the airbrush, is a helpful assist: its hazy articulation of forms, in subdued and feathery palettes, fade from one to the next without any convincing edge. Though figures are identifiable, the paintings feel closer to abstract, as the forms, like memories, are layered or as one with each other or the space around them. Some artists that include the unconscious in their work may tend toward the provocative or even absurd. Keeneās paintings are more a quiet offering of memoryās odd conflations, and a modest pictorial attempt at both gathering and parsing these elements while respecting the irreducible nature of unconsciousness. Like Rembrandt, Keene channels subtlety and grace.
Back to Philip Guston. He also believed that āfrustration is one of the great things in artā, while āsatisfaction is nothingā. Keeneās work may challenge the reasoned mind, which prefers its edges defined. But unlike art that satisfies, āto our increasing boredomā (Guston), another kind of artāelusive yet pervasive, vague yet sensicalāis what actually lingers, because it cannot be pinned down. Its polyvalence keeps it in a state of becoming. Keene himself told me: āThe confusing elements are necessary; it has to be that way to get the feeling.ā He was talking about his work, but the same could be said about memory. What resists explanation nevertheless gives rise to affect: both art, and memoryās, intended audience.
In his show “Tempo 85” (2022) at Montreal’s Espace Maurice, Bronson Smillie takes apart a player piano, forming evocative new assemblages with its repurposed parts and accessories. In Roll Rubbing #1–4 (these—and all—works 2022), wooden piano keys become shelves for embossed photo mounts; in The Skeleton, more piano keys and washers form a sculptural collage on a wall-resting keybed; and for Keys, piano roll boxes are mounted, player height, in the shape of its title. What’s significant is that Smillie’s artistic intervention keeps the referent instrument intact, a gesture that signifies an observable reverence for the object’s previous life. When he does intervene, traces of his own oeuvre naturally appear: the use of paper pulp and repetition as an extension of his printmaking background; era-specific objects, like photo mounts and a wooden letterpress, that have lost functional relevance but still possess aesthetic merit. Where he appears, so does his signature touch—one that is considerate and tender. Considerate in how traces of previous owners, their marks and notations, are left on scrolls or boxes. And tender like his intervention, which is less a dismantling than a delicate adjustment.
Smillie’s consideration for the objects makes me want to exchange the word repurposing for translation, after Walter Benjamin. In “The Task of the Translator,” Benjamin explains that translation “does not cover the original, does not block its light, but allows the pure language […] to shine upon the original all the more fully.” This is Smillie’s work described: he translates the objects he finds into art, all the while preserving their history. Translation also offers the original a new life again, or rather—à la Benjamin—an “afterlife,” which is to say, a continued life. In “Tempo 85,” Smillie asks his viewers to give these objects, like he has, a second chance; he succeeds.
“For a mystic, the inner world is a weather that contains the universe and uses it as symbolic language.” The artist, kin to mystic, has a similar relationship to their inner world, using the universe behind the veil to develop their own visual vernacular. For the artist Camille Jodoin-Eng, the terrain of that world, of its feelings and curiosities, is the basis for her growing group of invented symbols. She dips into that world’s depths and out of intuition they emerge: some as simple as an oval or curved line; others, like the papier-mâché pieces on view at Convergence at the Frog Pond, more elaborate. There are experiences that inspire her works—water moving over rocks in a small creek, flocks of birds undulating in the sky, a friend putting on their makeup—but these exist more like spiritual references for the abstract forms they’re related to. Her symbols, born from a wordless place, are a mystery even to Jodoin-Eng, and she invites others’ interpretations. I think of what 13th century poet Rumi once wrote: “If the nut of the mystery can’t be held, at least let me touch the shell.” If the nut of the mystery can’t be held, then at least we all can describe, in our own language, the way the shell feels pressed against our skin. We can also of course speculate what exists beyond. Sharing our respective descriptions and guesses—honouring the multivalence—can lead to the tremendous widening of our inner worlds. For Jodoin-Eng, part of her practice is contemplating the mystery together.
