literary – Page 53 – In the gaze of the other

January 17, 2015February 29, 2016

Flash of Stillness: Playing Patience at the DMV

Some virtues are beyond me. Patience, for instance, ever the teacher, lover and nemesis, eludes me today. As I sit in the hard plastic chair in the DMV, watching the screen to confirm the number announced courteously by the subtly enthusiastic electronic female voice, “Now serving number G095 at Window 13”, I sigh in exasperation. My number is G0172. It’s the second time in a month and a half that I have lost my driver’s license, and apparently the punishment is laid before me.

I want to pluck my eyeballs right out of my head at the thought of this wait in the stupefyingly catatonic government issue slate blues and grays of this Kafka-esque muffled, stifling prison. Too many dull civil servants shuffling paper among chair slumpers and leg shifters, all emitting muted boredom, disgust and defeat. No one appears to be content–merely a large aggregation of bodies connected only by will to the call of the numbers.

My daily practice of late has been precisely about this: finding contentment wherever I am. But not just the ordinary contentment of gratitude for a life lived in relative comfort and safety. For example, this may not be the best experience a late Friday afternoon has to offer, but at least I am not being held hostage in a bank. I will eventually leave this drone of hushed activity, having completed the exercise in obedient compliance with temporary license in hand.

And it is not mere at-oneness, presence within the space I am led to by attention to breath. That place is familiar to me as I have beckoned that presence to practice yoga on particularly distractible days, to preserve my sanity in extreme adversity, situations beyond my control such as waiting in a hospital room for test results, and to create–writing within the clasp of close observational sensation and thought.

No, the kind of contentment found in voluntary partial confinement among these resigned soldiers of complicity is not mere surrender; it is much more focused, pinpoint. It is the kind of contentment that comes in very small packages, minute actually, perhaps down to the cellular level. This cellular ease is squeezed out of a stillness and silence within that can hear the seduction of the computerized voice tapping into specific sensors in my brain, sliding across synapses that fire the corresponding response: chill. I hear the voice, calm, soothing, and yet infused with the transparency of its purpose. It’s experiencing and knowing all at once, an ultra alert moment of bathing light.

These moments of hyper awareness, like visualizing sound vibrations traveling across cilia in my ear canal to produce tones, reactions and information, store savory bits of future antidote to the haze of an overslept day just like today. They entertain and calm me when bored or anxious.

There are seemingly insignificant moments I can remember as mere hair’s breath of time and movement recorded so finely to capillary’s considered caress. I close my eyes in the echo of “Now serving…G108…” and summon one such scene of long ago to the black screen of my eyelids and I am there:

Walking out the door in a hurry, late for work, I don’t even notice as I rush past him. Evan near misses but manages to clasp my elbow on the fly. “Hey,” he says huskily. He has just awakened and struggles slightly with sleep-shorn disarray, a waver in his stance. Stopped, the momentum of my intention and determined pace is still rushing on ahead of me as my body is stilled before his eyes. “Hey,” he says again still clasping my elbow, my attention now filling my eyes that have been locked into his by the soft insistence of his gaze. He raises his free hand to my face and rests his four fingers, thumb-less, palm down, under my chin lightly. I feel the warmth of his morning hand and his embracing time. “Have a fine day.” The sound of his touch lingers. My racing pulse of wheeling stepped-to thought slowed in the honeyed silk of stilled breath and moment, somehow I sense I will.

I open my eyes, once again to the dimmed fluorescent daylight of the room. The 90s throw-back television screen flicks to G112 as I recover the speed of my breath, regulate it to the pace of the room’s still life painting of humans in suspended animation. Leaving behind the image on a slo-mo memory reel, I feel the filmy residue coating my mood–a clear outlook reset. The furrows in my brow have smoothed out, not merely caved into my face. The tension lines around my mouth are slightly faded.

Returning to the room, I imagine the civil space of 10 inches between my loudly sighing, glum neighbor and me, hitched to the same row of five chairs connected respectably, tolerably separated to allow both detached misery and connected commiseration in accordance with the building’s function. I will myself to blanket that distance with warmth like the heat of Evan’s hand emanating an atomic wave of empathic static connection.

