trade (dreaming odalisque)
[Shhhh. She’s sleeping.]
[Listen:]
I’d trade this song for you. Unless…it’s going to be remembered. Who’s going to remember me? Who’s going to remember you?
Throw it all into the combustion of history. Throw it up against the annihilation of stars. Back yourself up in the cloud….racks of machines o’erheat the desert. Before everything. Powers. Down.
other marvels
I made a grid and titled it THE SHADOW UNIVERSE AND OTHER MARVELS. The rows and columns are labeled with shades of black. There is a storm blowing about, strewing fury and frustration.
Outer-space is where an odalisque escapes (read odalisques in space if you’re curious about that), but universal is all. The witching hour is the hour in which things are made. Look at a clock whose hands are stuck how they stutter stutter at what-o-clock don’t panic. Kill the clock. Clip the coil, pull the plug, flip out the cylindrical case for reactive chemicals, all toxicity (cadmium, mercury, lead), these mechanisms that have the power to drive hands.
When you’ve incapacitated the clocks, give your hands their work. Soon the birds will whistle, churtle, stir. Black becomes grey becomes white, even blue.
Clouds will pass. Sun time is gentler, more subtle, than numbered dials.
day’s end
space: absence [storm at sea]
universal: constant connection (expected to listen passively)
midnight
space: you describe the world
universal: stop. lost. [clouds]
witching hour
space: i should be right now [black iron fence or gate?]
universal: I am reclaiming. The writer always triumphs.
the writer always triumphs. I am betrothed to the stars. each pierces me like a pin. identify me for future generations: Saint Sebastian, beloved of art.
–The Odalisque
recursive figure
Figure [recursion]: a figure approaches
—
I’m reading about art and the abyss. The book was first published in France in 1955. I read then gaze–longingly, futilely–into the depths of my teapot. I struggle to disclose in dissimulation some ceaselessly murmuring silence, some infinite-far which cannot be arrived at, though it entombs me. If only, I think, suffocating in the extremity of my super-abundant exclusion, if only I could SPEAK, not of art and the abyss, but of odalisques & the abyss, which is practically the same thing.
But first I have to answer the question that one amongst you– oh creatures of flight known as readers–posed…how did I get into my obsidian obelisk? I will answer that, in my first attempt at popular entertainment, very soon.
Questions for me, The Odalisque? Comment or email me here.
“In this communication it is obscurity that must reveal itself and night that must dawn. This is revelation where nothing appears, but where concealment becomes appearance.”–Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, tr: Ann Smock
–The Odalisque
I am the odalisque who lives in an obelisk. I converse with birds.
