flower/s

This town loves flowers with a passion, even/especially indestructable silk ones, love indentured to death's subterranean roots. Perhaps the gallery will do a show called The Flower World and it will go like this:

The Flower World

See the flowers, so faithful to Earth.

We know their fate because we share it.

Were they to grieve for their wilting,

that grief would be ours to feel.

There's a lightness in things. Only we move forever burdened,

pressing ourselves into everything, obsessed by weight.

How strange and devouring our ways must seem

to those for whom life is enough.

If you could enter their dreaming and dream with them deeply,

you would come back different to a different day,

moving so easily from that common depth.

Or maybe just stay there: they would bloom and welcome you,

all those brothers and sisters tossing in the meadows,

and you would be one of them.

Rainer Maria Rilke - Sonnets to Orpheus II, 14

Not withstanding Rilke, the flower (or is it ‘flowers’; sometimes it seems that there can never be just one flower--although the presenting of a single red rose carries a certain density) occupies a special, but dual place in human affairs. In art the flower/s present us with a certain dialectic shall we say, inhabiting on ‘one side’ a golden transcendental romantic realm and on the other side of the fulcrum, a lesser world (or at least, more oddly, both present yet distanced) a silver world, almost universally a modernist double-speak ironic, even kitschy, a schmaltzy universe.  The good thing is that the artist does not necessarily have to choose between the place of heaviness, the place of transits, of thresholds, of initiations, births and deaths, does not have to divest herself of a light-heartedness to favor the weighty, since the flower is always patiently there on both sides of what often seems like a civilizational divide. Flowers in and of them-selves seem to be harbingers of human civilization. (Anthropologists have often remarked of dead flowers left in the graves of Neanderthals as a sign of their closeness to Homo sapiens enculturation. Writer Clifford D. Simak has even written alluringly in his novel All Flesh is Grass of an alien civilization made up of intelligent flowers, faceless and selfless but unitary, not ‘sullen slaves’ as Rilke puts it but joyful accomplices to the human project.)  Flower/s are love’s body in the making, root stem and heaven's tiara. And always a feast for the artist.

Pinelandia Gallery offers the artists love affair with the flower/s. contact the gallery at: etc

“We’re involved with flower, fruit, grapevine.

They speak more than the language of the year.

Out of the darkness a blaze of colors appears,

and one perhaps that has the jealous shine

Of the dead, those who strengthen the earth.

What do we know of the part they assume?

It’s long been their habit to marrow the loam

with their own free marrow through and through.

Now the one question: Is it done gladly?

The work of sullen slaves, does this fruit

thrust up, clenched, toward us, its masters?

Sleeping with roots, granting us only

out of their surplus this hybrid made of mute

strength and kisses — are they the masters?”

― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies/The Sonnets of Orpheus

third man out

(He remembered, after reading it, Freud's comment about melancholics: they very often speak in the third person, unwilling or unable to dissolve the frozen sea locked inside, no ax to take apart the monuments, frozen in memory, past scenarios set to repeat, warding off the aftereffects of death and disappearance, the aftereffect like those nocturnal machines grinding away in the distance, trying to fold-over all the Others that can't be digested or faced away, no they are beyond frozen in the monoblock of past spaceness and timeness, knocking the, dead I suppose, out of time and space. Thinking stops at death, sitting at the foot of the tomb stone impossible to proceed AHEAD, get along with life because its NOT life, maybe Something else but not life. He read today of a new experiment of totally freezing small mammals brains in a block of substance, preserving all its features while it was alive and not yet deteriorated thereby leaving open the possibility of resurrection...but what if there were a lament the creature made, a cry, a scream that had been captured at the final moment of freezing, that final state continuing potentially for ever, never resolving itself by collapse but enduring--in pain, in lamentation--for ever in null-space. And then he looks around at all the tombstones he passes and walks amongst every day, cascades of sepia animated snapshots briefly flicker, each making a final movement or gesture as he passes relatives. a brief trembling of the frame. It's enough to make him a melancholic for sure.)

At least one thing can be said about the various conflicts in the middle east, especially of the vaious monument destructions: they make visible that eternal war of the great Mothership of the Dead hanging everywhere in null space, with the boarding parties of the Living. And no one is really sure what that Trembling of the Frame means; science says it means nothing and doesn't exist except as childish misty fair tale, and the other side says, well it's hard to say anymore what the other side is. Myth? What is that?

machine

He could catch the wisp out of the corner of the eye, where the boojums lived when he smoked herb.

O: "O brother, when are thou?"
Him: "I hear the fiendish machines all night long, clanging banging dropping material from the railing onto other platforms, sawing grinding. The Law of the machine firms up under the detritus of noise, noise is the straight gate...or is that gait, could as well be, making the gesture of walking less pliable. The Law is both exoskeleton and endoskeleton. We can only endure in the animal mash between the two -- folded -- control surfaces...from even far away environments-----those damn nocturnal machines----maybe we are becoming like coral, constructing our external supports in very clever way, maybe that is the Way of the Extro-Law, disguising itself as support, making way for the ultimate supportive colony, bee-hive like."

O: Are they like that gentle humming many uears ago, you in bed, summer evening wind drifting in, lie space ships communicating you thought I bet.

Him: Lousy rotten shroud of memory. here, Henry Miller the shoe fits exactly.:

One passes imperceptibly from one scene, one age, one life to another. Suddenly, walking down a street, be it real or be it a dream, one realizes for the first time that the years have flown, that all this has passed forever and will live on only in memory; and then the memory turns inward with a strange, clutching brilliance and one goes over these scenes and incidents perpetually, in dream and reverie, while walking a street, while lying with a woman, while reading a book, while talking to a stranger . . . suddenly, but always with terrific insistence and always with terrific accuracy, these memories intrude, rise up like ghosts and permeate every fiber of one’s being. – Black Spring

A vision> I was in the Walmart grocery store section and looked up and passing like some weird ship was a mountain man, heavy set tall, long gray beard shoulder length gray hair but wearing a short purple dress about 10 inches above the knee and wearing a white blouse with huge breasts false i guess very large bra however jsut silently sashing past the tomatoes and avocados. I paused thinking did i see what i just thought i saw around the corner i go and no commotion, no large mountain man in drag   what tha'??!!! every space holds its cracks and gaps no matter how unperturbed the surface may be...

There was something else he meant to say but now forgotten, the clash of gaps, the muzzyness mustiness of memories...sometimes like thin gruel to make a life but you make it with waht you got.