FROM: THE WORDS

Chapter 3

A child touches a flower.

Then a tip of air moves to fill the space moving a leg apart from a leg. Slightly apart, the legs will promise a little breeze to the part. A seamless song stays the tip of an invective a against the child’s mother. One can’t see the mirror on the tip of a flower.

The cool child is father to the man.

The hard child is mother to the man

The quiet child is mother to the woman

The burning child is father to the woman

is sung and the singing goes on while the mother arranges a bouquet with irritation. Even so, this mother would make a better congress person than the X man. This is written on one of the spools All-the-Loss-That-Ever-Was one day dropped off at the museum where there had been a group of pressmen and presswomen dropping in on Boltanski.

In defiance of the mother’s flower estate, the legs part a little farther in the song, and the mother’s body’s gold mountainside and baby pragmatism collide. You can not, says the strange doctrine, written with this mother’s clash.

But defeat will be remade into rapture.

Or myriad seeds when struck by passing war machines will give birth to comedy.

Is that so, thinks the Chair, or the nihilist, the Romanticized-Hell-Grabbers, or even the man lurking around the magazines at the drugstore when they encounter such slogans. Is it so that defeat will be remade into rapture, or that machines will give birth to comedy, or that one can not when a mother says it, they think with the same thought as if all of them were the same person.

It was so that a chair was a chair in a room. Shadows curved in the room. A warm blue flew up our backs in the morning when morning was a seam stitched up by birds. Night had fallen into an abandoned trough halfway down the dune over which the nihilist traveled in his incubus by day and by night. Sometimes we would speculate from our bed that he was bolted down by blankets and that’s why he could speak freely on any subject. We were convinced that his claims became our own thoughts, and we would lay in bed thinking this and other things such as a machine is superior to a prop. Parroting the nihilist’s formula (there is a standard of measurement and value for anything, since there are as many possible standards of measurement and value as there are combinations of things in words) I would name all the things that were superior and what they were superior to.

The word glove is superior to the object glove. A hand is superior to a glove. A puppet glove is superior to a puppet hand. A puppet is superior to a doll. A doll is superior to a combat unit. A soldier in a combat unit is superior to a combat unit. A uniform is inferior to doll clothes. A tray is as low as a floor. But a floor is vastly superior to stockings. And then there is an assemblage of track records, which fall to the bottom of this verticality, though they’re buoyed up by a hardy variety of sewing spools.

Above the secular slide and gauzy strip we see through even babies know it is not possible to read someone’s mind. The slip shutter of pressmen and presswomen reaching for dots of Boltanski’s thinking to turn into ink is as innocent as reading someone’s mind, in spite of the spools of words floating overhead that contradict speech by turning it into objects. Boltanski says there is a dead child in each of us and the newspaper says it tomorrow. Flying babies write on spools floating above the exhibition’s landscape as if they themselves were an exhibit of daydreams and what they write are the missing words that predate an artist’s epiphany.

Laura Moriarty

From: Spicer’s City

When like palms with life

lines crossed as if memory

also didn’t last

you along the street seen

dripping with trees

the mind bright

We talked so long it burned my back. We never talk. My throat is bare. The sun. Never there. Day or night.

or white but not

like this stone ball

or like this record

round

The world in your town drenched as they say. Speaking about absence.

There is a register. A blur. A child tearing through the street. Not like you either.

high afternoon haze

your day to be home

In your day

is language strangely. You ask yourself what it will take. That taken. In the same words. A boy feels along the walls as if he were blind.

they take him

they taste him

angrily

The street is torn apart. That old street hidden and changed and hidden again. The new material. We don’t sing. Our steps thrown back. The pavement as white as the sky. Hell with the women these flyboys.

but you are no pilot

we sit in Gino & Carlo’s

at midday

The livid tables green as the child I mean what I say "We are not alone here." The music is identical. The pipes moan. There is less water than before. There is no rain at all

Victor Hern_ndez Cruz

GOOD WATERS

We do not claim to be of the fallen

The tradition of Aqueybana was not

Just within the material

It was not just in the people of the physical

In rhythm it was what still dances

In gene Plazas

Orbiters of extraction

Luminers of the messages in songs

The laws of travel

The events of trajectory

How we formed in the interior

The round bohios

Which became the shape of our

Transmitting dance

Back home-shakers of maracas

Do not talk of things that do not

exist

The presence is the presence

Claim for good the good of the good

Now claim you the delicious of the

Delight you gain

From the lost of the good to the

Out of step

And what out of goodness it was

That now the horizon vegetation

Chokes and the coming progression

Has no water or air

The tradition wanted more good for

The good to distribute throughout

Without finishing the spot–

It knew that beyond the needs there

Was no need to progress into that

Uptempo pace impossible to dance

That’s the "one voice to call back

the good of the good we have lost"

Even such that comes to your tongue

That too is there

No matter what or where

Aca or Alla

For conflict nuts

Say : Adjuntas and Chicago

We do not claim to be of the fallen

We are still delivering sound in red packages

Upon this there was only an attempt

At something happening

At the edge of realization

We are still waiting

We have not fallen.