Convergence at the Frog Pond is also inspired by quiet pockets we may find in a forest while on long hikes. It’s difficult in present times, though, to find a spot in nature free from the mark of heedless people—think of the litter often found peppered through fields of perky or flattened grass. I imagine Jodoin-Eng discovering a clearing within the forest, the vestiges of human presence strewn about, and going beyond removal: instead, guided not only by care but creativity, she gathers whatever discarded object— plastic bottles, electrical wiring, industrial spools—and finds a place for them in her art, the lilypad sculpture in Convergence an evocative example. I think of magpies, or bower birds, who cumulate objects made by nature or man to fashion something sublime. What Jodoin-Eng’s art does—and invites her viewers to do—is try, despite pain and destruction, to never forgo the creative impulse. We need it in order to survive.
Exhibition text for “Convergence at the Frog Pond” at Patel Brown (Toronto), 2022
Behind what I can’t Bring into focus is Maybe you or A small truth I’m Finding in Certain places like The blindspot In a rearview mirror or The light on in Another room I guess I am the fool I guess I am the soupy wings of A butterfly forming It’s nice this heightened Vulnerability and that I need it to transform I am sleeping Without dreaming I am failing towards Something big Still space Between us No longer being like
Is it time To peel it open I love to not know and Get the deep kick that Makes me cry or Write something down It keeps happening I praise the image forming And loving blindness Exploding behind the veil Like taking care And saying thanks Before I leave For good
Poem in response to “Unfoldings” at April April (New York), 2022
The title of The Cruise (1998) has a twofold meaning. It alludes to the sightseeing tours Timothy “Speed” Levitch, the film’s central subject, gives on New York City’s double-decker buses, tours that garnered a cult following in the late ‘90s. It’s also a reference to Levitch’s self-created doctrine: to “cruise” is to live nomadically, loyal to the present moment, and in dissent of the thraldom of conformity.
Directed by Bennett Miller and skillfully edited by Michael Levine, The Cruise is a strong piece of nonfiction portraiture, a depiction of a man in a wearing search for meaning. Footage was filmed twice—the first summer with a crew, the second, in the wake of DV cameras advent, just Miller—but only the second iteration was used, where Levitch, experiencing “self-consciousness fatigue”, let his performative guard down. The result is an honest portrayal of common artistic struggle, oscillating from scenes of Levitch’s brilliant, trenchant monologues in front of tourists or the camera, to others that are all too familiar: banal and bureaucratic encounters that curb the potential of Levitch’s existence. He refers to this as the “anti-cruise”, and the film offers examples: meagre pay and hours at work, his conservative family’s expectations, and a brief spell of incarceration.
“Anti-cruise” is essentially anti-change, whereas to “cruise” is to believe in and strive for a better world. He knows that cruising entails failing repeatedly, but it also means living a life motivated by adventure and love. Levitch is aware, for instance, that the pursuit of individuality, at the crux of cruising, is a delusion, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth the effort. “Biologically, we have the same infrastructure as plants,” he says. “[But] I want to be the flower that smells most profusely, that veers most drastically towards the sunlight.”
Review of Bennett Miller’s film “The Cruise” (1998) for In The Mood magazine, 2022
Combining documentary, narrative fiction, critical essay, and poetry, Level Five (1996) is one of Chris Marker’s many ingenious anomalies. The film follows Laura, a newly widowed computer programmer, as she completes her late husband’s unfinished video game, a task she herself has chosen to take on. Like mourning, it is an enterprise, though a more concrete one. Laura’s grief is an influence but not a detainer: it affects but does not stop her thinking. She adds new truths next to old ones. Time, she declares, is an invisible insect that chronically stings whoever lives. But those stings are not just the pain or nuisance that commonly defines them; they’re also reminders of her humanity. Time is life’s permanent tenor, steadfast and impartial, and there is no stopping it. Not like she is trying to fight it: resignation and curiosity are her framework, and she engages each ache under no illusions. Different interpretations get sowed in the same dirt where others have already been buried. The dead repose beside—and inside—the living. The connotations of this are Laura’s main consideration; or, more precisely, they are Marker’s, who knows the past is veined through each person like a network, too bound up to be undone or circumvented.
