The Nothing Hours

Ask me what happened

when the anesthesia hit, my lungs

were stopped, my heart was
silenced, and I will tell you nothing.

No tunnels or bright lights;

nothing to remember.

No outstretched arms or

family members long gone;

just my imagination,

a sketch of my body

stretched across a table. Of bright lights;

drips, hisses, bleeps; and steady, gloved hands.

Yes, that's right:

No, I wasn't there.

The Shape of Takotsubo

One afternoon she watched as the terrible storms descended. Unable to climb to the sky with her ladder and pull the clouds back together or seal the leaking shut, after several days her heart answered by opening until it was too feeble to carry her body and she fell to the ground. And now, after being rescued, after entering the hospital for the second time in less than a week, after being carried and swaddled tight in white sheets soaked heavy in the torrential rain, machines bleeped and dripped, chanted their anonymous steady promises throughout the room, and the doctor waded through rancid water to listen once again to the body nestled in her own.

What creature had taken hold to ensnare her heart in what seemed like an instant, inflating her left ventricle with its unexpected breath into the softness of a u instead of the efficient angles of a v, she asked him after he showed her the image.

Takotsubo's Syndrome he told her, his mouth stretching the word like an extended tentacle. Meaning the shape of an octopus trap.

A visitor then—for how long?

It happens sometimes; but don't worry; in most cases it goes away.

She watched them inside her: a billion worms twisting thick from a conical, glowing body, the suction-cupped arms of a violet octopus thrashing, swimming, drumming in wild, terrified protest—to to the rain, the thunder, the interrogation of the clouds mocking her with their windy chorus of whys, whys, whys—as thump, swoooosh, thump, swoooosh, thump, swoooosh slapped the tentacles and she saw the fallen ladder.

In the field under the grass the creatures slunk and hid from the storm. There they remained, nestled together until it was safe.

And lying in her drenched bed she remembered and began scouring for remnants, for a needle, a thread, a stapler, a roll of tape—something, anything—to patch up the sky. She turned from the octopus, because maybe there was a way to do it, pushed the sheets from her body, and began digging into the mattress, ripping it open with her bare hands, clawing the white stuffing away from the coils bit by bit, plundering past the bleeps and drips for the day before the rain. But she found nothing, dug until she made a hole straight through to the floor, was laughed at by the sanitized tiles, and returned bloody-armed and empty-handed as the storms continued, the water levels rose, and she began to float. Eye to eye with the octopus in its unexpected chamber.


--- Published in Tabula Rasa, Vanderbilt University Medical Center's medical humanities journal, 2012

Eulogy

That evening

when the bodies of the vultures are memories torn apart—

one draining in the ditch, the other festering on the asphalt, a row of matted feathers pointing feebly to the stars—I open the door and you tell me

the story of their deaths.

A man in a truck, with tires as high as your Camry, is coming toward you in the opposite lane; as he passes he is accelerating. There is a mad smile on his face. You watch as he starts laughing. And then as he drives even faster. In your review mirror feathered bodies soar—one, two, up, apart—thudding heavy

to the ground.

In the morning, however,

the vultures had danced

a bloody eulogy of iridescently arched necks and urgent beaks scavenging

flesh so mangled, wet, and black, it wasn't until I saw a hoof that I knew the dead one by its name.

And in the morning I watched as they became three stones.

Downy texture and sparkling viscera dissolving into form.

As distant shapes plundered themselves hungry
straight through a third. And sang together in chorus—
with the insects teeming under their claws and the flies swarming about their beaks—
the cornucopia of another day.

Nomenclature

Once you might have named her

the velvety redness of a rose unfolding—

       sun-fiery, undaunted, and open to the sky.

Or touched her

as a crimson petaled jellyfish—

       opening, closing, pulsing her body gently through salty brine.

Or known her

as the deepest well—

       a clandestine viscosity where desires undulate thick

       in a pool to overflowing.

Once you might have likened her

to the stillness of an icy dawn,
to that expansive winter hour before the world
stretches back to life and pink-blue fingers begin

unzipping the shroud of night.

Once you might have recognized her.

      
In those moments still dark

when dreams become snowflakes

echoing promises to snowy ground.

And once
you might have
described her.

As flamencoed hands
along the ribs rushing
lost, abandoned,

to the click of unrelenting castanets.

