scarlit ephemera

2009-11-16T22:46:00.000-05:00

I want to get lost
In the sound
Of your voice
Your hands
Clasping mine
A sign a melody

There was a melody
Distantly lost
In deep mines
Where solitary sounds
Lose fingers hands
Supple voices

Your voice
Has its own melody
Just as your hands
Tend to get lost
In the sound
Of words, yours and mine

I want this to be mine
As I sculpt the shape of my voice
Inflicting sounds
Upon melody
That loses
Itself dissolves in our held hands

You hand
Me what is mine
What I’ve lost
The remnants of my voice
Cracked melody
Composed of sounds

I listen for the sound
Of your hand
Moving to that melody
Which was mine
And held my voice
Secure before it was lost

Lost sounds find a voice
You hand me mine—a perforated melody.

2008-03-11T16:32:00.002-04:00

What does it mean to return? To arrive? I’ve returned to New York. Or have I arrived? It kept raining today, soft plopping rain, and then loud obnoxious streams of water falling hard on the pavement. I keep being surprised how things change-- new stores, gleaming on the street corners –sparkling, confident, and welcoming. I re-visit stores like Fresh out of nostalgia. I notice how the Banana Republic on 5^th Avenue off of Union Square looks a bit older this time because I guess it would be considered old now –having opened at least five years ago now. Maybe this is called culture shock, and yet, I can cocoon myself in Manhattan, in its familiar streets for a short while before being rudely jolted into realizing that every day people are streaming into this city with dreams bigger and more brilliant than I ever dared to imagine, even while I was here. You can see it in the courteous smiles of sales people, who strike up conversation with you over merchandise. What are they trying to be on their off time, when we’re not making superficial connections over how much we love Fresh’s soy face cleanser. Every day I’m closer to the day when I’ll have to leave again. And I’ll have to return to Beijing, or will I be arriving, again? When will I dream again like those who’ve finally arrived in New York? How do you reach behind the veneer to tap into the streams that flow beneath the concrete, the endless glitter of products, the gloss of couture?

Being away, I felt myself lose more of myself into this vacuous puddle of nothingness. I know it’s a matter of perspective, which is something I obviously lost along the way. Maybe now I’m trying to get it back. Reach my hands, then my arms deep into this opaque pool of substance to pull out shreds of the past and its lace-like memories—scattered remnants of dreams, half-forgotten. I have forgotten so much. I want to name something Soledad, traditionally a Spanish name, that refers to the virgin Mary, just to give this word corporeal substance. The name got stuck in my head today. Soledad, Spanish for solitude. There is such beauty in solitude, in the ephemeral oneness of one, the solitary, simple, solace of being in your own skin and knowing this moment is one complete moment. Soledad. Oneness encompasses more than singleness—it is complex, plural, multifaceted completion- a one with infinite layers of infinite depth. Soledad. I like the way it sounds, the way the sounds fall from my lips, the softness of the final ‘d’ in soledad, as if it landed on a pillow. In solitude I remember, reminisce, sort out conversations I still haven’t had.

I’ve had bhangra stuck in my head all day. I keep hearing the same flirtatious melody swirling through my memory and the earthiness of the bass grounding it, and I’m just letting the sound penetrate my skin. I haven’t danced like this in a long time. Haven’t danced with this much freedom, with this much joy. It was a kind of interior exercise in forgetting, letting go, following the bass, and somehow finding myself miraculously anticipating the next change in music. Basic rule of bhangra, we were told: when all else fails, just keep your shoulders moving. While watching, I realize, it’s more than just shoulders: that discreet smile curling around their lips reveals a perfect contentment, an intoxification with life. Watching them dance makes me happy. It’s startlingly, strangely simple. There’s a beat, a melody, voices singing, it’s projected into the room, and everyone’s dancing.

2008-03-08T00:58:00.001-05:00

I want to feel words forming beneath my skin, hear words tumbling into the space, want to hear the sound of my voice tugging words into sentences into images into existence.

What have I been learning this year trudging to and fro from school to home and home to school? At a recent job interview, he asked me, ‘有用吗?’ –did anything I learned this year have any use? To which I replied, ‘有意思' purposefully evading his insinuating question to tell him and to affirm to myself –it had meaning.

Meaning—significance. How was it really significant other than being a strange, self-gratifying, exploratory experience: a foray into a covert world of dancers training to be dancers in China. At school, I stood in the back of the class and attempted to be inconspicuous, despite the fact that I was conspicuously the worst student in every class. My body told no lies; it lacked sufficient training and discipline. It was inflexible and simply older than every student in all my classes. The other students have learned to smile, to cajole the audience into adoring them. They have been honing their renditions of femininity for years and as I watched them with pangs of envy, I alternated between enjoyment and disillusionment. There were times I felt tears pricking my eyes when their movement and the music gelled into one cohesive, complete line; sometimes I felt like their plastic smiles and mascara enhanced lashes only accentuated the bored emptiness in their eyes. But I also have to remind myself they are young—eighteen or twenty. They have a long way to go—if they keep dancing. They might not; suddenly there are too many dance students and not enough dance jobs.

This year, I tried to learn to be Chinese. I tried to make my words sound native, attached ‘er’ and ‘ar’ to the ends of my sentences, accentuated my ‘ing’ and ‘shi’ to make them crisp, hard and assertive and felt defeated when all the cab drivers repeatedly asked me where I was from. Only once did a cab driver guess Taiwan or Hong Kong. I triumphantly assured him that my dad is from Taiwan and my mom is from Hong Kong, and neglected to mention that I am really from New York. Usually, they think I’m Korean.

It’s strange to be back in New York again. I am practically inhaling the streets into my bones, revisiting my favorite shops, eateries, and resuming my wandering through the streets only to discover a sudden explosion of pinkberry frozen yogurt shops, and a red mango shop in ostentatious competition stationed directly across the street. New York feels like home, feels like a worn but still glamorous sweater that fits the way it’s supposed to. It makes me feel like me. But there are odd moments when I feel like a complete stranger. The streets seem to shift beneath my feet when I can’t remember exactly where something is, when I have to let muscle memory take over. Things get a bit fuzzy around the edges. And I remember I’ve been gone.

Bahok

2008-02-10T04:24:00.000-05:00

What does it mean to be an expat? Expat –expatriate, one who lives outside his/her country of birth. Having been enamored of the idea of living abroad, being a nomad out to see the world, taste the flavors and textures of another culture, I’ve been here for a year now. Here in Beijing, I’m one of many expats who sifts in and out of the city's already migrant population. The city has sprawled its way out into six rings that are suffocated by smog, people, incessant traffic and construction. Drawling ‘er's' and 'ar's’ tumble of out native Beijinger's mouths as they articulate their ‘shi’s’ vs. ‘si’s;’ ‘zhi’s’ are clearly enunciated and not to be confused with ‘zi’s.’ These are the external, insignificant details that cling to the wandering clouds of cigarette smoke that meander across the room and detract from the fact that for me, being an expat is living in a modified state of constant alienation.