A probe of time’s influence on memory and affect, both personally and culturally, is signature Chris Marker, the fulcrum of all his films. So, too, is his inimitable form of expression: enigmatic, fragmentary, and tongue-in-cheek. For Marker, there are no answers, only what patterns can be made from connecting loose ends. In Level Five, he assembles a bricolage of his favoured subjects—Japanese culture, the burgeoning of technology, a world after War—as the foundation from which to explore the never ending question of Time. Typical of Marker too is inventing characters to make his inquiries for him, knowing that fiction can push back on the borders that close in on storytelling when one has to remain faithful to the facts. Not like a common veracity would likely interest Marker anyway, as history is largely an art that strives for perfect truth in the face of great bias. No; Marker’s “gentle mission,” like that of Roland Barthes (as Wayne Kostenbaum writes in the introduction to A Lover’s Discourse) is “to rescue nuance.” For Marker, it has always been about the overlooked, the details that evade the wide angled view: that which pricks, like Barthes’ punctum, or the things that, as underscored in Sans Soleil (1983), quicken Shōnagan’s heart. With fiction, characters that act as proxy for Marker can hone in on elaborate states of feeling—or the nuanced—without eclipsing what is objectively factual. (In his more documentarian films like Grin Without A Cat, nuance is the overlooked subjects he interviews. He often aimed, as he states in a mid-aughts interview, “[t]o try to give the power of speech to the people who don’t have it,” to those who had “no tools to be heard,” and to those neglected by a sole, autocratic narrative.) Marker, like Barthes, wants “an armistice with perception’s systemic injuries” (Koestenbaum): to be free to adapt and dilate that perception. It’s about discovering other worlds while remaining in this one. “Okay, it’s fiction,” Veronique says at the end of fellow New Waver Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise (1967), “but it brings me closer to reality.”
In Level Five Marker invents Laura, played by French actress Catherine Belkhodja. We meet her via the diaristic videos she records while working on the game, all of them a one-sided communion with her dead husband whose name we never learn. Despite the intimacy this implies, we are not alienated as viewers. The videos are mostly philosophical and poetic musings, an out-loud processing, that help her reckon with the labyrinthine game he’s left her, the one she alone strives to complete. This strategy-based game, which is also never named, concerns the small Japanese island of Okinawa during the Second World War, and its goal is to offer its players alternative outcomes to the tragic events that unfolded. The real Okinawa was, at the point of Marker’s filming, still embalmed by the brutal trauma of WWII: over the Spring of 1945 the so-called Battle of Okinawa ensued, killing nearly half of Okinawa’s civilian population, with many of the deaths a result of suicide and ritual killings induced by Japanese propaganda. Japan may have moved on by the time of the film’s creation in 1997, bolstered by the country’s obsession with rapidly modernising itself, but to Okinawa’s survivors it remained a lacuna, unaddressed. (“[But] that’s how history advances,” Marker tells us in Sans Soleil, “plugging its memory as one plugs one’s ears.”) There are ways in which this can be rectified, but Marker is more interested in how this institutes a hauntology: the past may be omitted while creating a new future, but it is never absent. As the film moves from footage on Okinawa to Laura in the workroom and back, we see the differences in how this manifests: while Japan will not acknowledge the elephant that haunts its room, Laura holds each fact’s gaze—her husband is dead, her memory of him is fading—even in her desire to turn away. One painfully represses; the other painfully integrates. Only one of these pains has integrity.
Eventually Laura stops working on the game. It’s unclear what stage her grief is at when she does, but there are many indications of the experience having granted her perspectives that will aid her in coming to terms. “I can recognise myself in that little island because my most unique, my most intimate suffering is also the most banal,” she observes at one point. At another, she admits she’s afraid that something “as potent as a song” will no longer be her and her husband’s anymore, but instead “everyone’s to share.” She vocalises her fears to displace them, to see past the pain of another of the insect’s many stings. As time builds without stopping, memory gets subsumed into the large fabric of history, losing not only its potency but its sanctity. It all goes; she is simply being reminded. By the end, Laura has had enough reminders; she’d “come to a limit; beyond it, the game was not hers anymore, nor was history.” She engaged with her wound, asked the questions, felt whatever arose. The limit is an invitation for her own deliverance. Taking the hint, she disappears.
