Albrecht Dürer, Petit Palais, Paris

 

A whorled story

 

***
Don’t know how long it’s been,
six months, maybe a year?
I was fine, mostly, really.
Mh? Yeah, mostly.

***
I know it’s been a year.
I’ve been doing ok.
ups and downs,
you know how it is,
maybe.

***
It felt longer at times
– longer than a year, I mean –
long days were bad days,
short days were good days,
as simple as that, really.
– so long in fact that time
felt like a volume, comprising
all axes, terms, signs, results.

***
This year has felt like a decade.
Some hours stirred tumult and tears,
and terrible truths, sometimes smaller
than a grain of sand, sometimes
larger than the Laniakea.
Other days brought silences and smiles,
great quietude filling the mind
– a Boötes of the soul, unperturbed –
the lucidity actual, irrefragable –
the mind palace like an anechoic chamber
memories seen for what they are:
starkly untinged, and evident.

***
Three hundred and thirty-eight days
sixteen hours and twelve minutes.
Every single one of those seconds
as long as a mercurial day.
March 2nd was the worst, for some reason.
I hadn’t thought about you in weeks
– well, more like afterthoughts,
caprices of a winding/storied memory –
you flashed before me
particle ignoring all matter
I relived the hours together
slowly, not savouring but observing,
your contours more defined
– like a coastline under a satellite
then as through a microscope –
in endless, excruciating precision
the acuteness of the scrutiny
which made me understand, finally
why it had been so hard to go over you.

So I sat there with that mental origami
pleating and creasing ever smaller folds,
each one revealing a finer trait,
and I knew once I would be watching
from the comfort of space
where we always fly for a reason
I would finally see the finest
tales of embroidered memories.

***

 

I am wrong.

 
"In science it often happens that scientists say, "You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken," and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion."

Carl Sagan (1934-1996), in his keynote address at CSICOP conference (1987).

 

Light paper

Paper drop (passage) VII

Wolfgang Tillmans

Floating

 
It could be the
surface from below,
perhaps
clouds from above,
perhaps

Suspended,
up and down,
floating, floating.
Weightless, unpulled.

It could be the
air, water, light
– so precisely anything –
floating, floating.

Ground. Seabed.
Stratosphere.

Salt on the lips
– ah, yes, the ocean,
that vague memory.
Aren’t clouds made of
saltwater or dustwater,
dunes or oceanfloors
– floating – floating.

A gowpen of cottonwool,
a thoughtful of smoke,
all could be inside my mind
– subfaces and surfaces –
mirror of mirrors of mirrors
slowly spinning on myself
dimensions lost to the senses
I am nothing, floating, floating

if only the moon, a bird, a fish
I’d know where I
floating, floating
was – stars perhaps
I’d know – floating
why I enjoy
floating, floating
so much

 

In-between two storms

 

Un/clear divide

in Sólheimasandur⁩

nothing either white or black

but shades of blue abound

After the storm

 

Hunter's Moon

 

Statuegynous

Exhibition Viviane Sassen PHOSPHOR,

Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris (France)

(Click to expand)