I saw Akram Khan’s newest work, ‘Bahok,’ a collaboration between Khan's international group of dancers and the National Ballet of China. It made its world premiere in Beijing and will tour to London. 'Bahok' is translated into Chinese as ‘相聚' (Xiang Ju) –meeting. Khan explores what it means to meet another, to meet yourself in a work that attempts to transcend the boundaries of nation, language, and culture through the meeting of a collective body comprised of eight dancers-five from Khan’s company and three from the National Ballet of China. The dancers speak English, Spanish, Korean, Chinese, and Hindi to each other, the audience, imaginary customs officials, and into their cell phones, while breaking off into brief duets and group sections that ranged from sinuously statuesque to something resembling choreographed combat--all of it laced with varying amounts of raw, unleashed energy.

‘Bahok’ strips the scene down to an international waiting area. An old-fashioned overhead board with flipping letters reveals the titles of sections: Water, Air, Fire, Earth. It serves as an unfeeling omniscient voice of knowledge: ‘machines don’t feel,’ it tells you at one point, which perhaps, allows it to interrogate you—‘What’s in your papers?’ and ‘What are you carrying?’ before answering its own questions: ‘your body, memories, home, hope.’ And in some small way, that is enough.

There is a simple truth to this dramatic work which explodes with primal athleticism that is mitigated by startling and often poignant moments of cut-throat stillness. You realize that in this lifetime of water, air, fire, and earth, you are always waiting. You are also remembering, asking, hurtling through the space of memory. ‘You cannot know where you are going if you do not know where you come from,’ says one of the dancers. She wants to know where everyone is from because she does not know where she herself is from—only that she is not Chinese and that you must take a plane to where she is from. All she has, she tells us, is an image of rain, her papers, and memories which get more convoluted as she tries to tell us her story.

What would be my story? What does it mean to meet another, to meet myself on foreign soil in the ever-present waiting room of life’s ubiquitous transitions from one gate to another, one exit to the next entrance. 'Bahok' reminds you to embrace the fact that you are home no matter where you are because you carry home with you. Home is your memories, your corporeal body, your skin, the texture of your hair. Maybe it’s just allowing yourself to be home, to be at home with yourself, blending into and highlighting the material differences in the external circumstances, grasping them for a moment before letting them go. You speak one language while I speak another; yet, we are both at home when we meet each other on the platform waiting for the train, the bus, the plane that will take us to another manifestation of home.

adjustments

2007-03-01T04:57:00.000-05:00

On a day where I was disgusted by the dust on the streets, the glum grey skies, the recalcitrant fog, the intense inefficacy of this city, I was comforted by the fragrant smell of cut flowers arranged in a glorious bouquet wrapped in lavender tissue paper and cellophane, blossoms bursting into the car’s dim interiors. It was crowded, rush hour, probably around 6.45pm. I was standing, holding on to the railing in front of the door, people stuffed into the space so that I couldn’t see past the dark hair in front of me, but I smelled the flowers before I saw vibrant petals peeking out at me behind someone’s ear, green ferns jutting out of the shoulder of another person’s jacket. I found myself inhaling more deeply, starved for the sweet smell of flowers to drown out the ubiquitous stench of cigarettes and the even more intolerable putrid stink of sewage that seeps out of drains. At Fuxingmen, people poured out of the train alongside me; baby's breath drifts briefly before me and turns the corner.

composition

2006-07-27T01:04:00.000-04:00

Again it is the language
Of quiet, of bones
Sinew and skin
Moving into the space
Of quickening light
And ethereal shadow.

Explore the shadow
Of the unspoken word—language
Inflates beneath light
And sinks into bones
A narrow hollow space
Covered by skin.

Think of skin:
Surfaces fill with shadows
That expand the space
Between silence and language
Tongues and bones
Catch the light

How eerie the light
Glimmers wan on your skin
Wrapped around flesh. Your bones
Cast no shadow.
You fall into language’s
Lost promises, the interstitial space

The blank space
Of too much light
Where there should be language
To cover naked skin
As encroaching shadows
Caress jutting bones.

Pages fill with bones
Carving through space
Creating long shadows
That erase the light
Your smooth skin
Stained with lost language.

Broken language heals like bones
Immobilized beneath skin. You space
Yourself slight between light and shadow.

unfinished

2006-07-26T20:42:00.000-04:00

In this dying light
I want to tell
You a story
With no
Beginning middle
Or end.

At the end
Of the day pink light
Infuses the middle
Of the room. You tell
Me no
One tells you stories.

Tonight, a bedtime story
Will end
The evening. No
Words, only light
Can speak, tell
You there is no middle

Or beginning. In the middle
Of the night, a story
Emerges untold
So that its ending
Eludes the light
Answers no

To every question, no
Exceptions. The middle
Of a moment fills with light
Silently composes a story
Inside the body, the ending
Begins in fingertips, tells

The narrative once, retells
It again and again, no
Break in the unending
Line, beginning middle
Melody. The story
Spoken in layers of light

Light beneath skin tells
One broken story in breathless no’s
Leaves out both the middle and the end.

In memory of

2006-04-22T15:03:00.000-04:00

Perhaps, on this day, with the sun, the earth and words breaking over the pavement like thoughts, I will say to you, hello. Within the memory of early mornings, the air fresh and slightly cold, at least there is a language, a gift, an open hand that fills with broken thoughts and breathlessly empty space.

He stood on his terrace looking into the courtyard twenty three stories below, not seeing the children playing, not feeling the sun nor the cerulean sky. He jumped at four o’clock in the afternoon from his terrace to the pavement, utterly still, ushering in eternal solitude.

It was a simple day; the past terminates in this moment. It was spring. It was four o’clock in the afternoon. It was Monday, the first day of the week, a beginning, an end.

You enter pain. Let it drop swiftly into your body like a stone that falls from today’s clear cerulean sky; recall what it means to live in a moment that has been surrendered to time.

Your foot falls asleep; familiar numbness tingles imperceptibly beneath skin.

What is universal, but the passage of time, the inevitability of hunger, of entrances and exits, shadow and light—

Disparate words and thoughts fall like stones and rest inside your quiet bones. What did you say? Why did you sigh? What do you remember?

You are silent. There are too many words and not enough voices, too many melodies nestled inside your cupped palm, broad, callused and waiting.

he ran away and hid himself inside a clock.

2006-04-12T11:53:00.000-04:00

Quick, hide
inside the clock.
Two fingers
coil around
cog stops
time still.

The room stills.
You hide
behind stopped
time, the clock’s
face like your own—round
and flat, it falls into your fingers.

Index and third fingers
bend, straighten, still.
Your body twists around
to see the other side, hands hide
your face—the clock’s.
You cannot stop

this moment of stopped
time –coiled fingers
disintegrate clocks.
Seconds slip still:
midnight’s round
edges hide

inside your hidebound
skin. You have not stopped
counting the next round
of seconds, minutes, and fingers
that will not stay still.
Keep clocking

the instant. At thirteen o’clock
your shadow hides
inside a stilled
cog, stopped
by your fingertips
red and round.

Two round
faces: the clock
filled with too many fingers
on too many hands that hide
the hours, minutes and seconds stopped
lulled into stillness.

