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22 May-15 June 1997: Thru Fairest Sunlight Warren Vance |
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living proof I am the past, or genetico-chemical boiled up for now as person. Or, I am some socio- ethnographic detail or another like, I am Richard the born in Geelong, the poet, say, from exotic Western District stock, to affable bull-necked bastards, and a diamond backed, flame bellied, succubus. Like that. I am the night-shift cabbie, Kick Down Dickie. I'm a sleaze (Stretching, lush with dreaming, rubbing my brushed velvet eyes), and a cranky bugger, but a pro- no question.* I'm a liar I think (I mean, I could promise you, I am, but you'd doubt it.) In the shade, I am that insinuating leopard. He thinks he's invisible With his eyes shut.** I think therefore I am, as well. I'm living bloody proof of that, but still, if you think about it, its not quite enough evidence.*** I am, I am... the Red Back Mystic! Surely I'm this little corker of a rubric! But sorry dear, no, just like Artaud, I am 'every name in history'. So, yes, I declare, I am Artaud, too. I'm the face in the mirror when I like what I see, (I'm the schmoozy boozy crooner. Am I Dean Martin?) I'm the mind on the road, I'm the lamp post that hails me. |
I am 'dad' to my kids and, as he, for sure, I am Someone Else. Once, eye to eye, we stared each other faceless I am, in truth, the snake you saw, just a split second ago, but, no, its a hose. Potentially, though, I know I'm a real possibility. I'm perving in the back for the rear view eye for its tear, or a sign of breathless sight, for she who'll drink down into me with a lust for blood and omniscience absolute and all-consuming but still. I'm the moth, alive, on the screen the pity the one insistent dead still moment of unmediate, bloody pity, full, the moment, incessant, voiceless, a chorale ascends, roaring cascading light within everywhere that being used to be. I am the Manjushri. I am the golden world gleaming at dawn. I'm the living dead, the blood and bone, I'm a load off my mind plant food, posthumous. And already I'm a compost of gratuitous sacrifices. I am the head on the wheel, in tears, and the ear that hears the snuffling sobs but then, somehow, sort of eavesdropping, they I just stop crying. (on a bike, a glimpse, then gone, before I could think to want her) |
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* The night driver's street is made of folded yellow cellophane and you crack through it like a sharpened stick. And you learn that sight is a question of clues about which we make certain assumptions. At night you operate by a whole other set, encountering the same (I think) phenomena, you reify just the same, but slower, conferring new identities to plane trees and pillar boxes till, in the daylight, things seem awesome, but senselessly overstated. ** He thinks I'm invisible too. Well, of course, to him, with his eyes shut, I am. More than he, to him, anyway, and he's just a metaphor for, I dunno, something. *** "The notion of identifiability via characterization is inconsistent and without any sanction in logical thought because the reciprocal dependence of terms on their logical opposites means that the two terms that make up any oppositional structure must both be present in order for either one to be present. This... means that one cannot have single terms, in isolation with respect to their opposites: either both or neither are present. The paradox of characterization, then, is that in the instance where something is characterized there must be a simultaneous ascription of logically contradictory characteristics to the one entity. Hence, in the very act of gaining their identity entities lose it as the presence of any attribute entails its absence. And in the very act of losing it they gain it since the negation of a characteristic affirms it. The affirmation of any characteristic logically entails the affirmation of its negation and vice versa. Wittgenstein...speaks of a feeling "as if the negation of a proposition had to make it true in a certain sense in order to negate it." ... Thus, contrary to its aims, entity identification is lost at the expense of characterization, rather than gained." (Peter Fenner, Reasoning into Reality Wisdom Publications 1995.) |
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installation detail |