Or

as laughter, longing, need, ache, loneliness, hunger, love, poverty, and want. 

But in the days of her unraveling,
she becomes a stranger. 

And you don't know what name to speak.

Or what language you will use when you call for her again.

You don't yet realize that the heart unmoored

will grow a new chord, will become a child returning

for the umbilicus again.

Or that given time

the heart will launch herself determined

out to sea for another go.

August Song

Hear the song of August sung
through a damply cricketed froggish dance
as two cats sit in a window
and one woman reads of another
who dreams of catching autumn.

Hear the song of August sung
as this euphony is split in two
by a semi's thunderous barreling,
as a woman pauses,
and waits, for the roar of it to pass.
Wondering if it will.
Because it seems so grave it won't.

Hear the song of August sung
as just a hint of it, just a whiff
is the taste that makes a woman dream
of flight through cerulean skies, above burnt orange and crimson pulsing,
as the rumble becomes memory and the song of summer night
wraps its body around the house again.

Hear the song of August sung
as a deer languid-bodied by the window
becomes the promise of a violin
and cats stare
penetrating glass
with eyes sharp, as branches
part dark-armed, trembling
in this symphony of the instant.

Hear the song of August sung
as a woman stands
on the porch become concert hall damply
listening to this end-of-summer place,
where copperheads thread
mosaic rustlings
through tangled grass of August green.

2011

December in Binghamton

It is the language of winter this morning.

Its rules spoken in the ice of words

floating in their new thick sheets

along the hip and thigh curves—gone cold now—

of the Susquehanna.

Walk across the bridge into a grammar of a downtown below freezing you hear.

And a windchill no more than 12. You turn. Look. Pull

your scarf tighter. But there is no one. And you realize it must have been you. Your own voice blowing past. Thoughts lost before they are. Silence crashing into the street. Silence becoming

an alphabet of letters

cracking sharp, fragile, precarious

in the bite of this December wind.

It is

the language of winter this morning

and the language of winter is:

A whisper. A shout. An ache.

An old woman wearing green mittens.

A group of teenagers spilling over the sidewalk in front of the school.

A boy with an unzipped coat and another without gloves

who shiver. Stand under a tree. Pass a cigarette back and forth.

A girl in tight jeans

whose laughter becomes steam

as the one with the dark hat

pushes her down into the snow.

          They kiss.

          You see them

          moving through the language of winter, into

          a grammar they don’t yet know.

Into a place of chapped lips and wild storms.

Into seasons of urgent clamoring and naked limbs.

And on the bridge the man with the navy pea coat

— collar high around his chin

and holding a can of Red Dog—

smiles, waves good morning, says just something to keep me warm.

And this winter language you hear too

in the bodies of the ducks skimming the surface

one after the other

lost along the water.

2004/2011

August Dream

Oh, Anna,

of bones singing now through garden soiled notes

beneath echinacea and hummingbirds come to drink, I dreamed

it was you last night dancing across the sky. Only to wake

to a knife stabbing memory straight into my ears

when clear as a bell you fell silent in the dawn.

And I heard once again, the gray of time passing.

2011

Phonetics

The boy beneath the skin tells her a story

about stones thrown in a lake, and naming them for their sound.

Blabo— he called.

For the moment their weight

broke heavy through the surface.

And she opens

her ears

to a phonetics     of living

to a path

made of the body

              the voice

              the pulse
                         of an instant.

She asks him then
to take her
to that place where memory
carves a dream over flesh

shivering amber through the trees.

                                              2002/11

Sadie Doesn't

Sadie sits. Head turned. Upright in the window. And she doesn't know

of the 76 dead in Norway, or of Amy Winehouse's last song, or of the men

in theater garb carving new myths out of history

as they fight about a debt. Or of the Arctic melting or heat waves spreading or shit leaking into the ocean or the woman strangled in Michigan

          —just like that!—

                                                 (by whose hands?)

last Tuesday.

After 89 years:

Who would have imagined

this room to be my end?

Sadie doesn't know

that Syria is on fire, that eyes crackle to the pavement,

or that the heavens are sucking Somalia dry through pursed lips drawing in

so hard to make children shrivel, become bone, finally losing themselves to

a mass exodus from their collective skins and simply

disappearing

gone quiet

one by one.

