Learning of his death, I shared that when I was writing about his work alongside that of the great artist Adrian Piper, he was so generous with his time and with sharing images of his art. I remain appreciative of his kindness and generosity.

More recently, I was reading Salar Mameni’s brilliant book Terracene and they (Salar) were critiquing the imperialist fascist art history that theorized the ‘world as a work of art’—where ‘world’s’ violent materialization into formable capacity was predicated on imperialism, extraction, and militarism

And then I was thinking about how Pope L, in a set of interviews, said that “the idea of a finished art work is a fiction, that “knowing what you’re doing is overrated, and that in response to a question about what writing and art “give to each other, he said “time”…

…

thinking about Mameni and Pope.L’s words together, I wonder of the stakes…

...of dwelling in and with the uncertainty, what evades epistemic and aesthetic enclosure, and that perhaps the valorization of the incomplete work of art is necessary to earth’s very survival …

…for Pope. L, in that relay between writing and performance is a duration, which for the artist, was often an opportunity for shared movement, a shared embrace and commitment to horizontal relation and living…a shared being-with the ground..

that collective embrace of the horizontal—informed by Pope L.’s critique of the anti-black, ableist, and anti-poor visible invisibilization of unhoused peoples and of unhoused social life—maybe also opened something like a momentary recalibration (Pope L. often named “gravity” as a collaborator)…a recalibration of space and time that generalized horizontality toward a hyper-extracted earth’s uncategorizable, released living

into and as an art-unmaking of its own design

with and against space and time as they unknow themselves

…..not sure any of this makes sense, and maybe following another Pope. L.’s instructions, sense is often over-rated too. With so much gratitude

image is from my book Wandering: Philosophical Performances of Racial and Sexual Freedom (Duke 2014)

Work referenced

Mameni, Salar. 2023. Terrracene: A Crude Aesthetics. Durham: Duke UP.

Pope L, William. “William Pope. L. is Making a Commitment to Art,” Louisiana Channel/ Youtube;

Pope.L, William. “As a tool, meaning has its limits: On being inspired by the romantics and the power of the absurd,” The Art Newspaper, https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2023/11/17/as-a-tool-meaning-has-its-limits-popel-on-being-inspired-by-the-romantics-and-the-power-of-the-absurd

Blue Turned Temporal, 2019, Lorna Simpson; photo by me

“Whole glaciers, large as Ohio, floating masses of static water. All of them pale

frosted azuls. It makes me wonder – yet again – was there ever such a thing

as whiteness? I am beginning to grow suspicious. An open window.

I am blue.”

--Robin Coste Lewis (note 1)

I’ve been thinking about ice for a while.

How to sit and stay with the word, what it describes and presumably indicates...and how to write that word, that tiny ensemble of three letters while contending with its militarized expression, its anti-black, anti-brown, anti-”refugitive” animus (Jones; note 2). In fact, one cannot even do an internet search about “ice”, its geologic and earthly history without the first three pages of results spilling anti-black and anti-brown racism and surveillance alongside a running tally of raids, searches and seizures. Life broken in half. Not water’s frozen expression but its theft as border officials steal bottles from deserts. Water ceases to be water, just as ice ceases to be ice.

But I’m already off course because what the artist and poet Lorna Simpson and Robin Coste Lewis respectively describe and depict isn’t ice but glaciers and a glacier is “a huge mass of many years of snow, ice, rock, sediment, and water. It originates on land and moves down slope under the influence of its own weight and gravity” (note 3). And given the origins of Coste Lewis’s writing, which is an experimental cross-temporal, letter to a long-gone interlocutor, African American North pole explorer Matthew Henson, such ice is of the North Pole.

so much unencroachable bounty in Robin Coste Lewis’ formulation about ice, or more nearly glaciers, about their originary blueness, not whiteness…

Coste Lewis’s poetic engagement with water’s frozen iteration along with learning about the north pole’s imperceptible off centeredness--the pole is on a constantly shifting mass of ice--helps us return to it

against its discovery.

Tragically, to witness ice’s violent definition as violence’s enactment to see the lie of ice’s presumptively originary whiteness.

According to scholars Lisa Bloom and Erik Wilson, the pole emerged at another point in history, as a cold dream of American empire’s crystalline expression and occupation…imperially figured as a blank slate and terra nullius, the interplay of light and dark, a presumptively terroristic nothingness thick with anti-black and anti-indigenous Lockean-Christological imposition. (note: 4)

But the point, the deeply pulled and magnetically and chromatically weighted (constantly drifting!!!!!!!) point is that white isn’t originally, teleologically true at earth’s beginning and end. Rather, what’s at the beginning and all over, nonteleologically and in/visibly out of reach, is blue.

and blue is not white.