Can he feel it? I have tuned out all voices, human or electronic, and squinch my sight with open eyes, twisting the last drop of intention from the tube of my will to touch him with an invisible hand. I turn to look at him, retreating from my straight-ahead-vision of the shaved head and neck of the body in front of me, but I only catch his departing blurred frame. His number, G118, is up.

Fortunate for him. Fifty-four more numbers to go. Twenty-five numbers in 90 minutes. Lots of time to practice patience and play at staking the heart of the energy vampire in this room. Luckily, I have a full flash drive of micro memory moments to fuel my efforts. Heck, I have time enough to remember where I lost my driver’s license in the first place.

January 16, 2015January 17, 2015

Windowed Away

Credit: i2.wp.com

Some people alight upon my life and walk apace awhile.
Others come and plant seeds that root belong-with-me,
even if merely for that moment, those days, those years.
I met just such a woman who came upon me suddenly,
though it was obvious I was asking her, “Come find me?”
And she did set foot upon the soil of my soddened lands.

We had nothing and everything in common: music, play,
hopes, dreams, fears, and all the unspoken known things.
She liked all the teams I couldn’t and ate what I wouldn’t,
like meat-burgers and fries for lunch on every other day.
From the south was she and I the north; she was waves,
I lines, but neither size nor shape moved us, not our taste.

We mattered to one another in most ways, assured ones.
She had the same window in her house, though we lived
in two different worlds facing polar ends of the same earth.
Our windows opened to onlookers peering in on mimicry
as if an ex ray technician looked down the bony guts of us.
We let the air open space flow alike in each our breaths.

But I have never visited her house, so have not looked in,
only glimpsed shots, yet she has walked under my window.
She has eyed me pacing the kitchen floor and mumbling;
she knows how I fold my clothes in too hurried an un-care
so that corners are not crisp and the shirts are not square.
She has spied the crackled walls of sun bleached golden.

Too, eyes witnessed my children laugh and fall to the floor,
her sight-following the line of their dance or pitched glares.
And I memorized photos of her children, callows and cars.
Though I have never stood, and may never glance there
not in front nor from any angle un-before her open window
where others tread her sandy yard on tippy toe’d high view.

She keeps the keys and I the lock but only in third space
where bespoken desire kept in cranial play, hands sleight,
strong caressing visions malleable as clay in divine heat
baking dust forming bodies from sleeping nudes raw lie.
Or not she but the neighbors circumscribe ruled borders
that walk the metes and bounds writ in maps and books.

In a dream, I am a-wing to her window open wide waiting
and through it I can see soft cornered shirts un-squared
and foot traces of trails paced fretting the kitchen tile floor.
Where acne’d stares beam dull, disillusioned indifference
among feline’d fallows, howling chuckled comforted glee,
and rosemary floating breezes clung to seamless walls.

January 15, 2015January 17, 2015

“What’s Wrong with ‘All Lives Matter?'”

George Yancy, Professor of Philosophy at Duquesne University, interviews Judith Butler, Professor of Comparative Literature at U.C. Berkeley, and asks “What’s Wrong with ‘All Lives Matter?'”, also the title of the article. He opens the discussion of race in light of recent demonstrations in the wake of black deaths and police brutality where slogans of ‘Black Lives Matter’ were extended by non-Blacks to “All Lives Matter.”

The article is a keen exposé of Butler’s views about how bodies–black, white, gendered, or monied, all kinds of bodies–matter, though some bodies do not matter. Specifically, black bodies do not matter by reason of the continued exposure to behaviors and preconceptions about their bodies– the black body as threat, and not only to police. She says we make assumptions about people, and those assumptions affect how we act toward others, whether we avoid interaction or find them a threat.

