Going Home

For more than twenty years, I have been returning to my earliest photographic subject, my family home. This is the house in Los Angeles where my grandmother lived and it is now where my mother lives. The images I’ve made here form an ongoing archive that details the everyday experience of a place in which I am at once an intimate and an observer. In order to produce these photographs, I transform black-and-white negatives into copper plate photogravures and print them by hand with printer’s ink on gampi – a translucent, handmade paper that is as thin and imperfect as human skin. The resulting works are as much objects as they are images. The varying colors of the ink and gampi add another dimension, shading familiar scenes in an unfamiliar light, heightening the emotions that imbue the spaces where we live.

Because I live in New York, I only visit the house a few times a year, meaning that I rely on memory to guide me in the realization of this work, allowing the colors of ink and paper I choose to restore my impressions of a particular moment, a certain arrangement of light and shadow, of presence and absence. These patterns extend over many years, until it becomes difficult to disentangle the present from the past, the room you’re standing in from the room you remember. This process reframes my own subjectivity. I see the world I once knew as only I can see it.

—Stephen Hilger

All works: photogravures on gampi, 25” x 21”, unique. From top to bottom: Bedroom (1998/2021), Lamp (1998/2008), Medicine Cabinet (1998/2008), Sleeping in the Lanai (1998/2003), Weeping Fig I (2020/2021), Fig Tree (1998/2003), Pool (1998/2003), Shield (2020/2021), Weeping Fig III (2020/2021), Weeping Fig II (1998/2021).

slipSCREEN 2018-2021

News, Tweets, selfies, searches, playlists, ads—Kahlil Robert Irving’s digital collages collect, compress, and archive segments of the infinite information onslaught. Like his sculptural and paper-based works, which integrate elements of replicated and real detritus found on the streets near his St. Louis home, his virtual assemblages cull together what Hito Steyerl calls “the trash that washes up on the digital economies’ shores” of his daily communication streams to create diaristic tableaux expressive of both the general excess of it all and the particularity of his lived experience. Here, the condition of the internet is no different from the condition of asphalt to the walker, in which so much of Irving’s artworks are symbolically embedded: both are unevenly shared infrastructures. The internet, in this sense, is yet another hybrid aggregate and mundane technology of control, legislating dis-connective routes through the local and the global.

While the collages above are presented to resemble a simulacrum of a digital scroll, most were created over the past four years for installations in real space, where they covered museum and gallery walls in St. Louis, Cincinnati, and New York. For those installations, visitors could physically navigate the works’ immersive scale and intimate details—enacting the process of seeking smaller points of connection amid an overwhelming milieu. From rage to elegy, nonsense to scholarship, the historical to the immediate, Irving’s imagery collapses the hierarchy of what’s swiped through and what’s zoomed in on. The McDowell’s arches from “Coming to America”; an obituary for the actor Chadwick Boseman; a YouTube clip of a James Baldwin interview. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X laying at rest near a photo of Derek Chauvin wearing a mask during his murder trial. A cellphone buried in asphalt echoing a thumbnail version of a collage buried within a larger collage. Numbers tallying “confirmed cases,” death tolls, unread messages, and lottery bids. A still from a virtual Art Basel event titled “Decolonizing Ethnography” displaying memes of arguing white men, one quoting Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang and another quoting Edward Said. Blue and white pottery, synthesizing legacies of culturally appropriated techniques, floating amid imagistic tumult. Screen shots of curatorial meetings; photos of the artist’s mother; photos of the artist himself. Ceramic decal sheets of red roses and gravel, blue skies and the starry cosmos, and the full spectrum of logos for Coca-Cola and Sprite. Screen shots of song tracks by Tracy Chapman, John Coltrane, or the Gap Band, suggesting an ongoing soundtrack.

These are collective stories inscribed on an intimate one and vice versa; whatever’s writ large has bearing on Irving as a person, artist and observer. In that sense, Irving’s work grapples with Black subjectivity as well as its collectivity—of where he lies within larger structures of identification. Each digital collage is perhaps a kind of aggregate meme that takes up Aria Dean’s point that “for blackness, the meme could be a way of further figuring an existence that spills over the bounds of the body, a homecoming into our homelessness.” Irving seems to arrive at this by way of poet Bernadette Mayer’s experimental journaling methods, or “emotional science project[s],” located in the everyday—finding not one story but a lyrical form in the machinery of the epic, indexical and algorithmic.

—Jessica Baran

At the Assembly of the Governing Bodies _(Red Tape)_

Beside your longing,


            someone takes the minutes
            in a peculiar shorthand

                   :oughts & shouldn’ts & wouldn’t wes.


A leader            then    a congregation
             —everyone familiar with the verse.


                                              They ask,
                                                                    What purpose is there in being
                                                                    disagreeable? Unamenable?


<Inquiries about the earnestness of your desire>
Someone produces a mirror, proper shoes

                                                                   Temper, temper, little drums


                                              Time to go out walking


                                                                   See—she has unoccupied herself
                                                                   Now she is       persuadable

Their word                                              They say,

                                                                   What to do when we are full of lead?
                                                                   When a waxiness has formed the medium of our
                                                                   hands?

                                                                   She must join in! Participate!

Your conscience is nothing but a little red tape.


Enter: the forest of the mind
where, lo, you are heavy and bereft.

                                                                   She has become
                                                                   an obstacle
                                                                   an irritant
                                                                   a salt

                                                                   And she desires
                                                                   nothing

And I desire nothing

                                                                   She thinks that there is
                                                                   nothing

But what if there is nothing

                                                                   So what if there is nothing

But what if there is nothing but
this accumulation of aches?

                                                                  Say we sent out rabbits—dozens into field and
                                                                   forest—
                                                                   and a low fox running—as if through fire

                                                                   Which does she try first to retrieve?


                                                                   Does she take the hunter with the gun?
Do I use myself against?
                                                                   Play for her the plaintive cry
                                                                   The great horned owl’s six-throated call

                                                                   Does she want to see the danger overtake?


In the vulnerability of daybreak
your hands are full of rabbits

                                                                   Her mouth is full of salt

                                                                   Do not wait for the field to form a clearing.
                                                                   Show us an animal in the absence.

Show me an animal that is without its violence.

Abstract

I feel I should come out blazing/ dead hounds bayingfrom beyond/ if memory serves/ each became unwell when addressed by an incorrect name/ (in a hunt, you know, they are not dogs they are hounds and they don’t bark, they bay/ Alexander even sat exquisitely at the piano forte upon his haunches/ glistening/ the horses stabled/ their anatomies secured in ink/ I became totally obsessed with down-to-earth catastrophes/ the mayor in a ditch/ the parson upside-down/ from a cantering stallion he’d only just met/ I was riding my horse through a flash flood/ her coat/ lightning fresh/ the electricity shatters an otherwise pastoral sky/ and is now a club kid’s neural pathway/ apace with sunrise/ much Venetian crystal is broken inside the box marked FRAGILE/ Dad made fire/ Mom slept at the hotel/ the rest of the party was drawing pictures of childhood/ clumsily with charcoal and vitriol/ down by the raging creek/ we had come to a point that had no home/ beyond rippled sinew/ I knew things you didn’t/ I didn’t know things too/ my sense of direction is lights out/ horses sleep standing/ I only sleep when I fly/ at the gong of midnight/ the bridal party monopolizes the elevator/ but my fox mask and riding silks throw them/ their gowns/ in gutters/ the gowns/ the gowns/ how they hang red/ exquisite as bloodbaths/ it’s not my wedding/ but the hunt belongs to me

A Long View of What Is Near: The Place-Based Work of _PSA:_

Every now and then, a piece of visual art strikes a writerly chord in me—speaks, in other words, to my practice or my concerns as a person interested in telling stories and sparking collective imagination. I experienced such a confluence of sensibility several months ago when three messages appeared in large letters affixed to a wire marquee on the Midtown exterior of the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. I watched the concrete facade and its messages change alongside the shift from spring to the sweltering heat of a St. Louis summer, as the days lengthened toward the solstice and a year spent making up for lost time quietly tipped past its halfway mark.

In March the wall read, In deep darkness we become invisible. Somehow, we find each other and feel our way through. Written by artist Jen Everett, the text probed what life means in “this time,” particularly our present moment, when all of us, as a fragmented collective, are learning at uneven rates to restore ourselves and our loved ones, or still (forever) wading through loss and mourning and the daily tasks of survival, and examined the gnarly epistemological issues dredged up from solitude (hers, ours).