The stilled round-faced clock
Spreads your fingers, hides inside your skin. You stop.

writing from memory

2006-04-08T01:48:00.000-04:00

You walk briskly with sleep embedded in your skin; wait for light to change at the intersection. You stumble across the street. Someone whispers a song into your ear, sound shaping your limbs.

Far away

Your eyes are closed listening for silence at Times Square. You wait for a clear path to open, for concrete to break into clear panels of glass that promise to hold your resolute weight.

A new way

To tell you a secret, whispered into fading light that falls into your shadow. I’ll trade you squares for circles, leave my shadow in your keeping.

Another day.

Will you remember this scattered warmth that explodes into April flurries? Fat flakes follow the wind’s path, find themselves flattened in a finite pool of water on the stained window pane.

I can’t say

How your body fell into a shadow and disappeared. Beneath this light, your skin is quiet, your veins deep blue.

chuan bawang

2006-04-06T17:23:00.000-04:00

I had my first Sichuan meal in New York the other day; I’ve only had it when I was in Beijing, ironically. But I love it – the fragrance of the orange-colored chili oil that coats the food results in a slow, languid burn inside your mouth. Sichuan food has an intense and complex richness to it that rises in layers of flavor; from the introduction to some intial taste, whether it be salty, sour, or sweet, the end result is the heat that grows more pronounced with each bite. The flavors cut into each other, blending beautifully, as a tinge of sweetness mitigates rich saltiness; a touch of slow heat smooths out acid tartness. Then there’s texture: clear vermicelli noodles are like silk against firm flaky pieces of sliced fish that match the crunchy salted and pickled mustard greens inside a clear sour broth. A plate piled with thinly sliced pork simply melts in your mouth. The meat’s edges are still generously laced with a strip of fat, and smothered in a dark smoky sauce—salty, tinged with a smattering of sweetness and chili oil drizzled over the top, and finally garnished with chopped cilantro.

Blissed out.

Yungang Grottoes

2006-02-03T19:04:00.000-05:00

Can you hear
the ethereal silence
sculpted into yellow rock.
Caves are set within clouds
and careful relief
covers stone. My footsteps

fade. He steps
inside, hears
camera’s click, relief
filling his lens. Silence
surrounds carved clouds
roiling and rocking

gently in stone-inspired breeze. Rock
uneven beneath my heavy steps:
sallow sky veiled with petrol clouds
that cannot hear
echoes or silence
or find relief

from irrevocable decay. Scarred relief
stares back from perforated rock.
Stone buddhas sit in silence;
our footsteps
are heard
dispersing clouds.

Shadows cloud
my eyes. I am relieved
to hear
nothing. Yellow earth dusts rocks,
the soles of your feet. Your shuffling steps
erase winter’s chilled silence.

The ensuing silence
breaks into puffed breaths like small clouds
trailing after footsteps
and fading relief.
He disappears behind another rock.
I stand here

hear the underside of silence
carved immobile into rock. A sigh clouds
the air; relief clings to your fading footsteps.

beijing train

2006-01-17T08:59:00.000-05:00

I wish that I could have taken a picture of them. Standing opposite me on the other side of the closed subway doors, they could have walked out of a Chagall painting. It was the way he held her: one arm draped over her shoulder cutting a diagonal line across her chest, his hands clasped together where her ribs tapered into her waist, enfolding her in an awkward embrace. Her curved back rests into his chest, hands hang limply at her sides, jutting out slightly where his arms hold her. She has blank innocent eyes, open wide yet downcast, filled with the kind of emptiness that can tell inexplicable stories. Her faintly highlighted hair falls in wispy layers about her pale round face above her purple coat. He is only slightly taller, dark hair curling slightly at the temple and above the forehead. His high-collared jacket is army green, and though he absently caresses her stomach, neither of them look at each other. My downcast eyes rest on the nubbly texture of her coat and the wrinkled green streak that cuts across purple. The train rumbles into the next station; they walk out of the open doors hand in hand.

leaving

2005-11-01T16:00:00.000-05:00

The other day, I walked through the flower market on 28th street. The concrete floors were wet with spilled water, drenching the tangled carpet of wilted petals, discarded leaves and trampled stems. Flowers inhabited haphazard spaces; individual bunches of long-stemmed delphiniums encased in clear plastic straggled beside unwrapped snapdragons, their white blossoms twisting up and around strong green stems. As the boisterous staff pushed these mobile shelves from one end of the room to the other, shifting flowers and foliage across the crowded space, the narrow aisles shifted rapidly from rectangles to trapezoids, ending in cul-de-sac triangular corners. I flattened myself against a half-filled shelf of fall flowers--all maroon and gold and green leaves as a wall of packed tight-petalled roses rolled past me inches away from my face.

Later that day, I left my job. Sometimes, in the process of removing the chains from your wrists, you end up chopping off your own hands. How quickly heavy silver links fall from you then, as gravity pulls metal to concrete with a shimmering definitive clink that disappears into late afternoon traffic. Walking away, there is nothing left but the unbearable lightness of forward propulsion, the silence of an emptied tongue, and the stillness of decapitated hands.

_

2005-10-01T14:39:00.000-04:00

Novocaine careens up
the left side of your face:
blunt fingers palpate
a puffy cheek, a suddenly
swollen eye-lid,
the left nostril
tingles thickly beneath
deadened skin, as gaping holes
close in your propped
open mouth.

Black velvet curtains
open achingly slowly:
see the frame of a room
with ceilings removed,
mesh screen walls
confine two inhabitants
with knees nearly touching
sitting statuesque on
old wooden chairs
in turquoise corners.

They try to escape the circle
of their own chained fingers
hands clasped behind their backs
to fall heavily, pushing
screened walls open.
Space enlarges asymmetrical.
He and she separate
sit framed in opposite
turquoise corners.
Lights, crash, silence.
They stick their tongues out
at each other, totally still.

Sudden run
collide, push, pull,
frenzied physical
interrogation ends
at stalemate:
chained by cheeks
pinched by the other’s
fingers. He pulls the skin
away from her jaw.
She has his face’s flesh
between her small fingers.
They let go.

A study of human relationships:
two people flung
fling selves together again.
Again the weight of one body
crushes the other. She bears
his entire weight curled
over her narrow shoulder
unfolds his stiff body straight.
They separate
into turquoise corners.
He writes in a marble
composition notebook.

She fingers the edges
of an old white sheet.
They meet midway:
exchange paper for
fabric, re-exchange,
corners fray,
notes fall. Four
corners held in
four fists flailing,
palms burst open,
fabric in flight
falls to floor.

A stranger fills
his right palm
with your left cheek.
You watch
his knuckles trace
your cheekbone hidden
beneath shut off flesh, feel
the horror of absent pain
embedded inside your closed
covered mouth.

going home

2005-09-15T00:00:00.000-04:00

I decided to walk crosstown yesterday when I turned the corner just in time to see the M79 pulling away from the curb. I always get lost in Central Park. Its irrevocably rounded paths smirk at my thwarted attempts to find straight streets in this green revelry of smug circles. The curved horizon of buildings along Central Park West and 5th Avenue peeks out tantalizingly square and angular over soft green treetops. Against Manhattan’s meticulous grid, Central Park works in coy curves, defying the regularity of upright straight numbered streets and emphatically historic avenues: Lexington, Madison, Columbus, Amsterdam. Here, paths lead into darkened overpasses, overhanging branches, the remnants of a softball game—gangly players all dressed in red. A strand of bright yellow leaves breaks the hanging green curtain along the path. The sun sets slowly at the end of the hour, forty seven minutes past five in the evening; the park’s verdure suffused with amber light. Along the tree-lined path, a young woman sits alone on a park bench, bare feet dangling beside her shoes, talking on her cell phone with perfectly affected sophistication.