Sometimes a mode of address is quite simply a way of speaking to or about someone. But a mode of address may also describe a general way of approaching another such that one presumes who the other is, even the meaning and value of their existence. We address each other with gesture, signs and movement, but also through media and technology. We make such assumptions all the time about who that other is when we hail someone on the street (or we do not hail them). That is someone I greet; the other is someone I avoid. That other may well be someone whose very existence makes me cross to the other side of the road.

And not only is the black body as threat assumption institutionalized and reiterated through the disproportionate incarceration numbers of blacks to whites, arrests, relegation to poverty, etc., but concomitantly, whiteness, which is not a color so much as a predisposition of privilege, is normalized.

Whiteness is not an abstraction; its claim to dominance is fortified through daily acts which may not seem racist at all precisely because they are considered “normal.” But just as certain kinds of violence and inequality get established as “normal” through the proceedings that exonerate police of the lethal use of force against unarmed black people, so whiteness, or rather its claim to privilege, can be disestablished over time. This is why there must be a collective reflection on, and opposition to, the way whiteness takes hold of our ideas about whose lives matter. The norm of whiteness that supports both violence and inequality insinuates itself into the normal and the obvious. Understood as the sometimes tacit and sometimes explicit power to define the boundaries of kinship, community and nation, whiteness inflects all those frameworks within which certain lives are made to matter less than others.

The challenge to whiteness normativity is to saturate the culture (and thus reformulate preconceptions about race) with other conceptions of what is normal: Black Lives Matter. By insisting on that concept through persistent public demonstrations and exploitation of media, black lives can be seen first in the very insistence–that they have not mattered. To say that all lives matter, though true, is to ignore this first recognition–that certain lives do not.

She is right. We cannot just sweep up the protests in good feeling and treat everyone the same–because that is not how all people are in fact treated. The article is well worth reading for mapping the deliberate process of her thinking, how she moves through her thoughts to conclusion.

January 6, 2015January 6, 2015

Music is a Demonic Mistress in Whiplash

Credit: paleothea.com

My grandfather died when I was ten. I don’t remember much of him other than what others have spoken of him, that he was a piano tuner and a musician that taught and cajoled all of his 7 sons (not his one daughter) to play an instrument, two of whom were later professionals. I was told he was a gentle and kind man, soft spoken in juxtaposition to his louder more vociferous “witchy” wife, as characterized by an oft chastised daughter in law, my mother. The one lasting memory I have of him, Julius, Isidore prior to immigrating from Russia as his wife’s brother, is a cello lesson he gave me one summer afternoon of a rare visit to our Long Island home.

Though he and my grandmother lived merely a half hour’s distance away, we traveled to their Farmingdale home most visits. My father was the last of the seven boys, so his parents were older grandparents vis a vis my family and thus we traveled to them. On this one visit to our home, my grandfather, as ever interested in family musical progress (all four siblings and I played an instrument), decided to see for himself and sat me down for a listen. I remember his stern, disapproving look as I muddled my way through a piece I was learning for the school orchestra, probably some Muller-Rush simple exercise piece disguised as a song. Those were the days of music lessons and orchestras in elementary school, when instruments were offered in third grade at which time I was appointed the cello due to my long fingers despite my request to play violin. I had only been playing for a couple of years then and had not started the private lessons that I would have the following year, despite my family’s limited budget.

He was aggressive. He shook his head in decided disapproval, got up from his seat and pushed my fingers all about the neck of the cello, pressing down on the forefinger up high and stretching the ring finger down low and absolutely smashing my pinky. Then he jerked my bow arm from the elbow up to place it properly from his perspective, which strained my neck and torqued my hand whose fingers were being smashed into the neck of the now source of torture, formerly my cello, as used by this draconian musician. He instructed me in something barely conceivable as English worsened by his frustration, “Do dees, now dees, like dees!” He muttered in Russian probably.