In May the message changed, and the wall now read, We are made to see beyond this ocean around us - Stvoreni smo da vidimo dalje od okeana što naš okružuje. This aphorism’s author, artist Aïda Hasanović, uses the idea, expressed in both English and Bosnian, of seeing beyond an ocean of solitude and insularity as a metaphor for overcoming our current political and social environment. As a refugee of the Bosnian Genocide, Hasanović, like many others from her country, emigrated to St. Louis, which has the largest Bosnian population outside of Bosnia itself, and this aphorism offers the metaphor through which she negotiates her own crossing of physical borders and what she has now identified as a need to deconstruct the notions of difference put forth by the gatekeepers of language and belonging.

In June, the previous message was again replaced. I close my eyes and take a deep breath — I am filled with the wisdom of my ancestors: these words come from the artist and wellness practitioner Simiya Sudduth, who made the piece as both an affirmation and invitation, and as a welcome break from the disempowering structures of daily life. This is a reminder that, entrenched as we are in the sediments of oppression and neglect, the act of self-care and a connection to ancestral knowledge is not only essential to individuals’ physical, mental, and spiritual health but also to collective liberation.

The three text installations were part of the museum's group exhibition Stories of Resistance and organized by PSA:—a St. Louis-based artist duo consisting of the multimedia installation artist Marina Peng and the designer and illustrator Shannon Levin. Originating in 2019, PSA: has presented the majority of its projects on the side of a brick building at 2222 Chippewa Street, in the Marine Villa neighborhood, one of several in St. Louis to have been shaped by disinvestment and the departure of many of its residents. Peng and Levin's project is interdisciplinary in nature, and local writers with robust practices who have added their words to the 2222 Chippewa building include the poets Jacqui Germaine, Joss Barton, and El Williams III. The rotating text installations PSA:—which have also included a billboard in North St. Louis—use the familiar framework of a public service announcement to call attention to themselves in order to warn of threats to physical safety, to address the emotionally urgent questions of what it means to serve a public and to facilitate collective healing—in short, to create public announcements that engender, in place of fear and vigilance, feelings of safety and refuge. In initiating this project, Peng and Levin ask, “What is it that the people need to hear?” Moreover, they ask how to make art that is sustainable and gives a platform specifically to amplify underrepresented voices rather than the artist-organizers themselves.

Ideas about collective healing and restoration are not new to St. Louis. In the early 2000s, an urban renewal effort known as the Grand Center Project endeavored to create a “cultural renaissance” in Midtown by restoring historic buildings and filling the empty space left behind by white flight and dispossessive reconstruction dating back to the 1950s. But PSA: takes a community-centered approach by commissioning local artists to speak to the needs of underrepresented groups here and now. PSA: is oriented toward the local and the specific, not only in who they choose to engage, and in their aesthetic choice to occupy the traditional imagery of St. Louis’s visual vernacular (the faded ghost signs, the red brick, the hand-painted street murals), but also where in the city they situate their installations and, by extension, who they are identifying as their “public.” Geographically, CAM and Grand Center sit just south of what is known as the Delmar Divide, a single long-running thoroughfare that splits the city into two distinct wealth and racial sectors. PSA: directs its messages—written predominantly by artists of color—toward the Northside, such that they are visible to a historically Black neighborhood otherwise estranged from the Grand Center development, which does not extend above Delmar Boulevard.

It also occurs to me that vision is central to all three of the public service announcements quoted above. These aphorisms about vision range from metaphors of visionary seeing to metaphors of unseeing. Closing one’s eyes, as in Sudduth’s case, is a metaphor for a healing retreat into one’s intuition. In Everett’s case, becoming invisible or losing the sensation of sight actually opens up other senses, such as tactility, as a means of knowing one another. In Hasanović’s piece, there is even a play on the word “made” (made as in created, which is what the Bosnian word stvoreni translates to, but also in English made as in implored to, necessitated to), such that vision—specifically far-sighted vision—is interlaced with a religious or metaphysical imperative. The double-edged power of vision is evident at PSA:’s other locations as well. For example, the artist Jessie Donovan’s billboard on McCausland Avenue also takes up the theme of sight, pointing out the gaps in which vision fails to produce intersubjective understanding:

Here, There, and Nowhere: Cynthia Arrieu-King's _The Betweens_

The Betweens, by Cynthia Arrieu-King (Noemi Press, 2021)

It shouldn’t feel surprising that a work called The Betweens would exist in a space amid genres—between poetry and prose, personal history and memoir—yet Cynthia Arrieu-King’s new book endlessly surprises in its negotiation between the lived and the remembered, between the recounting of direct event and the sense that an event has left along the way. Arrieu-King’s book gives us more than either the recollection of experience or the derivation of experience compressed into verse. Jumping from fragments of encounters to conversations and impressions, this autobiographical work moves beyond the urge to tell us everything that happened in the author’s life, but rather how the things that happened shaped the person and the writer she has become. In her acknowledgments, Arrieu-King notes how some of The Betweens came into being within the manuscript of her first book of poems, People Are Tiny in Paintings of China, and this gives us insight into another way this work exists between spaces—in this case, the gaps within the writer’s processing of her own memories. Those two books now feel like shadow texts to each other, in which a line from the former as crisp as “I was down in the hole collecting rain” becomes another lens through which to read the larger narrative threads now brought together. What sets The Betweens apart is how personal it is about both the nebulous space in which Arrieu-King has always lived, rooted in her identity and upbringing, and a broadly shared BIPOC space through which her life runs.

The Betweens presents the experience of so many of us in this New World of ours that it’s difficult not to turn this review into a litany of one’s own experiences. My brother and I grew up in suburban Atlanta, the kids with the funny names with the funny religion and the parents who had accents. What the book captures so well is the dual sense of not belonging: our original awareness that one does not quite belong here in America, but also our growing recognition as we get older that one does not belong anywhere else either, certainly not in the Old World, where one remains the American Cousin—we had “American” stamped on our foreheads, even among family, my dad would say. All that can be said about this acute feeling is: This is why we do what we do, this is why we not only gravitate to the exploration of language and culture and memory, but also to one another, other misfits in this broad cultural experiment. Arrieu-King gives us in pinpoint accuracy not a poetics statement but an operating system, a way of understanding how we have come to be who we are. The book opens in a place familiar to me:

“I noticed that Chinese people didn’t think of me as Chinese. I told my dad how they’d say I wasn’t “a real Chinese.” I felt stuck in a gray area between this reaction and the reaction—to my playing piano, to good grades, to being quiet—that I was very Asian. My mom and dad kept neutral faces as I told this story and said not to say anything about it, to be quiet.”

We learn to shut up about ourselves, to find that space to blend in so no one notices us. It’s an impossible task, ultimately, because we are betrayed by our skin and by our names, shown for who we are to a world that doesn’t understand what we are. This can be especially painful at a time when we don’t even really understand what we are ourselves. When we don’t fit a stereotype, it’s impossible to get along. When we do—I don’t know. We’re always trapped. 

The lessons are direct: You don’t out yourself as other, as best as possible. You laugh along at a joke, you do as asked in the hopes of being just another person on a beach or in a school. Be one of the good ones and they won’t turn against you, the “perceived model minority,” she writes. But the journey in Arrieu-King’s work is not only her own, but also that of her family, which finds itself in between spaces too, within their individual struggles in an unfamiliar place, their collective struggles as a family and even their struggles with one another. Her brother becomes a sheriff, his own attempt at joining the existing power structure of the society we have adopted. Similarly, the silence of the parents in response to the racism their child faces, the urging to remain silent, is ingrained deeply, cultivated because silence is what allows  us to survive our otherness: “not to say anything about it, to be quiet, let it ride, not to let my upset show.” It is necessary, the parents believe. For me, this might be the most interesting thread through the work, in attempting to understand my own parents and their experiences, as well as that of my older brother as a child taken to a new country, all of them leaving a home in an attempt to find a new one, to create a new space for themselves, but inevitably finding the empty spaces between spaces. I remember a particular day in which I was arguing with the boy down the street about religion and my parents later told me to just not say anything at all. We learn, in some ways, to shut up about ourselves as a reminder that we are nowhere at all.

Arrieu-King’s writing about her father makes me wonder too “if this is what my father ever felt for escaping to the United States.” There was not only guilt in our home over having left others behind, wavering between an act of necessity and an act of abandonment. Back “home,” their parents were aging, their siblings who hoped to get their own children across the ocean were slowly growing disappointed or even angry over the years. Sometimes what Arrieu-King refers to as an escape felt like more to me like a curse, a failed obligation to others. Throughout The Betweens, this too seems to weigh heavily on her father, a sense that one should always act in certain ways, to be working and thinking toward the future and not wasting time. It is a heavy burden for a child, but one that Arrieu-King, while struggling with, also comes to understand better. It is not hard to see why one’s parents loom large in a personal work such as this, a lost parent even more heavily. The lessons of the parents resonate profoundly, their realizations speaking not only to us as readers, but also as children.