Today, a dragonfly got lost in my downtown 6 train; suddenly bursting into the air-conditioned interior, the woman sitting beside me hastily got up and moved away. It settled on a man’s shoulder bag, becoming suddenly still: black gossamer wings fanned open extending off its long thin body streaked with emerald green, all filigree veins exposed under flourescent lights. Instantaneous flight: it sprang into the air, circling silver hand bars, hovering unsteadily before a long strip of Budweiser ads, amber liquid suspended mid-splash.

A minute and a half

2005-08-20T22:50:00.000-04:00

Ninety seconds
to dream recklessly. To play with abandon. To fall fervently. To explore the interstitial spaces of a single minute, an hour, a day in the life. To live to the fullest, voluminous lightness, unbearable lightness, intoxicating lightness and weight bearing down your bones, filling you with infinite light.

Ninety seconds
to believe that every gesture has a purpose. Every uttered word leads to the next, just as every step leads to the next gesture, to the next bend in the road, to the next discovery. Stop believing in a single gesture, word, step, and the structure collapses, despair casting its web with wild frenzied glee.

Ninety seconds
to be able to say, I see you. I know you for an evanescent spell. It will not be the same next time. Sidelights blind your eyes. The rush behind closed eyelids. Another body’s heat; the solidity of its weight reminds you to match it, meet it, know it in the isolated infinite space of a moment.

30 hours later

2005-08-05T11:23:00.000-04:00

Sometimes you have to let yourself do nothing. How do you begin? Let’s begin again. If you stay with something long enough, it begins to change, to reveal itself to you: shows you what you are, where you are, where you need to go.

Dance: a game of solitaire that capriciously breaks into group settings, sudden flashes of bodily collisions, hands on your face, neck, shoulders, sternum, searching for hollows to rest. Two steps forward, one step back, and one back forward to two half-raised hands meeting. They shake; one twists an arm, the other twists a leg to spin an upright body to the floor. One catches herself on both hands, the other still holding onto her leg, they are still. One breaks out of this awkward embrace to run, shuffle, stumble, turn, stare, retreat.

What does it mean to give physical support, to be supported, to take that support away? What does it do to your body? What does it look like? What does it feel like? Dissect the connection between emotionality and movement, the expression of emotionality through movement. Discover movement’s humanity in its endless repetition, its profound simplicity. Fold, bend, stretch, straighten your limbs, your gaze, your understanding.

How well do you comprehend the rules in a game you play with yourself—your confidante and opponent? Failure is the breaking down of cognitive understanding, of memory, of the body. You lose when you stop playing. The game exists with an infinite capability; it goes on without you. The enormity of the empty gameboard cleared of all its players stands a vast, vacated desolate space filled with the thrill of uncertainty, the exploration of the next step. The end of the last step is the beginning of the next. The teeming choices are boiled down to a single one. How fast can you reach the extreme to get to the next step? How slow?

2005-07-09T10:09:00.000-04:00

I went outside today without an umbrella just to feel the rain on my face, rain pelting the wrinkles out of my shirt, my hair filling with rainwater, smoothing runaway wisps flat to my head.

On this stolen day, with rain snaking down the window in rounded paths, my mind wanders back to a fading dream: a fantastic landscape brimming with colour and asymmetrical shapes, seen through the walls of a glass chamber that flew through air in intricate spirals, dizzying and exhilarating. I remember the journey but not the destination.

Rest, for a moment, in the stillness of stone, of dawn, a lone star that appears in your dreams. Eyes closed, your palm covering your face, I cannot remember the word for beauty. It rains in summer; subtle, silent breezes are kidnapped by heat, except on days like this, when rain sweeps in wet, volatile wind, ushering you into long sleeved shirts.

21 June 2005 Pablo Ziegler Quartet; Edmar Castaneda

2005-06-24T11:28:00.000-04:00

Sometimes what makes a performance so alluring is watching the absolute transformation of the person in front of you, luminous under stage lights and lost in his own world, music filling his ears before sharing it with you, far away in the surrounding darkness. Edmar, with his easy smile, smallish frame, fingers plucking, sliding, silencing his harp strings, cuts the brilliance of his flourishes with resounding quiet. The memory of its sound echoes, while the space fills with a voluminous hush in the split infinite second before the next voice emerges, tantalizing and fragrant.

And then, there are musicians like Pablo: seemingly unreadable, he sits heavily at the piano, betrayed only by the discreet smile hovering about his eyes and lips. His greying hair gives him a certain gravity, lightened by the soft curls that frame his face. Striking a rhythm with the flat of his hand on the side of the piano, he begins ‘Hopscotch.’ His dexterous fingers manipulate sound with surgical precision, emitting earthy, sensual voices that float before melting into the richness of the melodies permeating the air, chilled by iced drinks clinking occasionally into the darkness. His voice is slightly gravelly in between songs, as he tells us the next will be a melody he wrote, ‘Milonga del Viento’ –Milonga of the Wind. I love his accent, the way he pronounces the ‘H’ in honor – ‘it is an honor to be here at the Blue Note,’ he says.

In the moment of listening in complete stillness, sound becomes tactile, imbued with fingers made of sinuous melodies that beckon, cajole, and charm you out of reality into magical plush depth and ethereal delicacy. Bliss comes wrapped in blue-stained notes and an Astor Piazzola tango re-invoked with piano, harp, double bass, electric guitar, and percussion. Trace this transient instant with the breath of an exhaled sigh while falling from intoxicating heights.

--

2005-06-09T16:50:00.000-04:00

Sobre la mano izquierda,
un dedo desapareció durante
la noche llenada de rincones
trenzando para siempre hasta el cielo
que cayó lentemente, penetrando
los ojos abiertos.

Ahora, en el mediodía sempiterno,
la luz interrumpe tu sombra con un dedo
perdido. Por lo momento, todavía
tienes tu palma entera que llenas
con un ramo de rosas blancas.
Su fragrancia te sigue

mientras que caminas por calles
de piedra y madera pudrida
hasta llegas a la puerta abierta.
Entra el recinto eterno con
ocho rincones esperándote.
Escucha la puerta encierra.

El mediodía sempiterno reaparece
en la escalera en caracol antes de ti.
El sol por este momento
queda, inmóvil en un círculo perfecto.
Sube contando cada paso, recordando
de nuevo el color del mar.

---

About your left hand,
a finger disappeared during
the night filled with corners
twisting endlessly towards the sky
that fell slowly, penetrating
your open eyes.