Since I was ten and was not well versed in Russian, Hebrew, Latvian, Polish, German or other languages my grandparents spoke, hell I was barely fluent in English at 10, I had always felt distant from my grandparents who were adoring enough, calling me pet names like Pamaluchkala and ochichonya (dark eyes), and teasing me with the yiddish equivalent of ugly girl and then smiling and calling me the opposite. They made me nervous, however. I didn’t understand them. That cello lesson did not help matters. I was nervous about playing in front of anyone let alone an exacting musician who spoke little English. If I had any talent or education in the instrument, none of it was going to show under those conditions.

Recalling that experience still elicits a frown to my face, sadly the only recollection of my grandfather, who was a receding character compared to the imposing figure that was my grandmother in stature and voice. That memory still conflicts with the one or two video preservations of some 35 mm film of him, my grandmother and extended family at their house. He always looked gentle, smiling, and composed. Was it the music that brought out the demon in him, the child abuser that plowed over the slightest sensibilities of a child not taking into account the damage he may have done to that child’s love for and thereby development in the instrument?

That question of the madness in the musician besieged me, awakening my grandfather memory and provoked a long look at my musical endeavors, after seeing the movie Whiplash recently. The movie in pinpoint precision well casted acting and unlikely thriller momentum (my glutes hurt afterward) presents the outermost limits of the innermost determinants of personal achievement through mastery of a musical instrument, here the drums: monomaniacal focus of the musician, the demented exactitude and sadism of the teacher torturously beating greatness out of his students, and the Odyssean journey of the student musician into Hades to learn the truth: Am I capable of greatness?

The movie was truly well done, especially the nuanced acting of Miles Teller, the aspiring Buddy Rich, and J.K. Simmons, the complex, somewhat deranged professor. So much of the movie occurred in their faces, that subtle twitch, stare or glint. As is often the case after seeing a movie of such caliber that it lingers in my mental limbs the next day, I wanted to read more about the movie, reviews and such.

Serendipitously, I came across this quote by renowned American conductor Leonard Slatkin on my morning travels through the net: “Ultimately, music is a possessive mistress.” I read this and immediately thought about the scene (SPOILER ALERT!) in which Teller brilliantly and brutally spells out to his girlfriend in a great detailed cause and effect chain of prognostications why he cannot maintain a relationship, which, without spoiling too much, amounts to the essence of Slatkin’s quote. There just isn’t much time for other passions when one consumes so absolutely, burns so powerfully inside that all thought and action is that passion or tied to it in some way. All else is peripheral. One eats to keep the engine able to execute for the sake of the art.

Whether my grandfather broke my art or I just wasn’t good or passionate enough, I gave up playing the cello seriously by my junior year in high school, the year I delved deeper into the world eschewed by obsessively driven musicians, artists, actors, and anyone with the monomania to pursue greatness: a social life. Now I pick up the cello or the guitar, which I later tinkered with, when the mood strikes me. I like it that way. The small suffering of frustration and yearning for skillful music making, that lifelong itch, falls far short, even in amassed decades, of the inconceivable agony in attaining greatness: the innumerable hours, indomitable doubt and suffocating insecurity for a payoff that may turn out to be no more than a less than stellar roster of achievements.

Sounds a lot like the trials and tribulations of the writer, who must likewise be owned by a “possessive mistress” if she wants to be the next something to read on a list somewhere. Or be content to dabble to her heart’s compromised content. The only writing whisperers of the J.K. Simmons kind that writers withstand are their own tormenting demons. They have to find their own motivation for distinction in a sado-masochism of their own making.

January 4, 2015

Cloud from Both Sides

The cloud loved me to pieces, wanted to be my high-hung hero, but only rescuing the parts in a singular vision of unilateral need, not all. One-way vision of a cloud is downward. Clouds hover, and this drizzle detective spied the splashy bits of me from afar and decided long before we met, which soft morsels would be engulfed first, probably mamms and glutes, the prominent parts, before soaking the skin to its marrowed bone, for those bits were obtuse objects of ejaculative enjoyment that only a cloud could outwardly conceive.

Credit: http://staciayeapanis.com/artwork/2063260_Making_Love_to_Spike.html

Clouds are opaque, particulate substances of deceptively barely perceptible content, but they are felt and can cause harrowing angst, ultimately fear. Storm clouds, for instance. Cumulonimbus beckons the discontented rain, sky signs of rocky weather while cirrus paints the sky calm for smooth sailing.

