If we had a keen vision and a feeling for all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.
(George Eliot, Middlemarch )

Salt

Found glass, large format negative subjected to salt water, moss and beeswax

Water book

Silver gelatin prints

Purification of Vital Wholes-- found glass, large format negative, beeswax and wire

"There was a star riding through clouds one night, & I said to the star, 'Consume me'."
 Virginia Woolf, The Waves

"Each sex has a relation to madness. Every desire has a relation to madness. But it would seem that one desire has been taken as wisdom, moderation, truth, leaving to the other sex the weight of a madness that cannot be acknowledged or accommodated."
— Luce Irigaray

FlowerEaters

Startled by the chime of metal against porcelain, the queen looks up from the book she is reading and notices a woman seated beside her.  The woman wears a necklace of gunmetal pearls and is leaning forward to collect the last of the soup from the bottom of a wide-mouthed white bowl.  Past seventy with a parched tumble of snowy hair,  her trembling hand releases the broth from the spoon back into the bowl before it reaches her lips.  She looks up and smiles apologetically at the younger woman who pretends not to notice.  The queen closes the small primer that fits neatly into the palm of her hand, and then her eyes, and allows the sensation of the soft velvet lining of the book between her fingers to lead her to a different place.

What she sees in the murky twilight behind her eyes is a room beside a garden. It appears to be something of a corridor rather than a room because of its elongated proportions.  Long white walls are rhythmically pierced by a row of high windows with opaque panes.  A light filled space without a view to the outside.  How she knows that there is a garden beyond those walls, she isn't sure. 

Perhaps it is the heavy smell of opened lilies, the pollen of which she can almost taste on her tongue.

 She recalls how her throat had all but closed up with the powdery emission.  A plain wooden table runs the length of the room and ten chairs are placed at an even distance from one another around the table. A single white bowl marks each setting.  It is clear that the room not been inhabited for a long time.  Cobwebs cling to the corners of the high walls and there is a thick layer of dust on the table.  She realizes it is most likely pollen from the lilies that she knew must be near.

She leans into the threshold of that space with hands on the door jam,  not knowing whether to flee or surge forward, when unexpectedly a group of women begin to file in through a door at the opposite end of the room.   The burst of activity punctures the hushed languor and the queen instinctively stands at attention as the women walk in procession in front of her.

 They are old women without garments to cover them, withered women whose flesh hangs on them like tattered curtains on their skeletal rods.  What the queen notices first, she remembers, are their fingers, which are long and loosely hinged by tendons that you could almost see beneath the sheath of skin; fingers fanned out, their hands project off the ends of their arms like dead starfish.  It is a display of bodies that are no longer supple and alive, but arid like something burnt by the sun.

 They appear tall and abnormally pale in the strange pallid light of the room and they have the air of a blustery orchard enduring a long cold season.  Trees wrapped in ragged silhouettes against a blank sky.

The presence of the lithe and lonely queen seems to go unnoticed by the women, and even though she feels the flush  of uncertainty, even fear,  she finds that she cannot move.  The muted stench of pollen in the room grows with intensity and the cumbersome air holds her firmly at the portal where she stands. For comfort, she begins to sing to herself a silent incantation, “there are nine women, nine…”

 As she muses over this tally, the women begin to seat themselves at the table, bowing their heads over the bowls. Without ceremony, or even a furtive glance between them, they begin to dip their fierce appendages into the white vessels.  Each pulls up a white flower, a tiny, exotic, lily-like flower, which promotes silvery layers of petals radiating from a blood red center. 

They bring the flowers up to their mouths and begin to chew.

 The queen parts her lips at the sight of the women eating flowers. They do not eat slowly or deliberately as one might expect an old woman to eat, instead they gobble them down, swallowing hard after each bite.  Their consumption of the petaled delicacies hastens with each mouthful and there appears to be a pleasurable desperation in the activity for them.  “Greedy women” the queen finds herself thinking, but she longed to know what the flowers tasted like. Were they salty or sweet? Dry like bread or quite viscous like a pudding?  Surely, they must be sweet like the small spun sugar confections her maids were forever temping her with.

 The queen feels her tongue move across her bottom lip and imagines there is a bit of nectar there.

The women begin to take the flowers into themselves in greater gulps and soon it is whole handfuls of the blossoms that they are forcing into their open mouths.   Rigidly they release themselves from their chairs so that they may place the flowers on one another's dry lips. What intrigues the queen most, who is beginning to feel dizzy in the dense air, is that the flowers keep bubbling up to the surface of the bowls, rising up toward the light so that they must be taken again and again without rest.  With increased haste, the women begin to cup both of their hands to retrieve them as they rise, and still, the flowers seethe over the sides of the bowl and spill out on to the table in cruel abundance.  Soon the table is laden with fallen blossoms.  Sepal, calyx and anther, they begin to quiver where they lay with a life force of their own sprouting great leafy vines from their ruby cores.  Tendrils rush down the table in a stream of verdigris as if a washwoman had thrown water from a bucket to clean the table after a raucous banquet.