Now, at eternal noon, light
interrupts your shadow with its missing
finger. For the moment, you still
have your entire palm which you fill
with a bouquet of white roses.
Its fragrance follows you

as you walk through streets
of stone and rotting wood
until you arrive at the open door.
Enter this endless room with
eight corners awaiting you.
Hear the door close.

Eternal noon reappears
in the spiral staircase before you.
The sun stays, at this moment,
immobile in a perfect circle.
Go upstairs counting each step, recalling
again the color of the sea.

supine

2005-06-05T21:43:00.000-04:00

City streets broken open
Underbellies gaping

With asphalt-crusted lips.
Gravel-laden tongues face the sky

Solemnly promise:
It will rain today.

Wait. One moment. Please.
It is the last time for—

Forgotten sentence
Swallowed like an ‘l’

Of rain falling
Into your open mouth.

question

2005-05-31T23:23:00.000-04:00

I am realising that all the things I want cannot be objectives in and of themselves. In order to fulfill the finite, one must reach for the infinite. The end cannot be the end.

How do you define infinity?

Maybe my mistake all along is that I have been too obsessed with beauty. Beauty cannot be the objective; it is merely a byproduct of authenticity.

What is authenticity and how do you achieve it?

Authenticity is sacrificing form—the superficial shape of codified movement, for the core of its existence. It is the honest questioning and exploration of the body’s movement and movement capabilities in all of its grotesque awkwardness that invites beauty to reenter through the backdoor and catalyses progress.

Progress?

The understanding of form, the physics and function of form; shape serves a vital purpose. Knowing that the mimcry of shape is instant death, only then will the body begin to explore new languages of movement. Dance is translating literature into the body’s silence and letting permutations of silence speak endless volumes of text.

Post performance

2005-05-26T14:52:00.000-04:00

It is a blustery day in late May. I am sitting in a turtleneck and sweater, two pairs of pants, and hand knit socks before my window where the four o’clock sky is weakly glowing grey. The clouds in my head refuse to pass—inexplicable fatigue. It is beginning to rain. Droplets of rain land on glass, scarring the window with short, needle-thin streaks.

After reading ‘Tea that Burns’ (a family memoir of Chinatown, by Bruce Edward Hall) I find myself furtively glancing a little longer at dim and dusty Chinatown doorways into family associations and old apartment buildings with intricate iron grille entrances. I return to an obsession with access, permission to enter through locked gates into lives and stories billowing untold beneath my feet.

History is bitter, burns like tea freshly brewed and scaldingly hot, like bootleg alcohol tipped back in a swift savage gulp drunk from a teacup. Why, in a cheery folk melody played on the erhu, do I hear the sadness of a forgotten history, a fading generation. All the incongruous mysteries of my contemporary reality draw themselves to the surface in a clattering cacophany, while the impassioned screams and giggles of children at recess in the neighboring courtyard fade from my memory.

Mommy and I translated a thread of Chinatown’s invisible tapestry of female laborers mired by financial hardship, family, and fabric, which they hold in their hands, cutting threads, sewing pieces, making shirts, pants, belt loops, collars and pillow cases out of cottons, refined silks and flimsy cloth. In a segment of video footage that explores the poetry of everyday gesture, two women are talking to each other and to the camera while they go through the motions of their garment factory job, cutting loose threads from finished clothes. They are older, with grown children and grandchildren. They only speak Toisan; I can barely make out what they say. I understand the dialect in random exclamations that lead to little comprehension of content. Mommy and I decipher their story: with generous smiles and uninhibited laughter peppering their dialogue, they tell us they are happier here than in rural China. Compared to filling their hands with stones to construct a well, sitting with scissors to cut threads with a friend is a reprieve. They will be taken care of in their old age by their daughters and their grandchildren. Their aging hands are deft, moving smoothly against the backdrop of their bright eyes and animated exclamations.

Writing is exploring the imagination with history alongside of it, recalling, remembering, recording, conversations, scraps of newspaper clippings, dog-eared photographs untouched up and blurry. Writing is choosing your memories.

The scaffolding at 70 Mulberry Street seemed like a permanent fixture until it was removed last Saturday in the quick space of a day, revealing the renovated historic contours of the landmark P.S. 23 built in 1891. The newly washed, painted façade of the building looks offensively stark, too brilliantly terracotta in colour, and strangely angular, as if time had not smoothed away the sharp lines of newly hewn stone. This recently unveiled corner of Mulberry and Bayard is suddenly bright and the shoemaker now has to put up a large beach umbrella to shield the sun and rain where the scaffolding had once covered him.

The other day, I brought my battered red shoe to the shoemaker, interrupting a conversation he was having with another man, who took leave of him with the usual, I’ll stop bothering you and let you get back to work sort of expression. To better examine my broken shoe, he puts on a pair of large, plastic framed glasses that nearly consume his small-boned face and make his eyes look googly. His hands look tough, well-worn with leathery fingertips stained almost the same viscous tallow colour of the glue that he uses to reattach my wayward strap to the shoe. To me, he is beautiful, in all his wrinkled splendour, the albeit romanticised wrinkles that I have affixed to his nondescript clothing and his small body bent over in careful scrutiny of my old red shoe. I sit gingerly opposite him in a collapsible stool, my two bare feet resting on my one remaining shoe watching the agility of his hands speak the language of learned craft.

Pre-performance.

2005-05-14T11:46:00.000-04:00

The only thing that reads seems to be desire; how much you want something and the way you interact with that desire, how you temper it, how it tempers you. Desire makes you move across space.

Dance is the balance of opposition – pulling from both ends, the dynamic play between falling and flight, between desire and the release of that desire. It is filling the emptiness of the body with emotion pouring in from inside and outside. It is beauty descending from sky and ascending from earth to meet in the finite body of the depraved human form transformed into sublime loveliness. To move is to inhabit opposition, to be pulled apart by conflicting forces stretching the lengths and limits of the body into kinetic stillness.

The act of performance is the miracle of rendering the imaginary into the real. See someone. Reach for him. Touch him. Trace his outline with your blunt fingertips until you taste the shape of his sadness inside your bones. It must be real, as real as a cup of coffee sitting fragrant, waiting for you at the corners of the room, perched precariously on a ceiling light, behind the last person sitting in the audience.

Be fearless. Step into the unknown, armed with only the inner light of the imagination. Wield images like a weapon to break into the encroaching darkness outside your silhouette.

Performing is like moving with your eyes closed, moving by sensory awareness of the tactility of sound, the weight of the body pressing through space, the floor beneath your feet, sensing heat, light and shadow, and the wind that peels away from your spinning body.

What medium are you moving through? Sometimes it is honey or oatmeal or the salty wave-ridden sea. Sometimes it is the gossamer fabric of dreams or sunset’s scarlet light. Each time it will be different but reminiscent of the last time or the time before and sometimes the time after.

Scarlit

2005-04-29T00:57:00.000-04:00

I. Solipsism

Enter bones
Through pried open scars
Lit by the faint glow
Of starlight at dawn.
A dying rose unfurls
Its secrets on stone.