Turned inside out as remains

mark the trails of mothers trudging headstrong-
exhausted clamoring for miles into

a vacuum

nightmares

of tiny bodies scorched,

abandoned,

dropped down

to the parched

earth.

No, she doesn't know.

Doesn't know as she stretches above

the birds rustling through the leaves below

the shrubs as she closes her eyes. Feline lost and safe

into a moment of rest once again.

Finessing Old Poems

An ode to a handful of childhood years spent in Kansas. Thank you to Stellasue for encouragement on the poetry front again ....


Being in Kansas

in the rock-strewn sharpness of that place made wild

and sometimes molded from graphite

called the heart
primary colors on a clothesline are t-shirts
peeled from tired bodies and left to hang
into the shape of solitary hours
of being forgotten outside

and near the clothesline in a yard
over ground too flat

is a world whispered kansas!
from the lips of a girl who thinks

her skin in the sun smells

like pancake batter as she tries
in the summer heat to fill
the parched-open earth with water

to fill the cracks that are to her

open mouths—thirsty thick-tongued

grimaces—striking at her ankles

stinging and harsh the way

they will slap on the afternoon she runs

fast for the house dropping the jug

as the fist of her heart beats

a warning into her ribs at the sight of yellow

sleeves thrashing from the almost-invisible

line tangled and angry in the sudden wind

so dry and cutting those days she will remember
when the wind fiery became moments
of tornadoed sirens and hiding alone hunkered
the body as low as possible in bathtubs waiting
down while cold fingers blossomed sweat petals
and ears knew the clackity rumble of coming trains

so strange and far away the green light of those summers made

of a thundery heaviness she will remember as

she turns one morning for his body

naked and able to laugh now as life unexpected

weaves the contours of a rainy dawn

and sharp, rough stone makes way to become

a deluge cool and indigo

             a downpour rushing wet

a place where open mouths are quenched

and parched tongues have no say

                                              

                                             --  2003/11

             

       

Part Two (the dialogue with Vanity press representative continues)

This is a continuation of yesterday's post: "Aesthetic Offers You Can't Refuse (Or how to respond to a vanity 'juried' art press offer)" Amazingly, first thing this morning the highly esteemed Ms. Judy Adams, assistant curator at World Wide Art Books, responded to the email offer that I sent in response to the offer I received from her. I then responded to her again. For convenience, and for those who missed the first bits of the dialogue, I am posting the entire email exchange from the beginning. Enjoy!

From: info@wwab.us [mailto:info@wwab.us]
Sent: Tuesday, May 24, 2011 06:39 PM
To: la@lorianneparker.com
Subject: Invitation to appear in International Contemporary Masters volume 5

Dear Lorrie Anne, I visited your portfolio at artsnashville.org and I liked your work. You are therefore pre-selected to submit art for inclusion in Volume V of "International Contemporary Masters?, a leading juried annual art publication presenting the most important artists from all over the world! Please note that this is not a free inclusion. If you are interested I will send you more information or you can visit the link: http://wwab.us/index.php/Masters-Application/%20To get an idea of the quality of our publications you can view our previous book at the link above.    Best regards Judy Adams - Assistant Curator World Wide Art Books 5383 Hollister Ave, # 260 93111 Santa Barbara CA Tel / fax +1 805 683 3899   wwab.us

  

From: la@lorianneparker.com [mailto:la@lorianneparker.com]
Sent: Tuesday, May 24, 2011 7:46 PM
To: info@wwab.us
Subject: Re: Invitation to appear in International Contemporary Masters volume 5

Dear Judy,

I just looked at the website and was so impressed with the publication that you represent. All publications that have the privilege of selecting me for reproduction are subjected to a rigorous jury process. I am delighted to inform you that you have been pre-selected to submit your proposal to include my work in your publication.

Please note: if you choose to include any of my images in your publication, that reproduction of them is most certainly NOT free. If you pass the jury process and I decide that you may indeed include my images in your stellar publication, you will be allowed to do so at the cost of $2000 for each artwork image that you choose to publish.

Thank you so much; I hope you will find this offer to be of interest to you. I know you recognize how important reproducing such work is to your success as a serious international arts publication. Do not miss this opportunity.