The women, undaunted by the organic clamoring around them continue to pursue their sustenance with renewed hunger, indeed almost savagely.   Vines curl up around their faces and through their hair as they peer into the bowls. The queen moves a step closer, and as she does, she imagines for a moment that she can see her grandmother's face sitting across from her at the table of her youth. The old woman is seen the way the queen liked to remember her, smiling as the steam rose from her pot of tea and enveloped her in its warmth.  As she leans toward the table to greet this ghost, she realizes that she has lost her sight in what has become the vast wilderness of the room.

 A blizzard of light had consumed the women and their flowers. 

Without her eyes to distract her ears from their gift, she hears a distant fluttering within the luminous marrow of the memory, and she knows it to be a small buff colored moth throwing itself against the windowpane.

 

I have come to a still, but not a deep center,
A point outside the glittering current;
My eyes stare at the bottom of a river,
At the irregular stones, iridescent sandgrains,
My mind moves in more than one place,
In a country half-land, half-water.

I am renewed by death, thought of my death,
The dry scent of a dying garden in September,
The wind fanning the ash of a low fire.
What I love is near at hand,
Always, in earth and air. 

Theodore Roethke

Laquered white board, found photograph, neuropathology specimen, pharmacetical glass

Lacquered board, found photograph, neuropathology specimen, pharmaceutical glass

She now lies dormant

There will be no survivors.

The cloak she wears is one of brooding indigo clasped by a single withered rose at her throat like dried blood on a wound.  Bearing a face as pale and unforgiving as a February moon, she sits on a rock and toils at unfurling a tender white bud.  Without mercy or regret, she pries open the tightly laced petals, peels each one back and rips out the burgeoning stamen within. 

There is a gentle savagery in the act that is somehow satisfying to the queen.  

She is emptied; spent.  Observing her reflection in a dim pool she discovers that she has adopted the slump of a losing general after the war is over.  What she sees in herself is the husk of her garden’s former abundance.

Once wildly fecund, she now lies dormant. 

She doesn’t want to remember the faithful tide of campanula and violets, morning glories that had shrouded the gates in a vapor of cerulean.  She senses that she knows something about the way the tulips spread out their waxy fronds to capture the rain, but she does not want to possess such knowledge any longer.  The lilies, the lilies she wants to forget most of all; the heady festival those extravagant flowers dared to promise.  This sadness within her is as deep as the sea and it creates a pulsating in her chest like a song she can’t help humming. Her heart is a fluttering insect caught in a fist.

What she tries most not to remember is milky skin, a luminous veil beneath which radiated the heat of a newly formed star. There were moments meant to be sealed in amber and laden with the flower haunted breath of bees that she thought would be hers to savor again and again.  She now wonders whom it might have been who had come in the dusk to return her to a biography of spring.  Had she conjured this other who had come and filled the shade with a timorous light?  She is possessed by a simmering wind carrying the scent of so many quaking bouquets, a wind that had swallowed her voice as she pleaded with the river gods to not reclaim their maiden.

The queen, who had always been weary, had not felt so in the presence of the girl.  Something in their meeting had allowed her to feel mythic and extraordinary. With the girl, she was a woman with snakes in her hair; red and winding with silver wings.  She was the lone moth who had escaped the tyranny of the silk trade, satiated until her life waned on mulberry and sunlight. 

A primeval knowledge had glazed her lips like nectar stolen from the rarest of orchids.  Then it was washed away by a day in the sun, a change in the moon.. She throws the shredded flower to the ground and with eyes almost transparent in the light, she regards her world with a painful clarity.  She knows now that with plentitude follows loss and regret.  She fights an urge to wail and lament like the women of ancient tribes. Instead she silently longs for the desert, the weight of the sky pressing into the earth, the rhythm of the dunes, its constant erasure. 

She breathes into her hand leaving a drift of violet-tinged soot on her palm. I am so thirsty, she had said to her mother as she drank from the well.  She drank deeply and still it was not enough.  She dips her hand into the pool at her feet and watches as the dark water is resurrected as a trail of green fire.

la la

 I dreamt last night that I was invited to see an artwork on the dark side of the moon. My escort was  a tall woman with white hair who informed me that we would need to take a twinkle along.  A twinkle? I ask.  Yes, she responds, we will need to carry a twinkle leftover from the stars the night before to keep us warm,  to light the way.

Moon Cat

 The cat with his lunar moth markings and river eyes would pummel her with his wide white paws at her belly, her breasts, and her temples. He pushed and pulled at her with the force of infant and beast, demonstrating a delirium that both thrilled and comforted her. His claws stained with wandering would rhythmically tangle through her hair lulling her to sleep.

Each dawn after the cat had leapt out the window at the setting of the moon, her snowy coverlets and silken sheets of forty thousand silk moths would be marked with the imprint of his muddy paws.

The residue of hushed night roses.