Before the stone
Gate built on shattered bones
A lone shadow unfurls
Over tamped earth; a maze of scars
Filled with dawn
The quiet glow

Of fading moonlight glowing
Ghastly over a half-sunken stone
Catches dawn
Rising into stiff trees, straight like bones.
Rough bark cut by scars
Hiding and unfurling

In time to unfurling
Whispered melodies glowing
Crystalline; curled edges of scars
Like stars inscribed on stone
Embedded in exposed bones
Lie languid upon dawn.

The rose awaits dawn
Scarlet petals unfurl
Wrap around bleached bones.
Soft white glow
Luminous within red; broken stone
slips inside scars.

The forgotten scar’s
History clings to dawn
Lacing cold stone
With the unfurling
Warmth of morning’s glow
Eerie over discarded bones.

Brittle bones cut scars
Into the ethereal glow of dawn
Unfurling lost secrets into polished stone.

2005-04-26T21:06:00.000-04:00

Here in the embers
Of fading fire coals
Glow in the twilight
Of last night’s warmth
A sudden burst of summer
Descends recedes
In a quick ribbon of gale

This is an exercise in nothing
In the mental embattled garden
Of lost innocence where youth
And beauty find finity
We move out of never-ending
Lines into isolated circles

Rolling in haphazard paths
Searching for the straightness
Of the lost line, its hidden curves
Bending precariously to penetrate
Bones, cold fingertips
A forgotten whisper at sunset

Here I am begging
Again for the gift of speech
With mute indignant silence
Chewing on stones for bread
Granite melts slowly
In my mouth

ephemera

2005-04-11T16:42:00.000-04:00

Here lies before you: soft shimmer of sequins catching faint light. Dusty black floor, black painted ceiling, closed venetian blinds. Bodies move through tepid air, articulate images replayed in the mirrors on the walls. Lies gently curl themselves around your inert body. Lull your mind into vacant pools. Drowning becomes sweet as you watch the others from the side of the room.

If you gaze long enough into the light of a warm spring day and taste the tears that drip slowly down your face, then maybe the emptiness inside will begin to break. This is where pain begins: the exploration of what it means to be human, real, full of life. This is what it means to be silent: letting other voices emerge into quiet dusty air. This is glass shattering around your inert body complete with smooth enamel shell and delicate porcelain finish. All the pain in your body rises, takes up the properties of the sea: surging waters laden with life, dirt and refuse, giving and taking life as it follows the command of the Lord. You swallow. Open tightly shut eyes. Plunge face into salted sea before the rest of your body falls in after it. Water surrounds skin. Sensation bathes limbs. Find respite; delirium has seeped into your quick laughter, your solid silence.

Your face has shattered. Begin again: construct a mosaic out of smashed terracotta, fire-glazed ceramic, hand-blown glass. Tedious work. Sharp corners: cut fingers. On your knees, an image emerges. Begin to see where the colours need to fall. Shadows take on myriad hues just above the lip, beneath the brow. And suddenly you’re staring at your own reflection.

2005-04-05T23:50:00.000-04:00

The lunar new year: narrow streets alive with jostling pedestrians. Lion dancers manipulate a brilliantly colored papier-mache head with flashing eyes and coquettish lashes; human feet extend off the variegated brocaded body. These mythical lions are surrounded by voracious tourists greedily eyeing the spectacle, consuming moments with soft clicks of cameras in dismembered hands raised high above the pulsating mass of shifting feet and shoulders. For them, Chinatown is a transient destination, a daytrip in their week-long New York city excursion. For lion-dancers, this is their moment to emerge from their shadowy practice rooms that boom with the sound of drums and symbols. They saunter down these cement streets with a train of musicians dictating the speed of their steps, and spectators throwing confetti and mock firework streamers which explode in a swirl of color before falling to the ground.

It is night. Spring settles uncertain in checkerboard days of soft wind and biting sleet. A single exhalation of breath: an arm falls, the sternum rises to meet the light. The body begins its journey through space and time, stepping heavily into earth, bare feet with cracked skin sliding.

Underneath the perpetual scaffolding on the corner of Mulberry and Bayard Street, an old man plays the er-hu beside his fortune-telling sticks. He passes the time between visitors by filling the air with the melancholic wail of a bow being pulled across the string that extends off its round snakeskin body. The sound rises over the din of traffic, seeps through pedestrian voices, settling deep into the wrinkles in his face and sliding down the crease that deepens in my sleeve as I open the door beside him. On the other side, silence descends. I am left with the sound of my own footsteps going up the stairs.

Run with me through these hollow streets; we will be flung across the refuse of time, those forgotten moments that lie in the quiet wasteland of our corporeal bodies. If I could fling myself across time, across the broad expanse of your exposed back, into your cradling arms, then I would fly, fast and far away into the distant realm of obscure thoughts hidden inside bones, on the backs of bent knees.