Best,

Lori Anne

Lori Anne Parker, Ph.D.

la@lorianneparker.com

http://www.lorianneparker.com/

  

[And amazingly she responds … in a matter of hours. Apparently she has a jury that works overnight or wakes at the crack of dawn and on this fine May morning had nothing else to do!]

From: info@wwab.us [mailto:info@wwab.us] Sent: Wednesday, May 25, 2011 11:28 AM To: la@lorianneparker.com Subject: RE: Invitation to appear in International Contemporary Masters volume 5 Hi Lori Anne,  Thanks a lot for your offer. We do have publications where we pay the artists for their images and also they get a commission on books sales. Our jury visited your link but they did not approve you to be included as your works do not meet up with their standards. We wish you the best of luck with your endeavors! Sincerely,  Judy Adams - Assistant Curator World Wide Art Books 5383 Hollister Ave, # 260 93111 Santa Barbara CA Tel / fax +1 805 683 3899 wwab.us [And then I let her know how impressed I was with the speed of her jury and their decision as well as my final decision about my offer to allow her to publish my artwork.]

From: la@lorianneparker.com [mailto:la@lorianneparker.com]
Sent: Wednesday, May 25, 2011 11:58 AM
To: info@wwab.us
Subject: Re: Invitation to appear in International Contemporary Masters volume 5

Dear Judy,

Thank you so much for your reply. What an amazing jury you have: the fact they were able and willing look at my website so quickly is incredible. Talk about hard work. And first thing in the morning too! I do hope you will reward them with donuts, bagels, fruit, and some coffee, or other such delectable treat, for being willing to attend to this issue with such haste. How proud you must be of them! I am writing this morning to inform you that my jury worked just as quickly (I myself will be rewarding my own jury with a complimentary brunch at a seaside resort) and after looking at your website and some of your publications, which we ran out to the library and several local bookstores to procure then peruse, have decided that your publication did not meet our standards and that we would not be accepting any payment from you to publish images of my work. So we are in mutual agreement on our potential contracts with each other.

But as you are so well respected in the art community I know such rejections will not deter you from continued aesthetic fleecing. I too am certain of my fabulousness and will not be deterred either and will continue to dangle my images in front of the faces of art publishers who will be only too lucky if I allow them to pay me to use them. I do hope you will continue offering artists the opportunity to pay to have their images published. You are a beacon of light and hope to the art world. Again, you should be so proud. Infinitely proud. Not just of your staff, but of the stellar services you offer to contemporary visual artists. Venice Biennale be damned: International Contemporary Masters is in town!

Best of luck on all your endeavors!
Lori Anne
 

Lori Anne Parker, Ph.D. 

la@lorianneparker.com

http://www.lorianneparker.com/

So, all you fellow artists out there. NOW you know the publication that you must strive for. The one that will be life changing, the one that will finally get you to the place you have always aspired to!

Aesthetic Offers You Can't Refuse (Or how to respond to a vanity "juried" art press offer)

So here is an incredible email I got today about my art that I am sure NO ONE else in Nashville or all the world received today (make sure to click on the link):

From: info@wwab.us [mailto:info@wwab.us]
Sent: Tuesday, May 24, 2011 06:39 PM
To: la@lorianneparker.com
Subject: Invitation to appear in International Contemporary Masters volume 5

Dear Lorrie Anne [perfect way to get my attention: give me an extra "r" and an unexpected "e"]

I visited your portfolio at artsnashville.org and I liked your work. You are therefore pre-selected to submit art for inclusion in Volume V of "International Contemporary Masters?, a leading juried annual art publication presenting the most important artists from all over the world!

Please note that this is not a free inclusion. If you are interested I will send you more information or you can visit the link: http://wwab.us/index.php/Masters-Application/ 

To get an idea of the quality of our publications you can view our previous book at the link above.

  

Best regards

Judy Adams - Assistant Curator

World Wide Art Books
5383 Hollister Ave, # 260
93111 Santa Barbara CATel / fax +1 805 683 3899

And here's my response to this wonderful offer (yes, I did really send it), which costs (and this is just the starting cost) a mere $900+ to have yourself included in what is no doubt the most esteemed arts publication of all times:

Dear Judy, 

I just looked at the website and was so impressed with the publication that you represent. All publications that have the privilege of selecting me for reproduction are subjected to a rigorous jury process. I am delighted to inform you that you have been pre-selected to submit your proposal to include my work in your publication. 