Review of Chris Marker’s film “Level Five” (1996), 2022
On The BeachĀ follows Young-hee, an actress, navigating the kind of pain thatās crystallized by a fraught romance. In the wake of an affair with a married film director and the resulting social stigma, she leaves Seoul for Germany before coming back to South Korea, to the sea town of Gangneung. Despite her grief, Young-hee still engages with the world: she goes to a Hamburg bookstore and asks the owner to play music he composed, screams about dying graciously after too much sake, draws faces in sand on the beach before falling asleep in front of them. In the filmās denouement, she has dinner with her old lover and his film crew as he happens to be in Gangneung on location, and what is typically a private affairāa maudlin reunion between the two participants of a brief and piercing loveāoccurs and unfolds quite publicly. But the encounter and its rigorous catharsis is tolerated by the others at the dinner not out of fear or politeness; it seems as if they all understand, are bearing witness to two things that are really quite common: loveās sororal pain, and a womanās anger.
As a straight woman, and like many straight women, Young-hee feels both desire and antipathy towards men (also straight). Drunk at the dinner with friends, she talks about the ones she met in Germany, how āinside theyāre the same. Men all want the same thingā. Anger can lead to negligent generalizations, but after her reunion with the director, I wondered if you could really blame her. When she tells him, even if tinged with sarcasm, āThank you director, for everything. You loved me so much! So Iām thankfulā, he leans across the table and earnestly responds, āIt was because you were so prettyā. āLetās get rid of all the men, and love each other,ā she tells her friend, a woman, at the earlier dinner, before they kiss for a long time. I know sheās half-jokingāIāve heard various women in my life say some variation of the phraseābut I wonder, too, about the real frustration it also emerges from: that women desire something that at best will strive to understand them, and at worst is generally responsible for their subjugation. I wonder too if this isnāt more the kind of suffering that Young-hee is experiencing. What would it be like to want a man but not need one? What if itās not about being chosen by her lover than it is about being free of the desire to be chosen by a man at all?
Itās a deeper question emerging from a more meaningful suffering, one that is already taking her beyond her desire for The Director. When her friend asks her what made her stop at the edge of a bridge to drop in prayer, she says it was to determine what she wants: ā[Itās] to live in a way that suits me. To be strong, and whatever happens, live in my own way.ā āOh,ā her friend responds. āI thought you were missing that guy again.ā She may still, but Young-hee knows too that loneliness is a fruitful condition, and by not denying it, sheāll reach the maturity needed to live according to her dictate. And the men will continue to appear, as they always do. Her task, like that of every woman, is learning to live with them, and sometimes, in spite of them.
Review of Hong Sang-sooās film āOn the Beach at Night Aloneā (2017), 2022
Again the mind Splits without notifying the body, Marooned and alert, hearing Echoes of its litany. Residue of Madness, that long education. Free of resentment it lets her rave, knowing No thought should be rejected nor Deposed. If so, they will return. One lesson Of many: there is always room at the table.
Think of him first. Desire to be expected. Safe is the benign option, to glean details like Souvenirs; a process that can stretch years. Craving should mostly be condemned: an Old belief reached in error, taught from Without, accepted in fear. Smart to sully what’s engrained. Say: I can sprint like desire too, have Battle acumen, and turn corners when I sense I may be felled. I Must challenge me. If not I move forward so slow I seem to linger. Besides: why should responsibility detain me? I may not soar if the ground gives out Beneath my feet, but now I won’t descend.
Then it comes into focus: Outside the bedroom window The smoke tree has finally bloomed Its plumes of gossamer. Meaning: The summer is nearing its close. Each day the heat thins. It’s Time that does this, the weathering. Adjacent birds speak as I greet the tree, Then my supine form. Hello, body. I Stretch you like a cat. Light fractured by lowered blinds Peppers the sheets.
Grief, its grip, unwelcome
in the unfilled home of body,
does not have control.
A soft thought in a fraught day.
Bitten pink I throw smoke
deep into me, like the feeling of feeling,
even if caustic.
Solid in the day I am.
Not a reprieve
but a slip into something greater.
No longer than one thump of a heart’s
worth. Does not have control…
Ha! A thought so soft I can almost push through.
Poem for “Fractal Exotica, Floral Erotica”, a group exhibition curated by Pumice Raft, 2021
I walk along St Charles street toward Charlevoix Metro, an April afternoon with a chill, and do so with speed, hoping that action, like rubbing sticks, gets me warm. The sun helps a bit—its eye lit wide in an otherwise undisturbed sky—but it is my moving body, my temporary companion, that really thaws me.