We were once warm but then the cooling produced more clouds in the stratosphere. When we first met, cloud on high, mare’s tails and cirrocumulous and cirrostratus of wispy wanton strokes across my face and hands, light touches, silent sighs, slowed my pace, pausing in misted percipience. I was closer to the ground then, inhaling dust of the agitated lowland dirt and needed the precipitation, a washing off of the old ways.

And as you made your way down, altocumulus, heavier on my tail, vaporous droplets down my neck, cloying clutch, more threatening with your sudden struts of blasted fretting and thunderous moaning, your thick strands of desperate tendril attachment, you clung to me like sticky humidity, suffocating flypaper, inescapably omnipresent, both inevitable and ever-forming: cumulus, stratus, cumulonimbus, cumuli stratus, all of you sucking my skin moist ciliating my breath that inhaled you in hopeful oxygenated renewal and expelled you in disappointed delusional destruction, moment by moment–dizzying with your denseness obscuring sight, obtuse prescience, dull ratiocination, and dubious succor, which were just schemes as transparent as you up close, mere apings of the bonehead borrowings from others, banefully boring and clumsy. It took lightning to flash on sight. Then the downpour.

After-burst renewing, insightfully born in a cloudless sky clears the way for time and breath kept close on the wing. Peace brother cloud. The winds blow you across other visages, fare for another day’s delights and despair. Me, I’m walking to the sun. Fire over inundation.

January 3, 2015January 3, 2015

Lie Me to Sleep

And after this, no more silken lies tell.
Hairy legs swept free from their web,
clearing the corners where secrets dwell
in its predator to prey, rotting suspense.

After this one last fool, the venom pools
in another victim of putrefaction’s paws.
Arachnid jaws of acidic kisses of cruel
juiced to the grave, engorged paunch.

Tell me, sweet, the eyes of the doomed
plead for love of the kill, lie me to sleep.

Spider Love

January 2, 2015January 7, 2015

Flash of Exasperation

“Do you want me to stop by after work?” he asks with earnest caret-shaped eyebrows.
“No, I’m not going to be home,” she says distractedly looking for her keys in her purse and not at him.
“Oh? You’re going out?”
“I have some running around to do, errands,” she replies now looking at him but still half attentive.
“Do you want some company doing errands?” he asks, still earnest.
“No. I have too many to do and…it’s just best if I do them alone,” she assures though with her head again buried in her purse.
“Are we okay?” his earnestness now morphed into deep concern, brows furrowed.
Exasperated, she turns to him now and complains, “Ugh, yes we’re fine. Why do you have to ask that all the time? You sound so insecure and…I’m sorry,” she apologizes in defeat. “That’s not where I wanted this to go. We can get together when I’m finished,” she concedes.
“Do you know what time you’ll be finished?” he asks with renewed courage by her concession.
“No, it depends on how long the line is at AT&T and when I get to the market,” she replies with a hint of dullness back in her voice again.
“Well, do you know approximately what time? afternoon? evening? night?” he persists.
“NO! I don’t!” she barks at him. “Listen, you are going to have to be flexible here if you want to get together. I will text when I am done. If you’re free, we’ll get together. If something comes up for you and you’re no longer free, then we will get together some other time,” she rattles off as she exhales slowly.
“Okay, but I really don’t want to do anything else. I’d rather see you,” he confesses resignedly.
“Well, then you’re going to have to wait for my text,” she reminds him rather shortly.
“I don’t get why you won’t tell me when you think you’ll be done, I mean just approximately.”
“Not I won’t. I can’t!” she counters with heat rising in her face and tightness forming in her lips.
“Well, what exactly do you have to do?” he tries her with careful curiosity.
Sighing deeply, “Oh really now. Do I have to go through my to do list?” Exasperated, “Okay, I have to go to AT&T to exchange my phone; it doesn’t charge. Then I have to pick up a turkey I ordered at the market before it closes. Then I have to bring Mark to and from soccer practice. I have to make dinner. It’s already 2:00, so this discussion is just eating up valuable time. Why don’t I just go do what I have to do?” she glares at him with growing impatience.
“Okay, so you don’t have any idea how long all of that will take, huh?”
“For Crissakes, no!!!” she shouts, slamming her keys in a loud crash on to the floor.
“Wow, you’re so angry. Are you sure we’re okay?”
(Door slam).