Blues are the beginning and the end and when I say the end I mean the bottom, the unknowable “quality of light” at the ocean’s floor [Lorde, note 5]]. In that way, for Lorna Simpson’s “Darkening” exhibition to begin with a line from Robin Coste Lewis’s beautiful essay “Using Black to Paint Light” is to provide a kind of ethico-geological, which is to say, chromatic instruction. Differently said, being before that Robin Coste Lewis quote which conceptually and architecturally prefaces Lorna Simpson’s recent exhibit Darkening, is to be with blue, a beginning “said better than in the beginning.” (note 6)

And blue’s chromatic displacement of whiteness changes everything.

I.

Darkening consists of large, floor to ceiling paintings, featuring towering and descending glaciers. Rich in blues of every shade, ink washes the canvas of screen printed glaciers which are, as well, superimposed with thin vertical newsprint of unknown article subject.

Blue is distinct in its (blue’s) capacity for the longest range of travel, from star to ocean floor. Blue, not white, is with the earth in its crystallized stillness and in its aquatic insurgencies.

"According to the magazine Scientific American: "The ocean looks blue because red, orange and yellow (long wavelength light) are absorbed more strongly by water than is blue (short wavelength light). So when white light from the sun enters the ocean, it is mostly the blue that gets returned. Same reason the sky is blue."[...] In other words, the color of the ocean and the color of the sky are related but occur independently of each other: in both cases, the preferential absorption of long-wavelength (reddish) light gives rise to the blue. Note that this effect only works if the water is very pure; if the water is full of mud, algae or other impurities, the light scattered off these impurities will overwhelm the water's natural blueness.” (note 7)

As the shortest wavelength, blue is unabsorbed...left alone, or as Coste Lewis and poet Dionne Brand might both say together, arrives…Where arrival is unabsorption. Where arrival might be unencumbered passage..Where arrivals are untrespassable and elusive, outside the violence of arrest and enclosure…

To be continued

**

Notes

1.) From “Robin Coste Lewis’s, “Using Black to Paint Light: Walking Through a Matisse Exhibit Thinking about the Arctic and Matthew Henson”, Gulf Coast 29, no. 1 (Winter-Spring 2017)

2.) Gayl Jones coins the term “refugitive” in her novel Mosquito (Beacon: 2000) as a way of attending to The Sanctuary Movement and its aligning the Underground Railroad with the 1980s movement to safehouse undocumented people in the U.S.

3.) https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/what-glacier

4.) See Lisa Bloom’s Gender on Ice: American Ideologies of Polar Expeditions (University of Minnesota Press, 1993) and Erik Wilson’s The Spiritual History of Ice: Romanticism, Science and the Imagination (Palgrave, 2003)

5.) Lorde, Audre. “Poetry is Not a Luxury,” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde [New York: Crossing Press, 2007.

6.) Jones, Gayl. Corregidora. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1987

7.) “Why does the ocean appear blue? Is it because it reflects the color of the sky?”, Scientific American, October 21, 1999.

This week I read the essay-lecture, “Toward Another Shape of this World” by Dr. Rinaldo Walcott, who brilliantly beautifully instructs that “people’s movement today is broken into categories so that managing their access to resources can be done in relation to the maldistribution of those resources….”

And later Dr. Walcott writes, “let me propose that the term migrant is an assault on being…it is an assault because it is our species’ drive to move, for both survival and transmutation..”

This morning, the first day of Eid, I saw two photos, one of Palestinians in Gaza praying alongside rubble, aspiring for unbroken living amidst broken earth (image on instagram via poet Mosab Abu Toha, not reproduced here)

The second image was of a star posted by NASA, of a “Spirograph nebula”—

-

in the star’s center like its beating heart was the glow of a star that died thousands of years ago

like trees, stars carry the history of passage in their living…not as a border but as a glowing entanglement. A light held close in their vibrational fabric…”held but not had,” as poet Nathaniel Mackey might say…

I thought about how stars carry their dead behind them…and not only that …how they enfold those who have passed into a common project of living…

cosmic living isn’t marked by borders but by entanglement…cosmic living is actually anti-border..something I was thinking about this am and wanted to share. and with appreciation to Professor Walcott