Time throughout The Betweens seems jumbled, moving abruptly from one period to another, but the progression of vignettes, memories, and observations also feels incredibly linear, the mind wandering naturally through a personal and collective history in such a way that each new moment seems the result of all the ones that came before it. Arrieu-King avoids the traps of revelation, displaying a control in her writing that does not force any sort of surprise or grand epiphany by the end. She evokes the way that life is rarely punctuated by large epiphanies, but rather tiny ones throughout, built on the understandings of the past: 

“Nothing will teach you to wear a poker face faster than having a very dark sense of humor or being surrounded by co-workers who are kind, good, generous, and correct you, and explain to you each time you make a dark joke, how that isn’t fair … Always looking for what will keep you from ruin.”

While each stanza (or paragraph) of the book gives us a brief glimpse of time, an isolated moment, there is also the recognition of how each of those moments is its own realization, its own microgesture in the grand experience. We are left with the insistent sense that Arrieu-King has not only given voice to the in-between spaces of her experience, but also filled those places of silence with her speech.

The Galleries

New York City, 2021

I've been trying to learn from Agnes Martin1. She made big, abstract paintings, but without the drippy athletics associated with her abstract-expressionist milieu. So, I've been trying to learn: the not-knowing of it, the strands of longing and pain forming waves of oceanic peace, with a single human person as a (slightly reluctant) point of contact between heaven and earth.

The drawings of Susan Te Kahurangi King2 are (I think) about the parts of the body that are touched, or that want to be touched. The human body caught-up in print and broadcast media, melding with a cartoon body, or the various cartoons that inform our own sense of it, of what it is to have a body at all. There's Bugs Bunny at his most lascivious, and Donald Duck at his most agitated, and distended goblins from someone's vision of Hell.

Judith Scott's3 bundle sculptures are eternal, because they beckon to all these aspects of remembered life that can't be recorded otherwise. It's a mix of sensation and love, weights once held close to the body. There is so much value now in knowing that something existed in space and was touched by a human being, in knowing that it contributed in some instrumental way—witness, vessel, conductor—to an act of love.

I guess I've been thinking about touch a lot, and I've been really drawn to textures and surfaces lately; maybe it's somewhat of a pandemic thing: getting back to basics, focusing on what you can feel, smell, and taste. Martin Wong's4 paintings of the 1980s Lower East Side seem to happen in a world where the borders—between New York City and any individual resident—have dissipated into meaninglessness: the city like a winter coat, wrapping tightly around one's shoulders.

While Jay DeFeo5 was painting 'The Rose' (1958–1966)—a sort of celestial relief sculpture in oil and crushed stone—her studio space got coated in a skin-like accretion of white paint, as if this San Francisco apartment was a part of the artwork. We know this because, when she was evicted from the space, she had to move the 2,300-pound painting elsewhere, and the move was documented by Defeo's friend Bruce Conner6 in his 1967 film 'The White Rose.' We see 'The Rose' sitting snugly in an apartment alcove, with soft sunlight at its edges, and in Conner's inky 16mm—this is the painting in its most beautiful possible state, it has to be. We also see 'The Rose' being arduously lifted onto a truck, and hauled away by a group of laborers. So is it a vessel of the Heavenly sublime, or an ungainly and burdensome weight, or both? It's both.

Now I'd like to explain some details of a Douglas Huebler7 piece, because I really like it, and I don't think it's very easy to find online. The piece is 'Black Plane #2 (Study)' (1979), and it's comprised of two sheets of paper in a frame. The paper on the right is all black (I think it's covered in ink); the paper on the left says (typewritten):

TO THE EXTENT THAT THESE WORDS, AND THE
BLACK PLANE REPRESENTED AT THE RIGHT ARE

MOTIONLESS,

          COLORLESS,

                    AND FULLY FRONTAL

TO THE PLANE OF THIS SURFACE, THEY ARE
PHENOMENALLY SIMILAR, BUT, IF CONSIDERED

ONTOLOGICALLY

THEY SHARE NO COMMON SENSE OF PURPOSE;
TRUE TO TYPE, THE WORDS ENGAGE IN A
COMBINED EFFORT TO FABRICATE MEANING
WHILE THE BLACK PLANE SIMPLY PRESENTS
ITSELF, SELF SUFFICIENT AND NATURAL,

SUBLIMELY INDIFFERENT

                    TO CULTURAL AMBITION

A lot of conceptual art of the '60s and '70s seemed to prod at limits—the limits of language, of representation, of knowledge—and one of the strange things about looking at it now, is realizing that we have not (and will never have, maybe?) expanded or transformed these limits in the past 50 years, not really. The particular forms of messaging are rigidly locked in time, though, and now part of the struggle for these works is to fight off a sense of quaintness, a generational fissure that settles like dust.

I was struck by the sense of rarity in Laura Aguilar's8 videos. Aguilar is remembered mainly as a photographer, but she made some remarkable video art in the mid-'90s: in blurry, desaturated footage, we see Aguilar herself speaking plaintively and generously about deep depression and suicide. I've seen a lot of videos in my life, but very few like this, and why is that? Aren't there bitter YouTube apologies, manic TikTok confessionals, desperate video/text messages, that sort of thing? There must be, but I don't see them, because they're not meant for me. Aguilar's videos feel raw and honest, and also they were made as art, which eventually means that I can see them and write about them. One of the irreducible elements of an artwork is the extent to which it was chosen to be shared with the outside world; it's a matter of intention and also of directionality. As Agnes Martin wrote, "There are two endless directions. In and out."

Lucy Raven's9 'Casters X-2 + X-3' (2021) is comprised of four bright spotlights attached to robotic apparatus; I saw it in a large, formerly industrial gallery space, where the rings of light moved slowly over patchy brick walls and worn wooden ceilings. And you know, when you think about it, electric light is a pretty new invention (by the time Thomas Edison patented incandescent bulbs, the world already had photography, telephones, stainless steel, and nitroglycerin). And I think that collectively we're still not over it; I'm definitely not. These widely available machines that allow us to speak in a language otherwise reserved for destructive gods: surely this must have been a sharp, schismatic break, right? The people who lived before electric light, and the people living in the years after. And now we have "light pollution," you see. We make so much light that it becomes, effectively, poisonous.

I was alone when I saw Charles Atlas's10 'Angel Dust' (2021) (well, except for the gallery attendant, who had to turn it on for me), and it was almost like I dreamt the whole thing. It's a specially designed video projection onto a sandstone pleasure pavilion façade from early 19th-century India (part of a series of shows in which different artists worked with this odd, lovely piece of architecture). The arcs and corners of the façade were lit up in salaciously tacky colors, greens and purples straight off of the internet, with white-light borders drawn around the structure's large, empty windows. It was like two friends drunkenly smiling at each other from across the bar: a shared purpose, not harmful but somewhat mischievous, pleasure-seeking, unashamedly superficial, unmistakably human.

Again, I'm not sure how much of this is the pandemic, but when I think about art I saw in 2021, I remember a lot of pretty lights. Tacita Dean's11 16mm footage of a golden, glowing moon rising silently over a dark landscape. An-My Lê's12 tender, delicate black-and-white photos of bombs raining down on a U.S. Marine training ground. Ching Ho Cheng's13 exquisitely flat gouache paintings of sunlight through windows.

I also remember some vivid colors. Derek Jarman's14 feature-film masterpiece 'Blue' (1993) projected onto a large gallery wall, so that the space is given to the film's one and only image: a full, ponderous shade of blue. The honey-butter-pancake yellows and oranges of a sun-drenched erotic-art studio, as imagined in recent paintings by Lisa Yuskavage.15 The sickly-sweet pinks and blues of Wong Ping's digital animations.16 The shimmering, opaque yellow of a Rachel Whiteread cast-resin sculpture.17

I remember the pinkish-reds of Carolyn Lazard's18 video installation 'Red' (2021); I actually didn't like this piece at first, but it's different when I think about it now. For 'Red,' Lazard rubbed her finger back-and-forth over a smartphone camera, creating a pink-red-pink strobe effect; in the adjoining room, a separate video shows warning text when the strobe is on, and gives countdowns to when the strobe will start or stop. It's a piece that moves in several directions at once, and in all cases it moves with tension and conflict: the standardized motions of a mechanical "effect" and the faltering movements of a human hand; the social good of warning labels and the impish urge to create something dangerous for the hell of it; the great powers of media and the sad limits of language. And in my memory, too, there are conflicts: a piece of art that I didn't like before, but which I like now; a deeply complex artwork, which I remember mainly as a simple room full of red light.

Etel Adnan's19 landscape paintings seem to have very little conflict. They're complex, but no part disagrees with any other part: there's a sense of holistic unity, maybe best seen in her small paintings of palpitating, colorful suns. The idea of everything-in-its-right-place has a lot of reactionary potential, but the order here is not due to an authoritarian impulse, but instead to some gentle process of nature and time. Things just belong where they do.