She always denied having anything to do with the mess when the maids came to change the bedding. She claimed the cat was possibly a conjurer and had come in through the window to mark her with a dark spirit as she slumbered. But it was she, who would arise in the moonlight and open the window upon hearing his cries. Cradling him in her arms, she would bury her face in his fur, that smelled like dampness and woodsmoke and secret wild places, and she would transport him ceremoniously as one would a demigod to her chamber of whiteness.

Winged

So, it happened that the moth sang to the queen through this distant fluttering. It sang of soft white cocoons being cradled in the bosoms of women who lived in dry places. It sang of toil and earth and sadness. It sang of ceremony and extravagance. 

It sang of a dress.

A dress that must be made of the silk spun from the cocoons of forty thousand silkworms.  In that lyrical beating of those fragile wings, the queen learned how silk was made from the cocoons of moths that were never allowed to emerge from their transformative slumber.  It was the cocoons that were needed and not the moths.  As fat caterpillars, they ate their ambrosia of mulberry leaves to gain strength to spin. They spun their nests with an instinctual hope of liberation. To spin would gain them a freedom they had never known.  But they had been duped.

There would be moths she learned, that would escape one at a time and fly into her courtyard, bringing along residual threads of their silk cocoons attached to their wings.  Because the journey was long and the moth’s life short, they would die upon arrival.  The queen must be patient and observant. She was to collect the silk and the wings of the fallen moths and fashion a dress out of this detritus.

 A dress, the moth confides to her that would be able to fly.

 The queen looks for the fallen creatures as she ambles about her stone courtyard that is lined with an army of white tulips, rigid and blanched as a marble balustrade.  She scoops up the husks in her delicate palms and places them in a cut glass urn with a cobalt lid.   As if informed of their mission the moths eventually arrive in desperate light-winged fleets.  Soon her garden floor is covered with a dusting of gauzy moth wings and broken petals.  The queen commissions larger urns to contain the moths and their unraveled threads until her bounty expands to the point where it is necessary to store them in a cask of polished birch; a cask as tall as her own body.

She spins and sews and when at last she completes her dress of ivory silk, she ceremoniously hangs it on a hook by her window.  The dress dances in the breeze, occasionally tormenting her with the promise of departure, as it hops about, brushing its hem against the sill. But like a bird with a broken wing, it is animated but never able to take flight. 

She decides that perhaps the dress must be worn to fly.  She puts it on each morning returning it to its hook at night.  Soon the weight of the silk makes her stoop and she grows weary. Eschewing all other garments, it becomes the only dress she owns and she wears it every day.   She weaves a set of sheets with the remaining threads she gathers and embroiders upon them a banquet of pomegranates and meandering vines.  She makes a coverlet and pillows, which bloom abundantly with white needlework.  She adds a canopy then a pair of curtains bearing the gleam of moonlight. At night when the abandoned dress hangs suspended like a talisman at the window, she presses her head to her pillow and imagines she hears the moths vibrating inside the silken cases, chewing their way through the threads in a collective sigh.

 

 

Bone Stars

 When the queen was a child there was a span of time when she and her family had lived in a desert. Baptized by white light and pale sands, salty stars thrown across a cover of onyx, she sleeps beneath an awning of indigo and crimson. Years later as she raises her eyes in her forest kingdom the verdant canopy takes on the appearance of the congested galaxies of those desert nights. Gilded leaves dance like the monumental orbs that torched the nocturnal terrain of her youth. There is the flapping cloak of the tent scented with sage and myrrh, the stone taste of tepid water from the canteens as her mother lifts it to her lips.

In those chalky mornings before the sun presented its steaming daggers, she is allowed to wander at will in the dunes.  She shuffles along the fissures, slicing at the air between land and sky with her long angular body.

The child had been instructed in the ways of the nomads. She took readily to banishing mirages in the half light of dawn and twilight. She knew how to sniff out the difference between arid sand and sand that had known rain within the month. She observed what it meant when the camels twitched their tails right rather than left. She could identify which plants pointed in the direction of the oasis and which ones denied their allegiance to it.  And eventually she would come to understand that the sand, the stars, and the hot winds that blew before dawn were ignited by the same elemental force as her mother's tears.


During these walks she became a gatherer of bones.

Bones were the only objects to collect in this vast and empty place. Bones that lay white as promises, each one radiating its own sun. Bones shaped like things that had nothing to do the geography in which they had emerged. A small clavicle looked like a butterfly, a rib a petal from a lily.  The jawbone of a creature she could not name took on the shape of a sailing ship. Upon a shard of femur that seemed to her a petrified piece of moon, a bit of dry flesh remains. With thumb and forefinger she gently pries at the edges of what appears to be lingering connective tissue.
A scalding gust carries it away into the granular monochrome.


A shred of jerky to be swallowed by the living.

What if you slept? And what if, in your sleep, you went to heaven and there plucked a strange and beautiful flower? And what if, when you awoke, you had the flower in your hand? Ah, what then?

----Samuel Taylor Coleridge