“What if we could detach repair not only from restoration but also from the very idea of the original? So that it’s not that repair comes first but that it comes before. Then, making and repair are inseparable, devoted to one another, …”—Fred Moten, “Nobody, Everybody/prayer, prepare, repair (with Harold Mendez)” from Poetics of the Undercommons

“Maybe I am after a performative experimental grammar where a run-on sentence isn’t so much “bad grammar” as much as it is an insistence on the possibility of a feral existence that is not hemmed in on all sides..”—Kameelah Janan Rasheed, “Vibrating Sentences,” Protocinema

”

—

“What if we” and “Maybe” are beautiful ways to begin

“What if we” dwelled with “repair” as the condition for every sentence and wordly arrangement. Where repair, following Fred Moten, isn’t about restoration in some self-same, Enlightenment, platonic sense…but rather, where to “repair” is to return to a broken pairing, a togetherness ignored…what Erin Manning and Brian Massumi call the “commotional” field disavowed when sentences got and get instrumentalized toward racist, ableist, sexist, cis-heteronormative, earth-extracting and life-enclosing ends. Where grammar, following Kameelah Janan Rasheed gets deployed as a regulatory regime such that the bend of the letter, the song letters together sing in the wind of their ‘maybes’ gets stilled against themselves.

Put differently, and learning from and with Fred Moten and Kameelah Janan Rasheed together, how might beginning with “maybe”, a word which lets some air into a sentence— the word bending the straightness and oppressive verticality of the letter/word’s line— open up the possibility of witnessing repair’s anoriginal plentitude… a way to dwell with the sentence as a kind of earthly reparative assertion against the sentences that hurt and break.

Wishing you good energy and support as you create with your words and sentences in this new year.

Works Cited

Moten, Fred. “nobody, everybody/ prayer, prepare, repair (with Harold Mendez). From A Poetics of the Undercommons by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney. New York: Sputnik & Fizzle.

Massumi, Brian and Erin Manning. Thought in the Act. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.

Rasheed, Kameelah Janan. 2024. “Vibrating Sentences,” Protocinema, https://www.protocinema.org/protodispatch/vibrating-sentences

Of writing’s tentative newness.

Of a door being opened so that air gets in.

Perhaps, with draft too, there’s the suggestion of a bent table, something on its side, something that can be leaned or rested upon so that an architectural or cinematic or unformed dream can be crafted and sustained in its unfinishedness.

Substack is a daunting place because, for me and my relation to it, it’s a place of and for drafts…for a kind of clothesline rustle and display of half or unfinished thoughts

…which is how thinking is…which is how writing is…

still, even the written or drawn or painted or sculpted itself bespeaks a finishedness that is never not vulnerable to air…the peeling back or blurred line that evokes a door-tapping wind of rethinking…the ecological shift that comes with reimagination…

Maybe being okay with the draft in all of its open, bent airy incertitude is about embracing all that it is.. a way of relating to the word or line or turn of paint and clay that recognizes its own vast and changing weather systems…its resistance to ends…and the idea of fixed arrangements..🌺

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heidi and I connected on social media, and I’m grateful to have met them there and to have been introduced to their beautiful writing. They were kind enough to send me a copy of their poetry collection which I received last week.

There’s always more to say and to celebrate. I made a substack as a place for the beginnings of celebrations…recognizing that they will unfold in other ways and in other forms over time..

Indeed, art takes its time and its impressions sometimes show up when you’re in their immediate presence, as with heidi’s book, when the page is open and the type within reach.

At the same and at unanticipated times, , art registers almost like a wind or shudder or some other mode of being astonished...in the… space, as with books, between type…that hard-to-describe rustling blur around the end of a word… as if the words flicker like a torrent of dried leaves, where what the poet makes becomes itself beyond the inky-leafy arrangement of beauty on paper. Staying around and floating, even when the book isn’t physically near, like meteoric dust

I’ve begun reading and dwelling with the first few poems of the collection, which themselves invite us to read toward and as a dwelling. Not dwelling as settlement but rather as a kind of being-with the word on the page…as if it were a feel of rain, a ripple of heat, something seismic under the tongue…something passing through…ephemeral …-as if the reader and the word were part of an intra constellational dance that passed through just as the earth once tried to . before the earth was stopped… held so tight that it became a planet, a globe…held so tight that conquest lied to say it no longer moved…