I had thought that Jesse Murry's20 landscape paintings were full of conflict, but now I think it's probably more accurate to say that they've been witness to conflict. It's as if a terrible storm had been frozen in earth, like a fossil. There's a harsh materiality throughout—you can see the oil and the grit, you can make out every brushstroke—but isn't that just nature at work? It's as if each painting contains its own tiny hurricane.

Deana Lawson's21 'Boombox' (2020) is a hologram—not a regular photograph—and it's so important that it is. The piece shows a 1990s (I think) stereo system, a bit beat-up but it probably still works. The components seem to be stuck together with packing tape, and there are four price tags pasted haphazardly onto the speakers. Each of these details feels important, because the whole thing—the whole object—feels important. It's a physical site where music, touch, money, community, age, and time all have a presence, and the hologram has its own weird presence, seeming to jut out into the space of the gallery. You sense that everything—everything important—passed through this object: love and tenderness, fear and rage, gossip and art, and now you're walking in its light, taking up its space. You're passing through it, too.

---

1	Agnes Martin: The Distillation of Color; Pace, May–June 2021
2	Parallel Phenomena: Works on Paper by Carroll Dunham, Susan Te Kahurangi King, Gladys Nilsson and Peter Saul; Andrew Edlin, May–July 2021
3	Super-Rough; presented by the Outsider Art Fair, June 2021
4	Martin Wong & Aaron Gilbert: 1981-2021; P.P.O.W., April–May 2021
5	Bruce Conner & Jay DeFeo: (“we are not what we seem”); Paula Cooper, September–October 2021
6	Bruce Conner & Jay DeFeo: (“we are not what we seem”); Paula Cooper, September–October 2021
7	Douglas Huebler, Sherrie Levine, Walid Raad: No More Than Three Other Times; Paula Cooper, April–June 2021
8	Laura Aguilar: Show and Tell; Leslie-Lohman Museum, February–June 2021
9	Lucy Raven; Dia, April–December 2021
10	The Pleasure Pavilion: A series of installations; Luhring Augustine, September 2020–July 2021
11	Tacita Dean: The Dante Project · One Hundred and Fifty Years of Painting · Pan Amicus · Significant Form · Monet Hates Me; Marian Goodman, September–October 2021
12	An-My Lê: đô-mi-nô; Marian Goodman, June–August 2021
13	Ching Ho Cheng (part of More Life); David Zwirner, September–October 2021
14	Derek Jarman (part of More Life); David Zwirner, June–August 2021
15	Lisa Yuskavage: New Paintings; David Zwirner, September–October 2021
16	Wong Ping: Your Silent Neighbor; New Museum, June–October, 2021
17	The Pleasure Pavilion: A series of installations; Luhring Augustine, September 2020–July 2021
18	Greater New York; PS1, October 2021–April 2022
19	Etel Adnan: Light’s New Measure; Guggenheim, October 2021–January 2022
20	Jesse Murry: Rising (part of More Life); David Zwirner, September–October 2021
21	Deana Lawson; Sikkema Jenkins & Co., May–June 2021

Estate

Oranges were unknown in Gaul for a thousand years. Stories of the fruit’s sweetness and thread-like delicacy were first spoken from the lips of farmers coming back to Paris and the lowlands after the crusades, ordinary plowmen-turned-soldiers returning to their farms, scrawny from hunger, their faces dusty with powdered blood. They described the miraculous reviving power of a beautiful, perfectly dimpled, sun-bright fruit, plucked from city boughs on the streets of Jerusalem.

After the more liberal trading of the Valois dynasty (the 15th century), oranges were bartered across Iberia and presented as balmy gifts to the French court. The Sun King—Louis XIV himself—grew particularly enamored. This sugared flesh, he wrote to his minister of trade, this pungently burned, acidic scent, it is medicine to me. He liked devouring one in twenty seconds, whole, in lieu of a post-supper flambé, firm in his newfound belief that the hide and seeds aided good digestion. When stocks ran low, he ordered his naval officers to scour the Mediterranean coasts for trees he might uproot, buds he might steal. He required the kitchen staff to build pyramids on tables for breakfast. He pressed juice from a pestle and called it sang de dieu. Even the dyed color of the sun famously emblazoned on Louis’s personal standards changed from a Vulcan red to a warmer, genteel orange lumière. Then suddenly, halfway through his reign, Louis began planning an orange grove that might serve to anchor his father’s neglected, half-finished estate in the countryside, roughly fifteen miles from Paris, beside the village parish of Versailles. My new grove, he told Queen Maria, shall be a prayer to posterity. He envisioned the place as a national sanctuary, open to ordinary Gallic folk, Frenchmen who shared his sentimental streak.

The first wobbly saplings he tended himself, standing nude in the royal baths and gardening in tubs of soap-gray water, using barber’s shears to clip withering or brown leaves, which fell to the foam and floated between his knees. When the country estate was nearing completion Louis personally transferred his saplings to the country, handing them to Mansart, his garden architect (calling them mon heritage). Château de Versailles grew up around the orange trees, in a manner of speaking.

Louis often swore he smelled them upon waking, the back rim of his tongue slavering. When seated on the throne and dressed for official business, he often gazed into his empty hands and felt an imaginary heft “like a young breast.” He invented an outdoor game with several of his mistresses, seeing who could toss an orange highest into a cracked blue sky, the color contrast producing an almost religious ecstasy, which led to the second half of this game, devouring oranges by the segment during sexual play. Indeed, ripening oranges created a rather exuberant frisson in his majesty. On nature walks in his young grove he enjoyed nothing more than to hike his breeches and mount the first strong bough he could find, squeezing it between his thighs and inhaling the sweetness layering the air. His beloved oranges would perfume the years Louis suspected he had left upon this earth—such was the point. The trees would write his signature upon the land, and persist in growing long after he passed away.

He was half-right. Even as late as 1920, eight of the Sun King’s original, personally planted trees still enjoyed robust health. Eight that had been pampered as saplings in those royal tubs, eight sunk into the loose French soil by Mansart who knew a thing or two about longevity in fruit planting. Eight to signify an eternally youthful, ever-replenishing balance of the robust Gallic monarchy. Eight that grew to deep yield and flowering shade by the time Louis XIV, at the curtain of his 72-year reign, laid his aged body upon tissue-thin sheets of Giza cotton and breathed his last. Eight trees: seven more than the number of his grandchildren who survived the Terror.

Daily Affirmations

In the spring of 1975, a stucco storefront opened in Clearwater, Florida. Locals had noticed a new kind of arcade-style commercial property realtors had taken to calling a “strip” shopping mall, with units sunk into the same concrete mold in the style of a gallery. A tax services company sat on one side and a bail-bondsman on the other. Between them a sign was hung bearing the words UNITED CHURCHES OF FLORIDA.

There was no legitimate company by that name, and no such confederation. The name had been chosen by the storefront’s owner especially for its blandness, as he had private affairs to conduct. Who, he told his companions, would bother knocking on that door?

On paper, the founder of United Churches of Florida was a pulp science-fiction writer and former Army brat from Tilden, Nebraska named Lafayette Ronald Hubbard. For the past twelve years he had been circumnavigating the globe on a sixty-foot pleasure vessel he’d christened the Apollo, fleeing multiple charges of tax evasion. He’d been expelled from over twenty seaports along with a sizable cabal, loyal adherents of a program of behavioral philosophy Hubbard created some years ago, during a period of intense novel-writing—he’d previously specialized in three-page stories set on distant planets—and which Hubbard had christened Scientology.

Unbeknownst to his various disciples, who considered Hubbard an authentic, possibly alien genius, the CIA had begun tracking the Apollo after hearing a bizarre tip on ship-to-ship radio traffic that Hubbard was serving as a clandestine agent. More than this, said the anonymous report, he had been part of the agency’s most important employ, a high-level black-operations officer with top clearance, having started his service during the dark, early years of the agency, in the tumult following World War II.