Please note: if you choose to include any of my images in your publication, that reproduction of them is most certainly NOT free. If you pass the jury process and I decide that you may indeed include my images in your stellar publication, you will be allowed to do so at the cost of $2000 for each artwork image that you choose to publish. 

Thank you so much; I hope you will find this offer to be of interest to you. I know you recognize how important reproducing such work is to your success as a serious international arts publication. Do not miss this opportunity.

Best,

Lori Anne

How awesome is that--I was PRE-SELECTED to submit to a publication that doesn't require pre-selection to submit (or to pay) because, yes, I am so sure that this person REALLY checked my art out and it wasn't a matter of some data mining efforts that gathered up all the names from the metro nashville arts commission artists registry. My life as a full-time artist has begun. I have hit the big-time. Soon the dollars will be rolling in. For as the website promises:

In this superbly printed annual art book, we present artists of high caliber from all over the world whose work we believe to worthy of a serious art book.

The Coffeehouse Sheherazade, A Novella in Installments: Part 1

Art and writing languish when kept in the dark--whether the dark is a closet, a binder, a desk drawer, or a computer file. John and I were having this conversation with some friends just the other night. For me, the worst thing about bringing art home after an exhibition, isn't the fact that it didn't sell, but the fact that it is going back in the dark, back to a place where I almost want to say it isn't "art" any longer, because the encounter, the potential for it to become part of a real engagement, is gone. If there is no one there to experience it, is the finished work of art still a work of art?

With that question and those thoughts in mind, I decided last night that I would share some writing on this blog that would otherwise continue to hang out bound between the covers of my official dissertation copy with no where to go. Instead of waiting until (if) I find a publisher, why not share now, I thought. And why not do it in installments--a tradition I happen to like quite a bit.

So here is the first installment of The Coffeehouse Sheherazade. It's an experimental, philosophical novella that was part of my "experimental" and "non-traditional" doctoral dissertation. So, in an effort to bring words back to light/life, I hope you'll become part of the process, by clicking on the link, reading, and after that following along!

http://lorianneparker.com/images/Coffeehouse_Sheherazade_Installment_1.pdf

The Question of Truth in the Photographs of Simen Johan

"With their imposing size, articulated textures, and lifelike poses, the animals in Simen Johan's photographs have an uncanny quality of being literally present, as if they are not just recorded by the camera but are actual animals seen up close through a pane of clear glass."*

In Simen Johan: Until the Kingdom Comes, two owls sit on a picnic table, two foxes stand together in the snow, bears and monkeys forage for food in a garbage dump, and a lone buffalo lies seemingly resigned in another garbage dump--this one made of inedible detritus where the surroundings have gone gray and the bright colors of the scraps pawed through by the bears and monkeys are nowhere to be seen.

The viewer may stand before the photographs and first think to herself that indeed she is looking at the truth: An animal caught mid-pose in world behind the glass. But as she looks closer there is quick realization that things can't possibly be as they seem. There is an eeriness to the owls, for instance, something not quite right when you look closely at their eyes. They are partially closed, squinting. It occurs to you that the owls were dead when the photograph was taken and probably never sat together on their picnic table at all.

In these photographs, Johan plays with the notion of truth. The truth of a photograph as well as the idea of truly seeing animals "as they are." The comparison between his photographs and dioramas found in natural history museums is inevitable. In fact, some of his subjects are taxidermied specimens on display in such settings. What is interesting is the way Johan's work pushes the viewer to consider not just the questionable truth of the photographs themselves, but the ways a diorama in a natural history museum can itself never present "truth," even as it works so hard to do that very thing. The diorama is constructed as if there are no humans present. The human visitors who look at the animals on the other side of the glass are lead to believe that they are glimpsing the essential nature of the animals on display: So this is what deer, moose, foxes, orangutans do in their worlds when we aren't around and can't see... 

By creating compositions that are too impossible to be true, and yet seem so familiar and so real that we may want to insist that they are still true in some way, Johan offers wry commentary on the ways we as viewers, visitors, and learners project our desires and expectations onto what we see.

