November 10, 2014

Chat au Clair de Lunec. 1900Théophile Steinlen b. November 10, 1859

Dear darkening ground, you’ve endured so patiently the walls we’ve built, perhaps you’ll give the cities one more hour

and grant the churches and cloisters two, And those that labor—will you let their work grip them another five hours, or seven

before you become forest again, and widening wilderness in that hour of inconceivable terror when you take back your name from all things.

Just give me a little more time! I want to love the things as no one has thought to love them, until they’re worthy of you and real

. I want only seven days, seven on which no one has ever written himself – seven pages of solitude.

Rilke's Book of Hours Rainer Maria Rilke translations by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows google books

Nature Morte Au Damier / Rhum / Bass1912Louis Marcoussis1883 - 1941

An Army Of Dead Girls: Art’s Avant-Garde Joyelle McSweeneylana turner

This avant-garde, this army of Dead Girls, shakes the sun from the sky and replaces it with ornament, “orfebrería,” Art’s insignia (“as Grecian goldsmiths make / Of hammered gold and gold enamelling”?), stretching its own skin painfully up to replace the sky in counterconquest. When Art’s army arrives, it immediately enacts a regime of Anachronism. With and/or logic, it insists both on a dream interval and a fatal interval: this is not going to stop until you wake up so give up. Art performs both massive and trivial transformations—the dead are reanimated (a massive change), while a series of lyric, decorative images are daisy chained to each other with a twist of Art’s, or syntax’s, hand: pájaros become nenas como flores. Thanks to Art’s friable power, every surface is touched, changed, made to host each other, to and/or. The odd word order of Jen Hofer’s translation of the final sentence conveys this denaturing of rank, privilege, order, even the separability of bodies. The uncertain doubling up of roles and agencies in the final sentence—“Someone placed on our mask your lip”—points to the forceful and/or of Art’s regime. In this violent remaking of the world, the Dead Girls are Art’s avant-garde:

Caminamos distantes y vacías antes de amenazar. Somos tus lobelias de piernas preferidas. Cada vez que agredimos es como darte un beso. Danos la presidencia o la dirección de los disparos. Somos los frutos frescos de la guerra.

We walk distant and empty before threatening. We are your lobelias with the legs you favor. Each time we attack it is like giving you a kiss. Give us the presidency or the direction of the gunshots. We are the fresh fruits of war.

Louis Marcoussis

1st March: Ain Kiniyya by Yves Berger translated by John Berger Spring covers with a green exiles never forget the hills where wandering herds graze the growing grass Women stooped between olive trees clasp in their motherly hands sage wild thyme and zatar herbs of an inherited tongue Rain extracts from dust its secret treasures camomile poppy and cyclamen a coloured carpet of cries The blood of the red earth bleeds on a bed of pebbles whilst the wind blows away the pines of the settlements The folded strata of rock trace the lines of a time when oceans displaced mountains before men