Hubbard had indeed served in the U.S. Navy, that much was clear, for naval records reflected his service, but that was all. The agency had uncovered evidence of someone having attempted to falsify his service records by pumping them up to reflect a more battle-scarred experience. This lone detail raised a flag, for it was a typical black-operations cover. Another flag: no one at the agency from those years had been able to either confirm or disprove Hubbard’s service. Not a single agent recalled ever working with, speaking to, or meeting him face to face. And Hubbard was, to put it mildly, memorable: a wheezing, wispily-red-haired, alopecia-stricken, halitosis-and-dandruff-suffering, balding toad of a pale white male with a trick back and a twitchy, giggling manner, along with a mouth of rotten teeth and a dismaying sex addiction made all doubly desperate by his conviction that women found him repellent. Such a persona caused agency personnel to speculate Hubbard’s identity had to be an elaborate cover, he had to have worked black-ops, by God, he just had to be one of the anonymous legends. He was put under surveillance by active maritime agents. After eight weeks of research and infiltration, they unveiled a much simpler story, and the CIA dropped pursuit. The inter-agency report, shared with European Interpol as well as the FBI, concluded:

[Hubbard] is a shrewd businessman who has parlayed ‘religion’ into a multi-million-dollar business by taking advantage of that portion of society prone to fall for such gimmicks

Enfeebled in body by his late sixties, Hubbard was also powerfully homesick; he longed to spend his autumn years living in a cabin in the Rocky Mountains. Lawyers found an opening: if “Scientology” could establish a branch not in Colorado but in Florida, a state known for its lax laws concerning the legitimacy of any such enterprises, its leader would be permitted entry as a type of diplomat, a credentialed representative of that religion’s overseas mission, no matter how many taxes he had personally evaded. Scientology moved in and established a beachhead in the Clearwater strip mall.

It was all for naught; Hubbard was dying.

With new converts coming onto the Apollo every week to wish the prophet well, Hubbard could no longer hide in his quarters, claiming that he could only receive visions when completely left alone, recording the holy scripture of those alien forefathers who had chosen him as their vessel. His physical decline was obvious, and yet a majority of his followers were convinced the man was immortal. Confused, they argued among themselves, claiming his poor health was not merely evidence of a martyr-like devotion to the faith but could also embody Docetism (the belief that the messiah appeared in a sickly form on earth, while a true immortal form thrived in outer space). A few disillusioned followers decided that Hubbard’s physical deterioration flatly contradicted his many bizarre health claims, which he had been trying to sell for more years than he’d been writing science fiction—for example, that bouts of intense monastic concentration could defeat shingles. On his deathbed, everyone noticed, Hubbard was covered in shingles.

L. Ron Hubbard died of organ failure in the winter of 1986, aged seventy-four. Personal effects in his private safe amounted to over three thousand legal pads obsessively scribbled over, a life’s work dating back to his time as a college student and up through the years riding a desk and pushing pencils for the U.S. Navy, onto his early drafts as a deadline writer, his failed salesman gigs, his failed marriages. Strangely, to those who found the journals, no alien visits were recorded. There was no religious talk, no outer space visions, no fantasy. The jottings were normal if not eye-crossingly dull. Pages overflowed with fragments of daily observations, descriptions of weather and lunches, benefactor names he told himself to remember, mathematical computations of monthly budgets, some grocery lists, novel and story ideas, but mostly, thousands of one-line self-affirmations. On every single page, at least two or three personal asides and exhortations had been jotted down: they were Hubbard’s notes to persist, to endure, and to believe. Scientology’s creator composed his own destiny this way, envisioning if not willing success, secure in the privacy of his own modest hopes.

You are not repellent to women.
Your back is fine.
You do not need to invent fictions to impress people.

His Way

Near the end of 2019, two former Iraqi archaeologists were killed by mortar shelling in the suburb of Babylon, having joined ISIS in the wake of the most recent civil war that erupted between Shia sects in a turbulent area south of the capital, some fifteen years after the American invasion and the fall of Saddam Hussein. Their journey to martyrdom had begun that first year, in fact, on a certain afternoon when a forty-foot statue of Saddam was toppled and yanked from its base in Firdos Square, Baghdad.

On April 9, 2003, the Americans had reached the capital city at last. Iraqis were discovering that the fearsome dictator had fled, Baathists were being rounded up and jailed, and the streets were rejoicing.

George W. Bush, the American president himself, magically appeared on television screens within that same hour—his smiling face broadcast in cafés, car garages, shopping malls—with a message meant to reassure Iraqis of his personal respect and admiration for them, and how he knew in his heart that Iraqis were a good and gifted and peaceful people, for theirs was a country with a long dignified history. The nightmare of Saddam, he said, will soon be over.

During the roughly four minutes it took to broadcast Bush’s recorded message, the National Museum in Baghdad was looted by a mob. Papyrus leaves featuring the first-ever recorded writing, jewelry from Cyrus the Great, Sasanian arabesques, and over 11,000 cylinder seals of long-gone empires all vanished into the gray and black markets, never to be seen again. Dozens of Iraqi archaeologists fearful of such an eventuality had, just prior to invasion, provided coordinates of the National Museum to coalition forces, along with several dozen other Iraqi cultural landmarks for protection, though only the Central Bank in Baghdad wound up securely safeguarded.

Relic-looting continued throughout museums, civic buildings, and residences across the country for several months. Archeologists could see, in real time, actual theft of priceless antiquities through the very same cameras filming American Marines bringing freedom to Iraqis, and then standing by while dazed citizens were interviewed about what freedom meant to them. Yet another irreplaceable relic would be captured, on camera, hoisted on a looter’s back and hauled over the remains of a house in rubble, a smashed window, a blasted door. One archaeologist wept while telling the BBC that what they were witnessing could only be comparable to the Mongol invasion of Baghdad in 1258.

Back on April 9, an American corporal serving with the 4th Marines named Edward Chin found himself at the base of a statue of Saddam Hussein. It was an accident of timing: he happened to be picking his nose at the statue’s base waiting for orders when his higher-ups excitedly said that Fox News cameras had made it to the square, and certain Iraqi men in the crowd, along with Chin’s fellow Marines, had struck up a conversation about the historical import of the scene they knew would soon unfold. The statue was coming down. Simply due to Chin’s location, the crowd began egging him on. Using a rope, he climbed the statue. “Giving insult” man to man, as a cultural tradition, held an almost otherworldly power for Iraqis, or so Chin had discovered during his time in country. After scaling up to Saddam’s enormous face he did not know exactly what to do, but he pulled from his gear an American flag. Gleefully, Chin unfurled it, flapping across Hussein’s face.

All cheering stopped.

Chin later told an interviewer on Good Morning America that he’d been “sort of surprised” by the silence. He walked among stunned locals in his battle gear, gamely trying to smile, giving thumbs-up to scared and confused passers-by, assuring those who frowned at him that he only meant to insult Saddam, only Saddam and not regular Iraqis, and he apologized if that was the case. Anyway it wasn’t up there very long. For hours he continued to explain himself. He meant no harm.  He was a passionate patriotic guy like President Bush, remember Bush, on the TV? Saying he personally admired Iraqis? That was just his way, Chin’s way, of taking part in history.

Saddam Hussein’s way had been to study and copy Joseph Stalin’s grip on the imagination and iconography of an entire people. Ever since capturing the presidency in 1979, Saddam had issued thousands of orders for the construction of his own likeness wherever he could, swapping ancient faces with his own face, replacing famous scenes of Saladin, Nebuchadnezzar, and even Mohammed with scenes featuring Saddam. At the start of the invasion, when Saddam’s Republican Palace had been overrun by American troops, the commander waited several hours for news cameras to show up so that an enormous Saddam statue, the one that gazed upon the murderous comings and goings of his Baathist regime, might be destroyed for good by a rocket-propelled grenade. A wrought-iron Saddam in Basra was pulled down by British troops, and then one in Karbala, twice as large. None were captured as vividly for posterity as the forty-foot Saddam in Firdos Square that, prior to toppling, had momentarily been “defaced” by the American stars and stripes. Indeed, jihadists of the first insurgency against occupation forces took to trading photographs between themselves of the Firdos Square desecration, pictures showing a hapless grinning Marine on top of Saddam and spreading that odious flag, another testament to American arrogance.

A pair of archaeologists from the University of Baghdad (Daoud al-Maliki and Taha Maruf) observed the desecration of Saddam firsthand. Cameras found them in the crowd weeping, but not from happiness; they explained themselves. Each man had felt profoundly distressed in his soul by something only archaeologists would understand, for while these men loathed and hated Saddam, they loathed the poison of propaganda more. Propaganda obliterated truth and history like a bomb. What they were witnessing was the erasure and substitution of lived history, of Iraqi memories ceding to some nonsensical official story, and time itself becoming meaningless.

In the end, among the over-170,000 pieces looted from the museum in Baghdad was a pristinely preserved marble head depicting the Roman god Apollo, an unusual relic, to be sure, a copy of an original made in Greece and brought to Babylon in 323 by the conqueror Alexander the Great, who kept Apollo’s head in his one of his golden tents to watch over him as he slept. Allegedly, the pilfered head was at Alexander’s bedside when he took ill and died—not more than twenty feet from the actual spot where Saddam Hussein would build his last residence, a winter palace, a few millennia later, and where the head of Apollo ended up stashed for a time. Saddam rarely visited that residence; something about the particular location made him uneasy. It had been cursed by a primeval spirit, he believed, haunted by puckish jinni that clung to the grounds with an animal rage, as if something had upset them in the past and Saddam could not find out what it was. One weekend, in a fit of pique, the dictator ordered all historical artworks out of the house and donated to the National Museum. A single work of art remained, a ceiling mural in the great room.