At the same time his photographs have a push-pull effect: I see the buffalo and I am drawn in. I realize the scene is impossible and I am pushed back. I sense the buffalo's resignation and am pulled in once again. The truth of the image, of course, doesn't matter. This is something else Johan's work suggests: that the demarcations between truth and fantasy aren't so distinct. In fact, fantasy, the notion that what we see is "true" or somehow "real" even though we "know" it can't be, is something we need. It propels us along. Keeps us moving forward. Hoping that the dream we want is alive just around the corner.

And where are we in the meantime as we hope for that next perfect, ideal thing? As I wrote a few blogs ago, we are in the until. Where we may always be as our fantasies of a "kingdom" or that ultimate, longed for existence shifts, changes, and once again slips out of reach.

There is something else about Johan's work that is its own reward: the more you look at the photographs, the more you see, and what becomes apparent the more time you spend in the gallery is the way they hold up aesthetically both up close and at a distance. Step closer and watch as parakeets and monkeys emerge from the background and colors and textures come into relief; step back and take in the shapes of bear bodies curved and arced and slumped over mounds of discarded food that begins to look like hills of flowers. Again the push and pull in another, equally intriguing way.

-- LAP

* The quotation at the beginning of this post is from Mark Scala, "Simen Johan: Until the Kingdom Comes,"gallery guide, written to accompany Frist Center exhibition, on view from Feb. 20 through May 29, 2011.

On the Swampy Nature of Embodiment and artist Tetsumi Kudo

I am thinking about the body today, nothing profound or new even, just simply its ebbs, flows, surprises, gaps, and randomly skipped beats. We (humans) live and move--for we must approach it this way or we wouldn't get much done, would we?--as if it is reliable, firm ground, the raft we know will be there if the waters get too rough. And we can rely on it, to some extent, and we can even take care of it (exercise, eating a good diet, etc.) to make it even more reliable, but at the same time we inhabit that strange space of not knowing when it may fall out from under us, when we may have to grapple to feel steady again. We may tend to perceive ourselves as whole, a single entity closed off from the rest of the world, but in reality we live in a constantly moving dance. Shape-shifting with the elements. A well-informed friend tells me the number of E. coli in an inch of my intestines outnumbers all the grains of sand in the Arabian desert. In this instance I am host, and, of course, this isn't the only example. Every time I breath my immune system engages in battle with all the germs and bacteria I inhale. Every minute I live bacteria dwells on my skin and my all-too-human material body is host once again. I am thinking about this and the fact that we are all made of stardust: even wilder is the fact that though my right arm and left arm contain start "stuff," the stars this stuff is from are most likely not the same. I have been studying and reading about the work of artist Tetsumi Kudo lately, and find he knew how to represent this body incredibly--as always moving, open to, and part of the rest of the world in an absolutely gorgeous (and often grotesque, which doesn't negate the gorgeous necessarily) way. Bodies become swampy and swamps give rise to flesh. Kudo also reminds us of our vulnerability--the susceptiblity of embodiment to the swampiness of the stars and the inevitability of decay. I'll probably write more about him later (his place in postwar art, his response to a new nuclear reality, his explorations of a new, horrific vulnerability), but for now I'll just leave you with these photos. And make sure to check out the link and more of the images online. Once I started looking, I found I couldn't stop.

Thinking of Until (and of the work of Simen Johan [pt.1])

The meaning of until.

If I say to you, for example, before hanging up the phone: I will read this book until you arrive, what matters? As I consider the question I realize that what is important may not be your arrival, which may or may not arrive, but what happens until then, which is to say what happens now, not in the future. It is what I am doing until. In this case reading the book I hold in my hands. Until. It is the emphatic nature of the until.

I want to dwell in this moment. In the until. And doing so pulls me back from this place called "after" that I imagine will come, pulls me back from this place that never was. And tells me: stay here, stay in the present. Which is to say, the place I always dwell. Until you arrive, until the alarm rings, until the storm comes, until the sun rises.

And so it is the case with the work of Swedish artist Simen Johan, whose exhibition at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts from now until (or through) the end of May, is so aptly titled Until the Kingdom Comes. Until the kingdom, not when the kingdom, after the kingdom, before the kingdom, but until. Beginning with the title, the exhibition is very much an invitation to reside in the present. For this is what until is. The living and breathing that is happening already, and NOT the imagined life or breath beyond death that may happen after the kingdom (whatever it may be, if it may be, even if it will be, if one doubts (feels positive) it ever will be) comes.