The fourth poem “sonnet for the study of the earth in dream state” formally re-orients the reader, inviting the book to be opened horizontally and then to be experienced that way. The poem seems a gesture towards a complex regard for earth’s sentience, not an attestation of its sentience or a suggestion that the poet’s presence is necessary for such sentience’s affirmation. Rather, the dream is maybe a kind of joining with the chorus that is earth’s already experience, a stay with its “procession of watchful animacies” and intimacies that move as its living…the dream seeming an occasion for the “I” of the poem to achingly dissolve into the earth’s ache…maybe recognizing the poem itself isn’t closed type, a fixed and dominative pen, but an effect of an open palmed, open booked reach…that also shares the hurt of the once floating (still floating) more than-rock…maybe the poem’s horizontality is a way to express and enact that non-Euclidean turn…

June Jordan once said “to begin is no more agony than opening your hand”...and I wonder, based on the name if Ephemeral might move in that way…a beginning that invites poetry to spin with the earth not stop it… tries to listen for the ice that “sings,” tries to hold what the “groaning earth” harbors and… yet to somehow recognize that writing with an open hand means that the pen might roll off…joining the earth in and as its airy volition......- a hand that doesn’t harm or take but that seeks a fleshy sandy windy embrace..

Gently asking the page to try to hold earth’s elusive non-singularity in/against the word that hopes to meet it…with the extra spaces between words…making room for its multiplicitous scatter and spin …

I’m still close to the beginning of the collection..I’m not sure when I’ll get to the other poems within it but I know I will. But, certainly, for now, they remain alongside other unfinished readings and writings, and paintings that I’ve encountered, spent time with, and tried to meet somehow when I have opportunity to sit and attend–

turns of letter and acrylic that move together as what I remain grateful for, what I’ll return to and be with…

Works Cited

Jordan, June. 2007. “Who Look at Me” (poem), From Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan. Fort Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press.

restrepo rhodes, heidi andrea. 2024. Ephemeral, tr. Alexandra Lytton Regalado and Rocío Bolaños. The Lorca Latinx Poetry Prize in collaboration with Letras Latinas and the EcoTheo Collective

**all quoted phrases, including title” are from “sonnet for the study of the earth in dream state**

While attending the retrospective, I spent some time with O’Grady’s “found poems” created and installed as part of her 1977 series, Cutting Out the New York Times.

I was moved by the ways that their arrangements seemed to issue forth another story. Stories decentered and marginalized when the news voices state interest, colludes with the operations of white supremacy, settler colonialism, patriarchy, climate change denial, and the assumption that all social life and experience can be captured by words and their presumptively objective, rationalist ordering.

Combining concrete poetry and college techniques, O’Grady asks us to rerelate to what is within the news but often hidden by its organization.

(From Cutting Out The New York Times)

“Inside” “The Brain”

“Men and War” “Perform” “Again”

“Plants” “Get Lost”

On the wall, as affixed, the above might read as a poem relating the imperialist, militaristic, patriarchal, and ableist devouring of earthly life as post-Enlightenment’s enduring, brutal operations.

Yet, O’Grady’s bringing this to the surface is co-extensive with an aesthetic respatialization..such that, at times, terrible and, at others forboding, sets of phrases, when decontextualized and defamiliarized, makes some other arrangements possible. That is, O’Grady’s re-presentation makes me wonder: what if “inside,” when on the same line but separated (and slightly askew) from the “brain,” makes of interiors undifferentiated refuges disaggregated from the lie of a mind/body split?

I also wonder if “plants” aren’t necessarily lost but that in the loosening of the predicate, they (plants) might find a way to re-relate to not being found…where not being found accrues to survival…All of this re-arrangement is the brilliant work and invitation of the artist, to unsettle the grammar of the news toward other poetic and ecological possibilities..a Black feminist aesthetic refashioning of space and word so that other stories might flourish.

Flowers for Lorraine O’Grady and her loved ones

“I don’t know whether the bird you are holding is dead or alive, but what I do know is that it is in your hands. It is in your hands.”—Toni Morrison

Thirty-one years ago today Toni Morrison delivered her acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize in Literature. Across the speech, she invites the listener to dwell with the metaphor of language as a bird in one’s hands..where such a bird and/or words themselves might be imagined, always, as getting ready for flight…as capable of changing the air in the very instant of their departure…as moving and arriving safely, without being harmed or harming along the way… provided they are well-nurtured in their early days…