I pass through the Metro doors and pay my fare with blemished coins. Today I opt for the escalator over the stairs, not for a quicker descent but for stasis; my body deserves it after all the rapid movement. Forced into action again when the stairs fall flat into the floor, I make my way toward the subway tracks. With each step I move further into the sour air of the Metro’s basement, into an air that never changes, but waits, like breath, to be exhaled. It never does; instead it sits unreplenished in tiled corridors, the city’s wet subterranean lungs.
The car arrives as I reach the platform; I move toward it. The doors open; I enter; an empty seat an invitation for deeper stasis. In stillness I arrive. I tune in and listen. My mind brims and my heart thumps evenly, but hard, which feels like all over. I have just left the opening of Calaboose’s The body is a butter brain and am filled with a galvanized curiosity.
2
There’s an idea that’s often born when trauma occurs, one that gains power and potency with time: I, the mind, am different from the body. It’s the conviction that whatever happened to the body belongs to the body, leaving the mind unscathed. It’s not true, of course, and when the mind cedes in its attempts to get disembodied, it’ll aim for the next best thing: ignoring the body as best it can. But the body, too wise and radical to be dismissed, rings the alarm: fits of shaking, vague pains, nervous breakdowns like clockwork. In each is its message: I exist! My pain is real! Look! At! Me! One can ignore them for a long time it seems, even if they pulse as frequently as the heart.
But eventually—hopefully—one begins the measured process of reconciling the body with the mind. And sometime during this process comes the realization: each time the mind turned away it was only trying to protect itself; it really didn’t know any better. Cause trauma turns illogic into fact, it will make us believe in anything as long as it promises, even briefly, to prevent further pain. When the mind finally listens, it widens, and so does its proverbial ears; the language of body begins to seep in, understood. And when the body realizes it’s finally being heard again, it softens, and this softness leads to expansion. Malleability, too; the body is just as elastic as the mind. Able to change, to heal. The body is limitless, benevolent, and enlightened beyond measure.
When Laura McCoy tells me about the kind of trust she has in the newly discovered depths of her body, I think of all this. The body is the place she works from and believes in when she creates. For the sake of simplicity I call this place intuition, or the mouth of the body. In order for it to really speak, our intellect has to humble itself, to relinquish control without losing faith, and it’s in this delicate pocket of being where grace grows quickest and joy pulsates loud and regular. When I look at Laura’s art, I sense that it is in and from this delicate pocket that she makes her work. All five of the pieces she exhibits in The body is a butter brain feel like evidence of the serendipity that can come with surrender. When our mind lets the body lead they get closer, congruent, and in wholeness we start speaking our truths clearest. I know Laura is telling hers, and rigorously. Her art is a resolute movement towards integration.
The fact Laura works from the body is also evident in that I see body in her work. Both Custard and Shame (2018) and Fear with Cream (2019) are thick, soft, pasty; I get the impression of flesh and what comes out of it. “Athero”, which comes from the Greek word “athere”, meaning groats, comes to mind. It’s most often used to describe the fatty material that forms deposits in the arteries. Gruel-like sticky aggregate. Paint, clay, plaster, scraps, all layered up. My body reacts in some kind of conflicted sense of recognition, like when I feel disgust and desire at once. It’s a visceral reaction, activating my gut, making me vibrate. I realize, looking at these works, that they simultaneously make me feel sick but also exhilarated, and I get the strange urge to involve my body too, to want to touch them with my tongue.
My personal favourite are the dried flower petals, those tender souvenirs that figure into the collected flurry. Flowers, or a suggestion of their shape, appear in all of Laura’s works, scribbled or pasted-on urge-like. This softens me, my body, the little girl that lives within it. And when I let this little girl speak from my depths, she points something out to me. On her hanging sculpture Sorry Again (2018), Laura covers the sharp edges of the plastic in clay to shield us from injury. But the top edges aren’t covered, where adults can reach easily; it’s the ones closer to the ground that are protected, low enough for little hands to reach. Consciously or not, Laura protects the smallest and most vulnerable of her viewers. I think this explains not only the kind of artist, but the kind of person that she is: considerate, caring, generous. This is woven into all the works she creates.