We are dancing about lions, becoming at once the lion, the lion dancer, the human, the mother, the daughter, the lover, the father, the child at play. And yet we are dancing about nothing in this jumble of too many inconsistent images, too many incongruous ideas stumbling clumsily over paws and toes and hair let loose and thrown about. Inside the deconstructed lion head, with its hollow eyes and frail bamboo frame, your face is cast in a grid of shadows. A human figure manipulates the skeleton of a creature, with disintegrating bamboo bones held together by colored ribbons of tape. Behold our muffled conversation, the sinuous exploration of tangling legs and extended hands, but the narrative threads were cut before the knot was tied. And we are wearing raincoats as if to shield ourselves from the torrential flood of memories that stream out of light boxes in the non-existent fly-space of the studio. Within this cage of broken bones and waning tradition trailing heavily behind it, another obscure word falls, another gesture disappears into the concrete sidewalk littered with limp confetti that stains snow a dirty shade of pink.

~~~

Question: what is the objective of art?

to become transparent to self and other, so that you, they, she, him, are enthralled by the rushing of blood through arteries, and airless blood traversing blue veins, waiting to bear the burden of oxygen. The lights penetrate your skin, your clothes, to pull your soul to surface. This is the labour of your everyday journey through the iridescent streets of the airless mind, of the slumping gait of your unstill body.

~

I think dancing is like living underwater, in the crystalline blue salty sea, with the sun beating down upon its restless surface, and rain pelting itself into its airless depths. Dancing is like sleeping with the fishes, a kind of death, a falling out of the human realm into the amorphous surface and space of water. You are the foreign underwater creature, unlike the fish with their air-gulping gills and wide-open eyes. Perhaps performing is the surfacing of the human back into the human realm of surface-life, superficie, exterior spaces. There is something ironic about the fact that I hate water.

~

The ground beneath my feet shifts imperceptibly. I find myself on broken terrain. I have somehow lost my shoes. Not only have I lost my shoes, my proverbial map has also disintegrated into the rubble, with corners emerging in tantalizing and useless shreds, coyly peeking out, dusty and smudged with dirt. In my hands: a fistful of wistful memories, a recollection of some desire wrapped in faded paper marked with faint pencil. It seems I’ve been imbibing a tasteless imperceptible poison along with my unsweetened coffee from a disposable paper cup; how it got there, how it gets there daily, remains an irrevocable mystery. I’m hallucinating a decaying melody that permeates everything from the soft breeze that brushes my hair across my eyes to the plastic in my contact lenses; the landscape is bathed in a peculiar chartreuse light. Now the only escape is to recede, into inside self to create hallowed pockets of space where you endow the chaos, confusion, and pretension of the exterior with singular significance, a sublimity of transcendent flight. We come to the impasse between mind and body, where both seem to have forgotten the existence of the other. Unread messages are collecting at the base of the neck and accumulating within the body’s ribcage. There is much to be said and much more to be done. You reach down, memories spilling out of your hands, as you fill your palms with colored pebbles. You begin walking, your soles pressing into earth as you leave behind a trail of uncertain stones.

2005-02-28T10:56:00.000-05:00

It’s snowing. The view outside my window: soft grey-white at 5.26 in the evening. Thick spills of snowflakes float and fall according to the wind’s whim. Fuschia roses encased in clear cellophane hang to dry, upside down, against black venetian blinds, grey heather sky and outlines of buildings hazy in the distance.

My room smells like fish because daddy is cooking. I spilled tea that fell fragrant in a quick curtain down the table’s edge. The sky: grey powder blue. Lights glow faintly orange in the washed blue landscape. Outlines of buildings still faint. The sound of a child laughing rises eighteen stories.

6.08 evening: charcoal grey sky. Deeper grey silhouettes of buildings, luminous orange lights and soft spots of lit windows emerge. Time to go. Leave behind the wet table, the wet floor, and dried roses hanging above the windowsill.

I want to speak to you in a language that is not mine, words I swallowed when you were not looking. Outside, the wind tucks itself into your warm pockets. The streets are wet with melted snow, grey, like yesterday’s stormy skies. The sky has indeed fallen. We walk on transformed clouds leadenly moisture-laden on cement pavement. Pools of water with their still, slushy surfaces, deceptively deep.

2005-02-05T17:43:00.000-05:00

A single step
Sets off light
Pooling at your feet
Darkness closes in
Behind you
As you move ahead

The crowd up ahead
Will not step
On sidewalk cracks; only you
Tread deliberately out of light
Find solace in
The calluses on your feet

Several feet
Above your face ahead
Of your outstretched hands, in
The careful step
You take into scarlet light
I meet you

Disappear into you
The cracks in your feet
I hide from light
Settle in shadows up ahead
Mimick your every step.
A faint melody closes in

Folds in
On itself to touch you
Just as you are about to step
Across the doorway with both feet
Go ahead
Listen for light

Traipsing light
And blithe in
The space ahead
Farther than you
Dared to extend your feet
Take the first step

The last step will be light
Your feet will be in shadow
As you walk into the crowd up ahead.

2005-01-27T22:56:00.000-05:00

I started sobbing the other day in Sabrina’s class. I was learning how to move my arms. And I wasn’t getting it. Maybe I just needed to cry. Maybe it was the beauty that broke me--that adherence of clumsiness to finite and infinite beauty was spellbinding, horrifying, and brutal at the same time. The exactness and precision of the line itself and the passage of the line in motion; it is breaking space within space, reworking it, shaping air, flesh, and bones, incorporating sculpted air into your body. It begins with resistance, creating a resistance against your body so strong that you screen out all possible options except the one. The one thing of beauty: a beautiful shape that continues to renew itself within space, time, memory, and existence. A shape that holds presence, character, nobility and pure, unadulterated strength, intelligence, diligence, and discipline. These are the lessons of our lives.

To dance is to speak in the language of images: to speak with abstract articulation, precision and eloquence. This is the language that you never learned how to speak, but find yourself speaking, hoping someone will understand what your limbs have to say. To dance is to walk with failure lingering at your heels, ready to take your arm when you are not wary, an ever eager partner waiting to whisk you offstage and out the door, an unwelcome stalker. But I tell you: do not dance with failure waiting to embrace you in the wings, because failure is external and success comes from within, tucked intricately into the folds of carefully constructed organs and sculpted muscle fibres, in the mitochondria of every cell. Call them to arms and integrate your body into one organ made up of many parts. In dance, you must frame every movement in time and space, within and without so that you will never be caught in the flat death of a two-dimensional plane. To move is to create illusions of truth, truth through illusion; create infinite depth, length, extension, and suspension. At the end of every no, at the utmost end of every road, there will be a yes, a path that leads to the beginning of the next extreme, so that the more your drive your ribs down, the more your sternum will rise to the light; the beginning of presence, the exposition of heart, hence soul, spirit given forth beneath light, shadow--sharing.

That day, I was realising the utter loneliness of every moment. I think that’s what made me cry. If you want essence, which was what was going on, you will have strain everything through the sieve with every ounce of strength you have in your body. Otherwise, it’s not enough. It is absolute simplicity, an unbending, uncompromising simplicity that has the power to break through every thing you hold dear, everything you have ever known or thought you knew. It is mind-boggling, beautiful and breath-taking. It is purification. Simplicity is the act of purification, of erasing wayward lines, superfluous bits and pieces that distract from the core of existence of being. As you push through every barrier that impedes the expression of simplicity, you are wandering through thorns on your own. When you walk out on the other side in rags and tatters, you will see the truth on the edge of the cliff, but you will be standing alone with no riches, no status, no recognition, only the knowledge that you have surpassed the temptation to give up sustains you and you will be radiant. Only then will you be able to fall; fall to the depths of the mountain’s craggy surface to discover the pockets of softness and suspension that will catch you in your disciplined abandon. This is integrity. This stripping away of every material comfort, every vestige of all that is human, social, economic; the core of humanity. Be forewarned; your body will betray you. You will be deceived. You will stumble, thirst and cry out. But the path is ahead, the sky above, the earth below. I challenge you: walk.

I cried because it was real. Because I felt real. Because everything was gone and I had only myself; I had to face myself, where I was that day, that second, at the end of it all, at the end of failure, and the beginning of comprehension.

2005-01-24T18:18:00.000-05:00