As open, unfinished, textural and aesthetic newness

moving against the grammars of white supremacist, cis-heteronormative, ableist, settler and capitalist enclosure in/with the arrangement and rearrangement of letters and words as open, as drafty…

air let in, no border or gate. No anti-bird architecture

sentences that participate in the earthly project of undivided living…With respect to Morrison’s literary and aesthetic project and legacy, writing and wordly arrangement is an environment where Black women’s living can flourish...a passage on a page bespeaks other kinds of passage..unsurveilled, green and warm; phrases leave open occasions for refuge and subterfuge. The spacing itself another opportunity for private, untranslated dwelling…

and

Learning from Morrison and the lessons imparted in her acceptance speech, I wonder:

what if we thought of our sentences as a place with a responsibility to living’s unenclosed, deregulated expression…a life that hopes to fly once the conditions are right… that as writers..we might think of letters, sentences and words themselves as part of those conditions…that we can help with building a roost for/as new wordly arrangements..recognizing that such living will also and always depart, …that roosts are temporary but also warm and can be returned to.. A sentence or phrase’s leafy bed adjusted and remade when the weather outside of them shifts.

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Works Cited

Morrison, Toni. 1993. The Nobel Prize in Literature: Acceptance Speech. New York: Knopf Books.

What are some of your favorite sentences?

?

“she would have liked meadow lilies, because the very word meadow made her breathe more deeply, and either fling her arms or want to fling her arms, depending on who was by, rapturously up to whatever was watching in the sky.”--Gwendolyn Brooks, Maud Martha

This weekend I saw one of Lindsay Adams’s paintings on instagram (posted by Patron Gallery in conjunction with Adams). The 2024 painting “If it's greener, it's because I watered it” is a flourish of deep greens and blues, errant lines of red and yellow that seem to bear the wind in their abstractional application and arrangement. There’s an abiding saturation of green that holds the airy red and dark blue… as if green is its gravity.. a gravity made by the artist’s own watering, an elusive ecology conjured when brush meets the circular canvas.

If it’s greener, it’s because I watered it, 2024

(Oil on canvas)

screenshot of art; used with permission of artist)

Jasmin Hernandez, in conversation with Adams, writes “Adams is a Black American woman artist living with cerebral palsy (CP). Her floral pieces serve as a portal to her selfhood. She has explained that the flora serves ‘as subject and the visual foundation of the work, while the content is a deeper conversation with myself.’ The different flowers represent not only various aspects of Adams’s identity but also the many ways in which she is marginalized.” (Hernandez; Adams cited within; https://www.nga.gov/stories/lindsay-adams-intimate-paintings.html)

Perhaps this elusive ecology, what alchemizes in the movement between brush and canvas, the water and the green, is the untrammelable ground for this “deeper conversation.” After Brooks’s Maud Martha, maybe the green of the canvas moves as a meadow where the artist might “breathe more deeply” (Brooks, 1)

This weekend, on instagram, thinking about Adams’s paintings, I wrote that “they invite us to return to earth abstractly, or rather to/with earth as abstraction. Not in the sense of distance and removal but rather as an aesthetic occasion for what Dr. Philip Brian Harper might call new “social facts”…when the paint completely washes the canvas and the colors blur such that atmosphere and flower and ground and gravity seem an event, a new social fact…maybe it's a sociality that, as Dr. Fred Moten and Dr. Saidiya Hartman might say, bespeaks a living that does not bear the “trace of human inhabitation”… of settlement’s vicious separable interest.” (Harper, 2015; Hartman and Moten with Carter and Cervenak, FHI, 2017).

…an ana-bouquet arranged and released by the painter into the painted earths’ own dream and scattered across the path where the artist might meet herself.

That is, just as the art moves within a public and I think invites us to imagine earth unmoored from purpose or use..to unimagine earth or rather concede that the earth is an event of earth, before and beyond the living that bears “the trace of human inhabitation”...Adams’s relation to her paintings, thinking about the artist’s conversation with Jasmin Hernandez above, arguably conjures the earth, the unheld green, as an occasion for that safe harbored conversation, a meadow that rustles against enclosure and with the kinesis of “emergent,” uncategorizable, wayward flourish and as private breath of green (nps).

Works Cited:

Brooks, Gwendolyn. 1993 (reprint). Maud Martha. Chicago: Third World Press.

Harper, Philip Brian. 2015. Abstractionist Aesthetics: Artistic Form and Social Critique in African American Culture, New York: NYU Press.

Hernandez, Jasmin. “Lindsay Adams’s Intimate Paintings Explore Place, the Self, and Memory,” National Gallery of Art, https://www.nga.gov/stories/lindsay-adams-intimate-paintings.html

“The Meaning of Meadow,” National Park Service/NPS

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“The Black Outdoors: Conversation Between Saidiya V. Hartman, Fred Moten, J. Kameron Carter and Sarah Jane Cervenak. availalble on youtube.