It was that same room where the bodies of the two Iraqi archaeologists were found, the men having long ago grown out their beards and taken up Russian AK rifles to fight for a caliphate dream. They died in a gunfire exchange with al-Sadr rebels who briefly controlled the region from 2018 to 2019. Maruf and al-Maliki were good fighters, but known for taking off for days at a time to seek out worthless objects in the rubble—an official seal of the old Baathist regime, a Swiss fountain pen once owned by Saddam’s eldest child Uday—anything of the lost, frantic, disjointed past they felt had to be kept in mind and saved for posterity once the fighting stopped, once a caliphate was triumphant, and true Muslims again ruled the Levant. Each man carried a bulging knapsack at all times, stuffed with whatever pieces had been scavenged after gun battles. Both sacks, like everything else in the area, had vanished.

To this day, Saddam’s winter palace remains abandoned. The outer walls dotted by mortar and rifle-fire, the inner walls festooned with graffiti in both English and Arabic saying FUCK YOU SADDAM and INFIDELS ROT IN HELL, the structure is a monument to entropy, every door pried off, every shard of window-glass stolen, all the French chandeliers stripped for parts and the Persian rugs shredded to tatters. High enough to discourage any other desecration but gunfire, the ceiling-mural of Saddam’s great hall has been left intact, some thirty feet by forty feet depicting a panoramic history of Mesopotamia, date palms and dunes, crescents and towers, Sunni and Shia, and the former three-starred flag of Iraq, flying mutely and innocently at the center.

Between This Life and the Next

The last words of the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa remain a subject of debate among literary historians and biographers. It is an irony that Pessoa himself would have loved to exploit, for throughout his years as a writer and journalist he exhaustively deployed alter-egos, his famous “heteronyms” that permitted the author to play upon the subject of personhood itself. As the godlike creator of between 80 and 140 imaginary selves, Pessoa had already killed half of them, in one way or another, savoring their deaths and somber obituaries and competing “final words” for years—before that fateful winter of 1935, when Pessoa (the real one) was rushed to a Lisbon hospital complaining of high fever and stomach pains.

It turned out only one of his selves would die this way, in some rickety public hospital, of pancreatitis and a diseased liver. Only one would write, with an unsteady hand, the last line of his journal: I do not know what tomorrow will bring. Pessoa knew he might be nearing the end, but then again, what if? On his deathbed, he distracted himself with various fantasies of his remaining alter egos and their infinitely interesting, unwritten fates, the selves he hadn’t killed yet and who would in theory live forever, untouched by death or disease, and forever enraged about the state of the world.

As a reader Pessoa was a connoisseur of historical quirk, the bizarre telling gesture that often emerged from the murk of the past. He spent his last day in bed reading. A footnote in Voltaire caught his eye. Voltaire mentioned in passing how the concept of happiness, in the original marketplace Greek, might best be translated as “led onward by a devil or demon-spirit.” Oh!, thought Pessoa, laughing with micro-convulsions of delight, Oh god, yes, absolutely perfect. In this unexpected thrill of creative energy his fever briefly abated, his eyesight seemed to sharpen, his thoughts cleared like a country road after a morning rain, and he felt something like a groundswell—one more heteronym left to write, perhaps, the story of a wealthy lisboeta who believes he has lived a good life but who winds up in hell. A comedy, naturally. Pessoa blinked at the open page of Voltaire. He needed something to write with. He turned to a nurse standing guard by the window. She had clearly been posted there to help the writer with his night-time inspirations. It was not, in fact, a nurse but a hat-stand. The nurse did not move, nor respond to his inquiries. He tried again, though the effort to raise his voice was painful. Madame, said Pessoa, coughing, trying to sit up, if you please, Madame. Hand me my glasses. Pessoa was still wearing his glasses; he meant to say pen. And then he died.

The Minister of Loneliness

The prior minister in my current role, I was told, did not have the infrastructure or emergency funds to sustain a portfolio of loneliness. The authorities simply noted that isolation in the year of quarantine is palpable; it has taken on catastrophic proportions comparable to the plagues of ancient days.

Frankly speaking, the ministry position is a file shuffling job in a virtual sense, a documenter of records and data on the correlation between the Great Panic and the psychological effects of isolation. A glorified clerk, more than a minister, if you will. It’s not a role that involves the abatement of loneliness.

Rather, the minister is a processor of loneliness, and sort of bureaucrat, if you will. The Minister of Loneliness is not a counselor of lonely hearts or other such romantic fancies. The invitation for the job arrived over the invisible transom, thanks to the information brigade with its bits and bytes of data, an invitation which I scoured in a compulsive yet amateurish manner to pass the hours of sheltering in place.

The analysts of yesteryear used to say, geography has nothing to do with leaving behind your negative experiences; the abyssal terrain of memory will follow you like the tail of a runaway gecko. You see, I don’t mind living a small life. I’m not called to settle the moon. Despite the dire warnings of our virologists and epidemiologists, we lived close together in the urban zones across the world, cocooned in an illusion of safety, ignoring the early signs of the Great Panic. Years ago, in the migrant generation of my grandparents, the nations each sent a colony of people to settle the moon. Admittedly, it was a failed experiment – the colonists were sickened by the poor air supply, and thousands perished in the biodome. It was neither a viable solution for overpopulation, nor a feasible strategic investment in human life as we knew it, but rather, a stupid plan to purge humankind of all diseases, in other words, a gene genocide.

As the Minister of Loneliness, I look at the stars not as a program for my life, but as signs of a creator who placed each little fire in the heavens. To remind myself about the life before the Great Panic, I write a list of activities I used to relish. If the Minister of Loneliness can’t handle solitude, then how will she process loneliness during the Great Panic? By mirroring what I’m hearing and listening to what’s not said; untying the knot of each irrational fear by asking questions; pointing at jars of olives and sweet pickles at the open-air market; shaking hands with strangers at the bus stop, or vice versa.

In a quarantine dream, the world and its pantries of abundance have reopened with a global puff of flour, pouring a wealth of refined wheat and sugar into the world. I bake a chocolate cake out of a box, scissoring the bag with puff of dehydrate, powdered buttermilk, flour, and cocoa. I use eggs, extra virgin olive oil, and a quarter cup of bottled water to moisten the cake flour. I pour it into nine-inch cake pans. After the cakes have cooled, I frost them with a tub of whipped cream, and sprinkle half a cup of shredded coconut, a quarter cup of chocolate shavings, and chopped strawberries. I had no one to enjoy the cake other than myself, so I put it in the basket and lower it on a rope to the street. Partway down its journey, the ashen mourning doves of the city emerge to consume mouthfuls of the cake until none of it remains by the time the bucket touches the sidewalk. The mourning doves, cooing with grateful contentment, swoop up in flock and circle above the rooftop before flying back to their nests tucked in the nooks and crannies of the city.

I assemble a blackberry fruit tart with a buttery, flaky crust made from a tin of shortbread cookies I find in the back of a cabinet, and it’s the green parakeets who receive the blessing, then the crows, ravens, and grackles for morsels of the pistachio ice-box pie made with a graham cracker crust and a pudding mix folded into whipped cream. The glossy cream cheese and guava jelly crescent rolls were the favorite of the pigeons, and the mockingbirds swooped upon the hot cross buns made with a brioche dough. The organic strawberries fattened by alfalfa meal, by the way, were big as my fists, mashed to a bloody pulp in the mouths of feral parakeets. When I wake, the world is still on fire with a massive infection, and there is no place to run from the phobias contributing to the Great Panic. Each individual must go on lockdown, sheltering in place to avoid breathing on others until the world opens up again.

In the ministry of loneliness, with my parish of none, I go incognito by turning off the information brigade, the only endorsed chatter in the lockdown. If I don’t hear about it, I am not responsible for it. The weather is hot and dry as midsummer. In the night, I wake with a sore throat, the right tonsil precisely speaking, and look up the possibilities of what this might mean. A bacterial infection like staphylococcus, infected tonsil with tonsillitis, a tonsil with tonsil stones, or soft uvula abrasion from loud snoring? At the back of my mind, I’m aware this could mean I harbor the contagion of fear, lying dormant and asymptomatic in my body, now surfacing as tonsillitis, grazed lightly by a silver spiral of fear. I try ice cream first, then hot milk and honey to coat my throat, anti-inflammatories, and finally, daub the back of my throat with a mixture of aloe vera, oregano oil, and antibacterial ointment in a base of petroleum jelly. With a flashlight to the back of my mouth, I could see the telltale inflamed tonsil peeking out like an angry cockscomb out of the corner of my gullet.