December 31, 2014

Happy New Year! What Else Could I Write?

Happy arbitrarily chosen day to start counting all over again and feeling resolved to do things differently! Thank you, Caesar for setting this day in 46 B.C. of all days to start the new year, and not the logical one, which would be and was before him the vernal equinox, the official start of spring in late March. Just goes to show you, it’s good to be the king.

Resolving to make changes, do things right, and avoiding mistakes of the past is inspiriting. It’s the ultimate Mulligan. Who doesn’t love second chances (and third, fourth and fifth chances)? More importantly, who doesn’t love to be self-deluding? Not to be too cynical, but most of us make resolutions that stretch far into fantasy land of what I want to be when I grow up: thinner, stronger, healthier, wealthier, and a host more of -ers.

Truth is, those big resolutions that require the maker to do something avoided the previous twelve months are not going to magically happen with a declaration that it be so. Most understand that, so why make resolutions? Because it feels good to be resolved. It’s like any shot in the arm that gives a little boost from the limbic brain, like feeling sexy or getting out of the cold into a warm house. It just feels good.

A day for reflection, however chosen, is also a good thing, particularly because humans, Americans especially, seem to need to be told what to do when. That’s why we get a select few calendared holidays strictly enforced by the day off with stores closed and Hallmark greeting cards that remind us how we are supposed to feel. Think about how hard it is on Christmas day to be housebound because there is nothing open for distraction. Okay, except Starbucks…and the movie theaters. Just last week I surrendered to the deep desire to stay in pj’s all day and watch endless movies on Christmas day with the all-right-in-the-world justification of knowing that that is what my country wants me to do. Why else would I have the day off with almost everyone else?

Besides, the recovery from an after calamitous Christmas shopping for days on end hangover was much needed. So Christmas day is for recovery of one sort and New Years day is recovery of another–the obligatory drinking. How else does one know one is truly happy and celebratory if not drunk? I must admit the dry years and the wet years made the difference between boredom and enthusiasm vis a vis heralding in the new year. Oddly or maybe not so oddly enough, in the sober year ends, I never saw midnight except in the visions dancing before closed lids.

This evening, I will imbibe a bit, but probably just enough to keep me warm not sleepy. I don’t want to miss the stroke of midnight good cheer with the clinking of glasses and kissing of cheeks, some with loving embrace. The ritual synchronizes me. All is right in the world when I follow the rules of new years eve obligatory good feeling and hope.

Even though the rituals have changed throughout the years–from waking the kids up for pots and pans banging when they were little, to poppers and noise makers when they were a little older, to trying to stay awake til they got home safely–they still are important for setting the rhythm of days: wiping my hands clean of the old to roll up my sleeves and dig into the new.

Credit: https://valleyartscene.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/newyearevepainting.jpg

Two feet on either side, straddling the old year and the new, I step into the new year at 12:00 a.m. just as the last possible touch of the toe tip of my high-heeled boot lifts from the pavement of the old year to meet its mate in the new. This is the constant: keep on walking.

And don’t look back. Every year I resolve not to resolve but to keep up the good work of living. Like every year, it was the worst of times and the best of times–more or less. I had the good fortune of testing my mettle to its very painful depths in hardship and loss this year and found that I am stronger than I know and have so many who love me more than I shamefacedly have realized. I had the misfortune of resting in half sleep for days on end in the contentment that comes with ease and comfort. And the new year will bring more of the same.