I was angry that day for no good reason. Halfway through our educational performance, our director Dian, stopped the show to ask the front row of third graders to move up to make room for latecomers. The other dancers and I were standing in the wings, shaking our heads at this lack of foresight in seating. We heard the theatre’s sliding door rumble open, then closed. Dian explained to us backstage that we had an audience of mentally challenged adults coming into the house. After perfunctory apologies for the disruption, the lights dimmed to black. We resumed dancing, but we could hear someone moaning in the audience over the music. It made me want to jump higher, sink deeper into the role I was playing as a way of attempting to escape this unusual audience or at least erase the extraneous noise, but that was not an option. What an odd swirl of contrasts: young, ordinary third graders glowing with impetuous, intelligent energy seated beside a leaden file of mentally challenged adults varying in age from their mid thirties to late forties. The stage lights managed to dimly illuminate several distorted silhouettes of physically challenged adults. It was a mediocre performance that day, but it was ultimately a powerful lesson in humility.
As we were breaking down after the show, one woman kept asking us, one of us, any one of us, to zip up her coat, an old bedraggled coat which hung limply from her crooked shoulders. She was oldish, her speech was halting, repetitive, and the two folds of her coat lay feebly open. After repeated pleas, I finally knelt down to try to zip it up, but the zipper would not catch. She barely seemed to notice. I thought the zipper was broken; or maybe I simply did not know how to zip up someone else’s coat. I mumbled a helpless apology as she was shuttled down the corridor by the group leader.
From outward appearance, they are almost frightening, like a travelling group of ghastly apparitions with their stiff, shuffling steps, somewhat glazed expressions and distorted bodies. Still, I suspect that art has the ability to reach beyond their broken shells to touch a vulnerable spot somewhere beneath their mussed hair and old clothes. They made me want to speak to them, to heal the brokenness that lies etched clearly into their bodies, but perhaps not their minds? I do not actually know the degree or the ability of each person there, but perhaps it was a triumph in itself that they had arrived to sit in the darkened theatre space to see the changing of lights, costumes, colours, bodies and stories. They silenced me out of my anger, which melted into a dull sadness and yearning to let them taste the blessings of movement, music, performance, and life, which I have been given. Yet, perhaps they are happier than a privileged person could be; perhaps they understand and know the blessing of simplicity best. It felt appropriate and symbolic that I knelt at this woman’s feet, trying ineffectually to gather the two folds of her coat into one piece that would protect her from the unforgiving cold outside. She could not help herself; I could not help her either. The weakness of one equals the weakness of another despite superficial appearances, further revealing the common denominator of human frailty, and the gifts of grace and redemption that are so undeservedly bestowed. The rest of the group made their way down the creaky wooden corridor. I wonder how they made it down the stairs.

2005-01-22T23:21:00.000-05:00

scarlit ephemera

enter here. An existence coloured, lit by scar: the scar of memory on skin and on self. The ephemera of existence, of remembering--wispy recollection. I offer you a breath to sustain a moment’s respiration: scar lit and redder than sunset, blood, or roses hanging to dry from closed venetian blinds.

Intransigent steps, a solitary path, severed feet walking a lonely waltz into the distance of mist and fog enveloping the erect body. You are enchanted, enrapt, encircled by… night polluted by light, and cold, clearer than day, and the lamp that illuminates your bare feet on the smooth stone floor.

A strange welcome; the journey promises unravelling intrigue. let the mystery begin.

It begins with a break. The startling clang of glass on pavement stone splitting into reprobate shards that wind their way into skin under skin drawing bubbles of blood scarlet to surface. In time, with the wearing of days and hours of minute healing, the scab loosens to reveal the smooth scar beneath, waxy pale glowing in inconspicuous light. Here is memory forged in flesh.

Glass vase travelled from exterior space into microscopic lesions of your body where matter lies inert, waiting to be recalled.What do you remember?

Sound. The sound of falling. The sound of breaking. Water spilling. Glass wet on stone wet on your bare feet.

Scarlet. Roses bespeckled with water, smooth resplendent red against textured grey stone. Thorns hide amidst luxuriant leaves. Green blends into grey into invisible glass, clear water to meet scarlet petals and a fading red trail that leads deeper into distant interiors.

Here we begin again forgetting self and other, entering a newly created world; die beautifully to reality in order to grab hold of new life, a novel taste of the extraordinary. Here I am rambling through rain and clouds behind the dusty window sill of my cluttered room , trying to die in order to remember, relive stories sitting dormant in nail beds and bones, trying to call them out of their slumber into my waiting open palms cutting the humid air into wistful slices.

This is an exercise in dying. You live by creating worlds within worlds so powerful that the one you live in fades away, allows you to step out step away to fall into a gossamer brilliance so fine you will be walking on air, water, and fire at the same time. Laugh, cry, tremble, and witness miracles in the black box of the mind. Enter the fantasy.

You cannot look apologetic or uncertain; there cannot be a question of ‘can I do it.’ Repeat after me: it must simply be ‘I can do it; I am doing it.’ In moments of weakness, I do not believe in the fantasy I profess to create. And there, I die, never to awaken. It is a question of ownership; inhale the space into your body. Give birth to movement, stories, emotions, and images splayed out on the body’s malleable canvas. What do all these realisations, this constant repetition of knowledge do? How do you remember? How do you forget the halter of doubt, insecurity, paralysis that pulls stridently against mind, body, spirit?

It almost seems sultry outside, even though the air is grey, the streets wet, and the rain intermittent. Sensuality pervades the gloom in the heavy dampness. What does it mean? Where does it come from? What is it saying? Maybe, it’s always there, tucked away in the shadowy crevices of dusty corners, beckoning the bored passerby to slide a finger along the vertical line joining two walls, palpate the grey film that now coats your extended index finger. What do you do with this extraneous filth, this settling of air particles, sawdust, and dirt? Draw patterns on the swept floor: circles interrupted by squares and trapezoids trip triangles that revel in their sharp pointed edges. Step away when it is done. You open the door. The street reappears in its grey jungle, a jumble of cars, lethargic pedestrians, the swish of water falling from whirring wheels. The maze opens before you, green hedges give way to gaudy storefronts, restaurant windows filled with hanging poultry dripping with a tawny golden glaze. You turn the corner and disappear.

When you write, in your confusion of images, subjects, thoughts, you are mapping out stepping stones. But understand that one line will not lead to the next in the correct chronological order. Still, you set it down, mark it with ink, a coloured pencil, a magic marker. Hopefully, this will allow you to go back in, peer into the cryptic symbols you left for yourself, clues to some mystery you have yet to realise.

Sheets of rain sliding down the windows look like a molten glass curtain. Quick percussion of water on glass on brick on pavement. Contrasts with the wild grey smoke puffing thinly from the candle burning within a glass cylinder; wax pools still and liquid smooth.

Darkness breaks before you a little lighter with each word that falls from your lips: a deliberate exercise in sound. You are trying to speak, to think in another register, a language that has closed its doors on your exposed wrist. Caught in this vise with your veins running perpendicular to the sliding doors that now cannot quite meet, you utter a fragment of thought one syllable at a time in a voice you never knew you would hear rising just beneath your throat. From the other side, you are a faceless hand on the edge of the road begging for the gift of speech. Your palm grows heavy as veins threading the narrow expanse of skin over bone turn bluer beneath the mute weight of descending sky.

You recede reside in such interior worlds: a mysterious and muffled existence where you distance yourself from the surreal reality that permeates the humid air. You are conscious of the scent of flowers rising from damp earth stretching just past the black painted bars of the small cathedral next to the prison. A jumbled triangle of stone: basic brick chapel, synthetic stone prison, magisterial marble courthouse and the snaking uneven river of pavement connecting their cloistered walls.

Darkness lights up with your blistered steps, setting off surveillance motion censers and illuminating the uneven asphalt road behind the prison. Thin oblong windows are cut into quarters by thick round bars that slice light with the shadow of a cross. Darkness closes in behind you as you leave behind empty pools of light to blink off as stillness descends.

Enmeshed in street-lit darkness, wrists rotate in undulating circles, fingers follow to meet palms, meet air, meet each other, bearing the silent weight of day and its labour. Shadows settle onto your skin; ink drips from your extended fingers, leaving an invisible trail on dirt-laden pavement. You are painting a black on black self-portrait using the city as an unprimed canvas, stretched across a frame of air and water.