3
I’m delighted by the observation the little girl has made, so I allow her to be our guide for the rest of the opening. She’s happy she’s been given agency, the proverbial mic, and excitedly she rushes us over to A rosery (2019), one of Lucas Regazzi’s charged and nebulous drawings, produced with a mix of graphite and chalk pastels. It’s the figure, mostly, that draws her in. That draws me in, from that gut place of recognition. Sitting languidly on its heels in overlong grass, surrounded by candy coloured flowers that float around and against its portly figure, it stares out with a smile. Eyes and mouth are big, so big that they extend beyond their borders. It’s like the figure is so laden with feeling that it cannot be contained, and yet its gaze and grin are completely devoid of it. Empty. It’s a contradictory state, but I have learned that seemingly polar opposite states can co-exist and connect like an ouroboros; if you curl the ends to almost touch for long enough, one end will eventually bite onto the other.
When I’d previously experienced this intensity of feeling, especially such a melange of them, my traumatized body would shut down, as if it didn’t have enough space for it all. Like the features of Lucas’s hazy figure, the emotions would push—then break—out. But if my body could contain them, it wouldn’t explode; instead it would disorganize. I’d begin to detach from my immediate surroundings until I could only receive reality as an implication. Emotion was still there within me, but it was at the end of a long hallway, much too far to reach. I was beginning to understand what the recognition in my gut was when I first saw A rosery (2019). I’ve been there too; the plump little guy in the frame is dissociating.
Dissociation is a kindness from the body to the mind though. A coping mechanism, a kind of shielding from further harm and a way to deal with trauma. Lucas later tells me that drawing came from one of these places—a desire but also a need to cope with various shades of pain. Dangerous emotions can make a person dissociate, yes, but their weight can also make a person seek catharsis. Some popular options, like drugs or sex or anger or food (et al.) are all fleetingly remedial. I mean actual catharsis—the kind that’s rehabilitative, that ameliorates for the long term. When I see Lucas’ work, I sense this kind of release. A processing, a striving. When Lucas makes work, he does it from his depths, just like Laura, and in his vulnerability reveals himself. His work becomes remedy, not only for himself but for his viewers too; it’s the recognition we strive for in our daily encounters. Vulnerability is the ingress to veracity too, to habitual truthfulness. As with Laura’s work, I know he’s telling us the truth. Again, what that truth is I don’t know. And I don’t want to know their truths, not entirely. It’s impossible to give all of ourselves away anyway, hard as we may try. There are some secrets we must keep, not for choosing to withhold them, but because we ourselves are not certain what these secrets are.
The closest I can get to finding out is in Lucas’s drawings that contain words, like I am capable of expansiveness (2018). But I’m still not close, not even a little bit. They feel personal, obscure, quite literally too; there are some words that are shaded in a way which I can’t make out. It doesn’t matter though. I see their function as further processing; words with such weight that they feel more like things to address, to redefine, to let inhabit us without pretence or harm. When Lucas writes “I am capable of expansiveness” he inches closer toward that regenerative form of catharsis many of us seek. It is a statement that counters self-doubt. And if you say something often enough, eventually it becomes true.
4
It’d be amiss of me not to mention Lena Suksi’s text for The body is a butter brain, which I’ve read many times for the simple reason that it excites me. I’ve always believed exhibition texts should be less didactic and more expressive. Equivocal not explanatory. To leave room for the viewer, much like one of the works in the show. Lena’s text—profuse, scrupulous—is just this. One of butter brain’s many limbs. When I read it, nothing is revealed about the show; it doesn’t explain or contextualize anything. Yet I understand more, feel more connected to it. Nod yes IRL and deep down too. Knowing is nothing without understanding, and I’m reminded of this when I read her text. “There’s so much to be retrieved from the garden, under the bed, in the recesses of our tender bodies,” she writes. “More and more and more than we know, even with the old pains of digging.” Another: “Wound up, as when I am like a toy with a key, or whatever fear or food or height gets the heart rate up, I can be wound down.” What I do understand, after reading the text, is what makes the whole of The body is a butter brain so impactful—it’s a show that’s teeming with hope.