In Johan's work is the present in which the subjects are the ambiguous inhabitants of the place of until. Until the Kingdom comes. Take the image of the foxes (you can find it here). There are two. They stand together as a pair, their bodies touching: one cries, the other has blood on his or her muzzle. They are foxes and yet one shed tears like a human. They are so alive in their hyper realistic, glossily photographed scene, and yet, the viewer may realize, they can't be alive, that the scene doesn't make sense--neither the detail nor the sharpness nor the expressions on their faces. For what pair of foxes would stand together this way: huddled together as foxes become elongated mournful nest turned on its side in the snow, in a pairing off that signifies the coupling of two Homo sapiens--a tail instead of arm wrapped around the other, a signification of that other animal (now invisible) behind the camera? For what pair of foxes would stand together in this manner, so still, so unnatural, as if posing for the photographer, for Johan himself? And the seemingly so alive foxes we realize, must not be alive at all, the photograph (again, always?) is a trick. For how could those two be alive while standing so quietly, so artificially,  in their quiet snow-bound beauty? And here we may  begin to move into the meta analyis, asking questions about the truth of the photograph itself. How was it taken? Is it a single shot? Is it the result of manipulation? Where did the foxes come from? And what about all that snow? Look closer and we realize the closer we look the fewer answers there are. About the photograph, the process behind it, and, of course, the foxes. Look closer and we may realize that none of the facts matter.

This is the until. In this instance.

Until the Kingdom Comes (whatever, if ever, because it isn't about the undefined kingdom at all) we stand in ambiguity. Knowing we stare at two foxes but not knowing what we see as we inhabit a neverending  moment when the after is held in abeyance ...

Until.

In the Shadows

Of course we are in the shadows--

Of Hiroshima. Nagasaki.

As we have been (separately and together and differently and in so many different ways and along so many different fault lines) since 1945. And these past few days those shadows are in relief, have reared their heads, become loud, intrusive. For those of us who have been able (have had the privilege) of forgetting. Or simply living as if we can. There are those who remind us, have reminded us. Just like the post-earthquake, tsunami reactors are reminding us too.

I am thinking of Iri and Toshi Maruki (their after-Hiroshima paintings). For more than  30 years painting day after day echoes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for more than 30 years painting what started a few days after the first bomb when Iri and Toshi went to Hiroshima to look after their family. For the past few days, I have been remembering them, their work, my trip to Saitama, Japan, in 2006, when I stood in front of panels so large I couldn't even begin to take them in. And I wondered how anyone could even begin to paint something so large and not be overwhelmed by the very act of doing it. But I wasn't there. Maybe they were overwhelmed but had that rare willingness to stay in that space and keep going. Because they needed to. Because they couldn't put it out of their minds or bodies. Because they had made a commitment to keep putting the topic in the spotlight.

I remember that day. Sitting with my friend from the past (from my undergraduate life in Ellensburg, Washington), Tetsuya, who was living far from home back then after being transplanted for six months to a funny little city in the Pacific Northwest that was the home of the "Rodeo Grandmothers." Before our trip that afternoon in 2006, he had never been to the Maruki Gallery either. Indeed,  as we walked from room to room and came upon paintings that continued to grow in size, we were both lost. Terrified. Stunned. Walking gingerly on the sharp edge of grief fed by trauma for which there is no words.

I feel like there aren't words today. Even as I write. Even as I engage in such cliches about not having the language to write what I think I want to say.

I can't take it all in: everything that is happening right now in Japan. I wonder how anyone could or what that even means. I am powerless and hoping for the best and acknowledging how feeble that word "hope" actually is.

So tonight I am remembering those moments of friendship outside on the back porch of the Maruki Gallery overlooking the river where every year lanterns are sent along its waters in endless gestures of farewell. I am remembering that and the years of work and resolve of Iri and Toshi Maruki who painted and kept remembering.

Painting Ghost. Fire. Water. Rainbow. Boys and Girls. Atomic Desert. Bamboo Thicket. Rescue. Yaizu. Petition. Mother and Child. Floating Lanterns. Death of American Prisoners of War. Crows. and Nagasaki: all of these words titles of their memories.

http://www.aya.or.jp/~marukimsn/english/indexE.htm