For decades, it was the fear of a generation who suffered aviophobia, a fear of airplanes, and now the little children do even not remember their parents warning about it, and how the parents of their parents recall the images of planes falling on their vintage television sets and splashed across the pages of their newspapers, the plumes of smoke rising out of the twin skyscrapers. Do you remember where you were, what you were doing? Yes, I was speaking with my mother on the phone, the landline, not a mobile device, and she dropped the phone in the dish washer. No, I was getting ready for school, putting my bologna sandwich in my backpack. It was not yet the age when we could livestream events. The morning news anchor was not his usual chipper self, while the newsroom behind his head showed a whirlwind of people and papers in chaos. Now the fear has dissolved into the generalized routines of the populace, especially when we use documents to identify ourselves, and we remove our shoes for flights. How do we demonstrate who we truly are in an age of dissociation, of likes and dislikes popping up like assorted gumdrops and lollipops?

In the Great Panic, I can’t help thinking of the bird pneumonia carried by feral urban birds, not to mention the diseases infecting cats and people. I miss going to the market and picking up an eggplant, then a chayote pear. I miss riding the subway, the lime-colored tunnels of light. I miss the man who played the violin, busking for cash. I miss the for-sale signs propped up inside car windows. I can’t remember the last time I wore heels as I walked in soft-soled flats all over the city. I love flats, my unapologetic flats that say to the world, my soles will be with me the rest of my life, even if they’re unflattering. My flats traveled all over the city of champagne bakeries and chocolate fountains, its dumpling dens and greasy spoons. The city with its clotted cream fog rolling in from the bay and its nightly mood swings from one dive to the next had no idea what await beyond this short season of neon lights. Perhaps short isn’t quite the right word, I muse. Blessed, I whisper, looking down at the stockinged feet I’ve had since the shelter-in-place order began.

Is it too late for the information brigade to design an underground world in cyberspace where bibliotherapists research ancient books of wisdom and poetry as guides for healing, human empathy, and revelation? One where bibliophiles, lovers of books, serve as apothecaries to the drams and draughts of the past? The musty fragrance of the physical books offers consolation in the caves, where consumers of information would slowly pore over the histories and catalogues of yesteryear. Pods of capsules of time, the books would unveil their arcana about making sourdough starter in jars, using aluminum foil and baking soda in hot water to polish tarnished silver, and how to pickle one’s own capers in vinegar and wine, if one wished to do so, those unopened flower buds, the color of avocado flesh under the rind.

A pinking moon like a blushing cheek swooned over the city, a supermoon the color of raspberry lemonade, and for a minute, its witnesses were calmed by its glow. The information brigade, however, reported that it took on a canary tone like tooth enamel while it soared above our sleep. Only in dreams, the pink moon was the color of quarantine, a swirling bottle of the city’s mood in the foaming language of a fountain drink, or a glass of hibiscus tea spilling into the nocturnal clouds. The Minister of Loneliness picks up a spy glass, a brass, one-eyed telescope of sorts, and points it at the moon to see if it is a glass of pink lemonade.

Nope. In the rays of the moon, I dream of a labyrinth of honeycomb tunnels where the Minister of Loneliness is quarantined, a raindrop of vaccine against fear itself flashing its golden, quadrivalent eye in the lights at the end of every passageway, targeting flu strains cultivated in cell cultures, not in millions of eggs laid by government chickens. For this elixir of immunity, the vaccine is dyed red as prosperity eggs, as if prepared for a baby’s one-month birthday, when her name is finally announced to the world. Let us rejoice, for this child has survived a full month and beat the odds of death itself, at least, for now: her immune system has fought off the bacterial strains and toxic nitrites in the underground well water, the cross-contamination of a bovine caseinate formula boiled in a kitchen pot, the hands and feet of many relatives in the nursery. On a scrap of a paper bag, I write out a gratitude list starting with unbleached bread flour.

If Anybody Could Have Saved Me It Would Have Been You

She is sitting on the beach eating a chocolate chip cookie housed in a metal canister per the sort of metal canisters she imagines midcentury soldiers’ wives packed for their husbands to take to war. The day is hot, and the sun melts not only her and her fellow beachgoers’ skin, but also the chocolate chip cookie housed within the metal canister whose history she can only imagine. She touches the melting chocolate chip cookie with her finger, then touches her cell phone’s liquid crystal display screen, which therein contains a facsimile of Virginia Woolf’s suicide letter written in 1941, just after World War II began.

Dearest, the letter begins. I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do.

Virginia Woolf did not do the best thing to do in the ocean. Rather, she did it in the River Ouse in Lewes, East Sussex, England. Three miles away, in the nearby village of Rodmell, she and her husband Leonard—to whom her suicide note was addressed—owned a weatherboarded cottage. There, she wrote Orlando, To the Lighthouse, The Waves, The Years, Mrs. Dalloway. In 1910, 31 years before her river death, Virginia Woolf—then Adeline Virginia Stephen—had been institutionalized after attempting suicide twice, once by trying to jump out of a window, and once again by overdosing on Veronal. Woolf may have had bipolar disorder, sources purport, but words make things name themselves (a poet once said), and I distrust that we can precisely language anything our minds do, seeing as no mind is the same, despite the ways our minds all spin out from time to time.

The waves are now lapping against the shore, and the girl on the beach is re-reading Virginia Woolf’s suicide letter with my finger. As was aforementioned, this letter was written to Leonard—her husband, not Cohen nor Bernstein. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you, she wrote, reaffirming the myth that anybody can rescue anybody. But maybe love can save—meaning to keep safe, to avoid the need to use, to preserve the soul from damnation—a person, or maybe another person’s attention can save another person, or maybe if adults failed to tell us good job and I love you when we were small, nothing can save us but ourselves.

After reading Virginia Woolf’s suicide letter on the beach, whose sand is hot and therefore makes her skin stick to body, she walks back to the train past the bar where an elderly man is drinking. Hello sweetheart, he says, and she winks at him, but he cannot see her eye because it is covered by plastic meant to protect her irises from the sun, and she cannot see what he is drinking because her vision is tinted. On the train, she misses the elderly man, not because he is memorable but because there is no one else to call to mind.

A lie?

A lie.

First, she thinks of her former beloved, and then she thinks of the elderly man. He was sitting at a bar without sitting at the bar, for in fact, he was sitting outside of the bar where he was drinking. Scanning the train with her tinted vision, the girl considers the straight line of energy required for the train’s bars to extend from the train’s ceiling to its floor, much like the elm tree behind the weatherboarded cottage in a village where she has not yet moved, and which she cannot call to mind because she will not move into the weatherboarded cottage for several months and thus has not yet made its acquaintance. But we know things before we know things, she intuits, and so somewhere within her consciousness she lets herself visualize it and subsequently feels quiet and adrift from her present reality, though she does not let herself know what she knows despite the fact she knows it.

In the past, when she was eating a homemade chocolate chip cookie housed in a metal canister per the sort of metal canisters she imagines midcentury soldiers’ wives packed for their husbands to take to war, she did not feel adrift in quite this exact way, nor did she feel out of tune with her consciousness’ registers of knowledge. In other words, she did not feel the detachment of her mind from her body, nor did she fear the repercussions of exiting the beach to re-enter the world. Nor did she imagine herself to be anywhere but on the beach, albeit now, writing this, she feels an ocean in her torso, and this ocean provokes her to once again return to the actual ocean, into which she might step without clinging to reality; into which she might wade with the insistence of one who has also made peace with her grief. In this wading, she will let the water carry her away until I, too, am asleep near the bottom of it. 

Red-Trimmed House

From the northeast corner of the house, through the window at the top of the stairs, we could see the buds of the fruit tree, pink and soft in the last days of spring. The bare branches had grown new leaves, and by the time the sun warmed our skin, their fruits were beginning to emerge. Red seeds, they looked like, about the size of acorns, but they weren’t close enough that we could really see them, even though the branches could scratch the window at night when the wind made its way through the pines. If the tree had been a bit older, and us a little lighter, we might have climbed out of the window and into its branches to escape for a little while.

The webs appeared a month or two later, arriving like little packages too tightly wrapped to tell what was inside. We could see that they were denser than a spider’s web, and not built for the same purpose. The white lines crisscrossed, threads of thin, soft sheets. They spun larger without us noticing until they were big prisms surrounding the fruits and the leaves with irregular planes. Just a few branches—they didn’t cover the whole tree. They looked just like cocoons from where we saw them, cocoons big enough to hold a bat, probably. They got to be a couple of inches across, and about as long as my arm, up to the elbow. And that’s when Papa said he had to go to the store, and after he went to the dump he drove to the store and bought himself a long stick, and the stick came with a long blade. We watched him from the window, his arm now a straight black shaft with a scythe on the end. So easily he sliced off those cocoons, letting them land on the damp mulch below, so gently they might have bounced if they had not been so light. The tree was unburdened now, lifting only its own fruits and leaves.