Although Lena is a traditional poet, Lucas and Laura are certainly visual ones (self-proclaimed too). And the true poet has faith. This faith persists despite many of them being dysthymic, as life gives all of us reason to be. Trauma, pain, poverty, life, may trick the poet into believing they’ve lost faith, or hope, or beauty, but they never do. These things never disappear, they only hide. It’s people like Laura, or Lucas, or Lena, that go searching for them—for the first time, or repeatedly—and get illuminated in the process. Then they do or make things, afflatus-like, that illuminate others too.
C.D. Wright said, “It is a function of poetry to locate those zones inside us that would be free, and declare them so.” The body is a butter brain shares the same function; it too is poetry.
The failure of words
Is not a sentence.
I can interpret with success but
To succeed doesn’t always mean
To understand.
I want to understand.
Heart or head you
Can’t have both.
You’ll have to excuse me!
This is not something
I have arrived at with ease
I find Truth in
Inferential processes that are So tied to straight
Thinking.
I can touch my tongue to the
Blade and make it wet.
Feeling is an axiom but
Only to me. Maybe I can
Wet your blade too
I believe in intuition, the ability
For me, and you, for
More than just us to dip into meaning, to
Share it. What if I can’t tell you or
Show you. What if you just have to
Trust me
(Baudrillard said this thing about the
Shroud of Turin: that
Regardless of its lack of veracity it
Was faith that gave it its
Authenticity)
In the heavy pause between
Encounters I am still connected to
you. Dolorous it may seem but.
You haven’t gone missing.
Grief and restriction only happens if
You think of body as requisite
For making contact
Look, I am just trying to give form to what lacks it but
I’m only realizing that it’s
Hard. Thankfully I know that
I don’t have to fill the gaps anymore. I’ve come to laud
Voids. A reverence for extended silence.
To induce stillness is an act. Not doing
Nothing. I guess I’m finally
Getting it
Poem to accompany “Wires webs veins nerves roots stems” at 8eleven (Toronto), 2018
We learn people as we do language. An intonation, a gasp of air, a long pause. What are these tiny details but revelations and obscurities at once. Lessons of the spirit. To try and reach the transcendent and fail, but in that failure find closeness. That’s fine. Connection, friendship, it’s the closest I’ll get to the divine.
Memories, like words, often evade me. They sit on the tip of my tongue and stay there until they fade; a simple reminder that they don’t belong to me. It’s times like these I need others to enlighten me. I prefer the tenderness of working together than confronting a burden alone. Besides, a memory that belongs to one person can only bear that name, but a shared memory can sometimes be called history.
I can’t describe to you when we met, or when we evolved beyond acquaintance. We meet several times, first in groups, then alone. Eventually I am surrounded by warmth. I don’t intellectualize this experience, but I pay attention.
There are parts of my friends’ souls that are kept. Each effort to access them is a barren one, but stubbornly, I’ll try again. They don’t know it, but I ache with every attempt, and when the pain is eventually alleviated its coupled memory loses its power. We all suffer from repeating ourselves, but some of us have better excuses. Another way to describe it is admitting defeat, and accepting the unknown with grace, then surrendering to the desire of wanting more.
I am ambitious and misguided. What did Cassavettes say? “Love is the act of not knowing.” He was right. My truest friends I will never understand completely. Their value is in their mystery.
I lay flat and read in these rooms. It said, Consciousness is not a self-enclosed Cartesian theatre. I blushed when I thought of avenging my former self. Which is to say my current self.
I painted my room the colour of her birthstone. She had never heard of blanket terms. Not that War, but her own; history forms boundaries, denies repetition. There have been many Lonely Girls.
My mother said I smelt of matilija poppies, my little fried eggs. The day I decided to try grapefruit, I found myself reading your natal chart. O Sayre, I do not pity you. Years later, my father would borrow your nose, and give it to me.
I find the term noetic on accident. Now, I thrive in the realm of coincidence; as the peach fades, my veins grow bluer, thinner. They say: therapeutic intervention is fruitless when the orchestra lacks a conductor. I say: I will always love my illness.
Later, when I am dead, they will confirm that the turquoise gem is and has always been a symbol of male power.
Mourning has a wicked appeal and fragments the evening into sickly moments They are unrelated until much later I use my neti pot for other things I can’t tell you what We try rubbing the skin off our noses Art says a mutual gaze provokes tears Poor, sweet macula Only the sun can calm me God gave me eight beauty marks but I can only find five