I wish all of you who I am so grateful for and have enjoyed in my slapdash, sometimes frenetic attempt at a meaningful sharing of the fragments of my memory, thought and pleasures in this blog, a happily, merry, loving evening. See you tomorrow (I will tap softly on the keyboards in deference to your sensitive state in the morning ;))

Cheers!
The gaze

December 30, 2014

Picture Me Picturing You

Man is the only picture-making animal in the world. He alone of all the inhabitants of the earth has the capacity and passion for pictures . . . Poets, prophets, and reformers are all picture-makers, and this ability is the secret of their power and achievementsy: they see what ought to be by the reflection of what is, and endeavor to remove the contradiction.
Frederick Douglass

Edward Jean Steichen’s Gloria Swanson

In manipulating the presentation of information in a photographic negative, the Pictorialists injected their own sensibility into our perception of the image—thereby imbuing it with pictorial meaning.

We are all poets for what is a poet but an image maker?
We are all imagists.
We imagine we see in others what is, what will be and what we have always wanted.

The fiance envisions the perfect wife in spikes and aproned pearls,
nymphomaniacal lover and cookie-baking Cleaver mother.
No matter that she is not the one;
he sees those features in her nevertheless, more or less.

She can cook.
She likes children.
She looks great in heels.
He makes her fit the dream of his waking.

Who is a husband but a movie projector to the screen of the chosen one?
He depicts desire–figure framed photo of his ideal in ribbon and steel.
Meanwhile, she is his pocket and his purse, the hand up his sleeve making his jaw move.
Her world spins his above their heads.

What is a lover but someone who ‘shops the photo of her future mate,
rich in charms, clever to the touch,
sexy in her arms, ambitious enough for a sensitive side–
though she has never met him?

What is the unfaithful but a husband who paints his mistress the un-wife?
What is a poet but the mistress of make-me-love, hers for the taking?

Castell Photography on Vincent Serbin

I generally experiment with ways to artistically illustrate human thought. By human thought I mean- to present an image that expresses the way we perceive the world. The way our visual system assimilates information ( i.e. two eyes see two images and those two images are processed by a brain) and creates an interpretation of a moment. So in my work , when I juxtapose two images ,it reflects the way our visual system works but, in a sense I’m eliminating a function of our visual system by presenting two images instead of one. This I believe offers a fascinating way of reinterpreting the world.

December 28, 2014December 28, 2014

Still Life Flash of Pre-Sleep

Evan lies next to me, his pillowed head in the shadow of mine. I am reading, elbow-propped, turned away.
We are prone, bare, having just settled into bed for the night. Humid heat of a New England summer makes flannel impossible and silk torturously sticky. We sleep this way most nights four seasons long.
His body is serpent shape mirror of mine with inches of space between us, creating the comfort of a cooling air canal. We are art in symmetry.
His hand, open palmed, smooths across the contours of my hip, waist and shoulder, smearing heat like oil upon the line of curvy seas in the imagination of his hand–port to starboard to port again. The slow rhythm of his caress lulls my lids to half mast as the warmth and tingling skin sensors combine, dance me to lullaby languor. These are the moments.
I stop reading to softly lower my head to the pillow, ever so slowly, avoiding the slightest ripple in the water of his soliloquy wave. I hold my breath the whole way down.
Releasing, exhaling in measured silent wisps of warm air through my teeth and the pebble O my lips make, anchor hits bottom, the sync of his hypnotic oar undisturbed; it continues to brush the still of my anatomy’s ebb and flow.
I breathe just enough air to live, causing not so much as a flutter-by in the sheets. If I fill my lungs too deeply, selfishly, I will signal sleep’s onslaught, killer of this powerfully peaceful moment of breath, body and hand. No dream could be better than this. I own it–to the coral depths of fibrous memory.

credit: http://mystery756.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/hands-on-body-loving.jpg

	Damian Black on Our Roman Fathers
	Luke Edwards on Autophony: The sound of living…
	Shrut on Love is a Left Handed Lie
	Krista Mullen on Just Be
	Inthegazeoftheother on Remembering Boredom