Later, we saw the black bin outside the garage, left from Papa’s trip to the dump. Papa had forgotten to wheel it back in. Papa was glad to have saved the tree. We asked about them at dinner, those prisms and how they had looked up close. He had wanted to show us, the way they were spun, the way the little eggs sat within the planes. And the bigger ones too, so many of them, sharing this one cocoon. Hundreds, there must have been. And what did you do with those cocoons, we asked, and Papa had not been forgetful. The bin was full of water, and the cocoons were sunk in there, and I knew they were still hugging their branches, waiting to drown, waiting in the dark underneath that tight black lid. But the small ones had been able to swim; they swam within their cocoons, Papa said. They didn’t die. Come see. They’d crawled up the sides to where it was dry, and there they were, clinging to the lid. Now he stuck out his finger, his finger a shaft jabbed straight into the small bodies until they fell. Too many remained to kill in this way, so Papa wiped them off the lid and threw them into a bag of trash. Hundreds, he said, there were hundreds of them, if a hundred is just ten by ten. They suffocated there, the little ones in their cocoons, and went back into the bin, the bin now drained and dried and wheeled back into the cold garage. Papa drove to the dump again and came back and looked happy about his new tool.

Receipt

This was meant to be your day of resisting temptation, but more important than money is generosity. You will make this quick. You begin in the large sale section, circling a sea of racks, but the large t-shirts are stained with trendy brand names and stupid slogans and none of the pants appeal to you. You descend to the men’s department. One plywood surface is full of sweatshirts in tan, grey, and pink hues, on sale for $29. One of these might do, but the collar is just a bit too high, and that logo. You find a separate sale section. Hats, boxers, ugly shirts, polyester and rayon. At the end of the shirt rack, in the farthest corner of the store, you find a black terrycloth short-sleeve shirt. $14.99. The material is cotton and cheap. You can see through it. But it would do as an extra gift to round out the package. You walk by the sweatshirts again but the small logo is still there. You find the two lanes for checkout, one to the right for the human cashier and one straight ahead for self-checkout. The cashier looks bored and you are tired. You move forward and scan the tag yourself. It rings up as ten cents. The two employees standing behind you are still exchanging jokes, maybe flirting. Can they see the massive screen of your register? Should you say something? You decide not to say anything. You stand there and wait for the machine to roll out a disproportionately long receipt. At the door, someone says something. You turn to them with fear, and they repeat it: Goodnight. Good night. You get away feeling like you have gotten away with something and descend into the subway. Home again. You eagerly pull out the shirt and feel a hard lump. The security tag is still attached. Google tells you that the tags are full of ink, so that if you try to steal, you will have blood on your hands, plus the goods will be ruined. You could return the item to the store and ask them to remove the tag, but then you would have to show them your disproportionately long receipt to prove that the item is in fact yours, and then they might see that you had only paid ten cents for it. No, you’ll have to pry it open. YouTubers show you how to do it—strong magnets can convince the devices to open—and end with disclaimers that they did not in fact steal the items. Another method involves the use of two forks in a rocking motion. You opt for the screwdriver instead. Your leverage is good, and you manage to yield a nice margin on one side and then the other, but you have to keep circling the central prong because widening one side causes the other to close up. Your clearance is now half an inch wide, just enough to slip in the metal shears. But the metal shears are dull, and your cuts become increasingly violent in your impatience. There. The deed is done. You remove the round black lump and its bent plug from the shoulder. But now the t-shirt has a hole in it from your blind probing. With your needle and your black thread, the last length on the spool, you sew up the hole just like your mother taught you, first circling the event with small stitches in and out through the intact perimeter and then closing it up with one cinch.

Bed Springs

A short story about a couple whose marital troubles are channeled into an ongoing, accelerating frustration with the conditions of their mattress, which, rather than their difficulties with each other, they cite as the reason for their lack of sleep, restless demeanors, and increasing anxiety. This leads to an endless search for a better mattress, which inevitably adds to their troubles those of financial insecurity and the physical strains brought on by the recurring trips to mattress discount stores and repeated trips up and down their third-story walkup, with and without a mattress bridging their cold shoulders.

Once the economic toll of again purchasing a new mattress clearly becomes untenable, the couple turns to mattresses they find on the street. Through these dirtier acquisitions, they begin to also take on the psychic weight of their neighbors’ marital troubles—a blood spot there, bed bugs everywhere, copious urine stains, and unreadable traces index the unspeakable plights of the others they hear arguing on alternating weeknights, or see returning hand in hand from the grocery, or nod to across the subway platform each morning, or pass on their way to the bodega at night.

While chatting casually, laughing, gleefully, even, for example, they have sex, but, finding it unfulfilling, spend ten postcoital minutes discussing the relative merits of the springs on this mattress compared to the last and decide that it did not provide enough give for the positions that would have given them satisfaction.

A month later, she announces at breakfast that she has noticed a decided slump in his shoulders, an irregular curve that begins at the nape of his neck and gently holds the S curve of his scalp at a low angle, as would a slack line. It’s not firm enough, he complains, and she knows what he means.

They had begun with the pillows: Sealy, Tempur-Pedic, insubstantial, IKEA, his deceased grandmother’s, her childhood’s. None provided quite the right level of support. Switching sides of the bed similarly provided little relief, though they did have a discussion about the tissues he found stuffed into the crack between the wooden siding of the bed platform and the mattress.

They take a trip to Home Depot that May to purchase some plywood to line the underside of their box springs, a DIY solution he had proposed in hope of solidifying their mutual commitment to this bed, this mattress, his back. She runs her finger along the rough surface of the boards, procuring a splinter.

One morning, she wakes to a high-pitched whine; the window has been left open in winter, introducing a strong, cold breeze, which in turn gently rocks the closet door back and forth on its old hinges. Dutifully, she rolls back the clammy blanket from her chest and lifts herself from her foam imprint. Before closing the closet entirely, she sees (nearly glowing in the light of dawn) an air mattress folded tightly on the top shelf. It has traditionally, in their household, been reserved for guests, but now, she reaches for it. It is inflated by mid-morning and remains so until the subsequent evening, when she warmly suggests that they try something new. He complies, eagerly. By morning, her shoulder blades make contact with the hardwood floor.

It ends only when their landlord complains about the number of mattresses in plastic wrap that have been abandoned on the sidewalk in front of the building over the past few months, in increasing numbers—a sign to current tenants and potential future renters that the building is unclean. Soon evicted by force of increasing monthly rent, they begin their search for a new studio, but, finding that their respective commutes from affordable boroughs will likely have to increase, they find that they would instead, perhaps, be better off finding their own respective places, at least for the next year. Rather than returning to the mattress store in search of two comfortable twin mattresses, one for each apartment, they agree to retain the mattresses of the previous tenants of their new respective rooms.

Huddle

a reverie on antecovidum soirees

Mix it up
make it count
delight folks
be delighted
steer phrases
be steered
in the swirl
roust about
seek a huddle
spot a huddle
slink in
stick out
seek gaps
shoot them
spot walls
crash them
step back
make space
watch huddle
sidebar one
slip a shiny
receive well
what rebounds
pocket insight
pocket wit
move on
in the swirl
seek a huddle
spot a huddle
slink in
say nothing
nod a bit
make it count
seek a signal
spot a signal
drop a shiny
kick it once
kick it twice
kick it thrice
scoop it up
toss it
receive well
what rebounds
step back
make space
watch huddle
empty pockets
show empty
share empty
fill empty
with shinies
kicked around
from nowhere
to somewhere

"Awake in light and without hurry, I wrote"

Awake in light and without hurry, I wrote 
while my students wrote of mornings. A rose 

before the light, a perfumed chamber, alone.
Arose in cold darkness. How I wanted to look out 

from a high place. Wanted the view, warm, 

a hammock, a stack of books, no others,
my children (tight knot

in the rope) with me, in my sight,
playing, or maybe sleeping, out of harm, 

not needing me. 

"Jewel-glow fruit gummies, sugar the body needs"

Jewel-glow fruit gummies, sugar the body needs
too much, not enough, sleep, pain, shoulder blades

all ache from sitting up to see snow-swarmed
streets, maelstrom of ice pellets blown

by the car’s draft, not fall, but swirl, surround.

Each night, changes in pressure explode
the slate in bursts, like some unknown animal

knocking loud against the roof of this house,
last winter filled with grand pianos

kept warmer than we permit ourselves.

"Six months of winter make season"

Six months of winter make season
a lie snow buries in evidence. A preponderance

of icy wind. We walk uphill
clutching another’s arm,

past harmless flakes, shards slick as luck.

Talk flickers, raw with it, she winces.  
Clouds shift, light floods the room, 

warmer voices tender a way to speak 
without hearing my own voice  

an instrument I still play badly.