Exposition Park

Diorama

28 | Diorama [after Magali Lara] 1. [Snake] Can we so name with any certainty as to be proprietors of sight? And does the night watch really matter? Misgivings that insinuate when issued from the animal aspect, intelligence unable to avoid: something we fear because it moves faster, proves more cunning, leads us into situations that belie our brittle nature. As though transcribed into a journal or travel log, subject at breach point, surrounded by flames, in the process of spilling or secreting; occurrence of blaze and blast. In the wound left by these questions—I can’t remember what I wanted—such sight as there is rejected to identify with the beast, “I can guide myself by way of touch, through hearing, or with the tongue. But not the eyes.” A borderland state between demise and rebirth: place parallel to childhood where fingers recur those first prohibitions—of mixing and diluting , of wallowing in our own smear—so as to achieve, at last, a change of skin. In the underpinnings and semantic slippage—as totem and taboo, as a figure of movement, as the shorthand for temptation and erotic consequence , as an omen of danger and death, as the simile for writing or as a pattern of abstraction—the snake an endless oscillation of emblem and motif: plasticity itself, in form pliable and by line perverse, in all things deviation , from coiled spiral glyph to ascending fret. Translucent฀paper฀shrunk฀ and฀crinkled฀by฀the฀wetness฀of฀the฀watercolors,฀these฀tendrils฀and฀probes. “One of two folds to surround an opening” and the intellect by way of touch and senses, when the sheltered part of the psyche surges now with a violence demanding a new gauge to measure the categories of a self. Blur in the borders between determined nature of the symbolic and ephemeral condition of the real: where the outside—unless subsisting inside—is meaningless. | 29 2. [Habitat] Soy la única que no se mueve. No hubo quién tras las dos puertas donde el horizonte fue el agua derramada de la lluvia anterior Columna vegetal la hiedra desde Uno de los tres jarrones —como la noche por el vientre retrato, como un desierto, el de este sueño vertido (entre los árboles) sin mirar atrás Supe al fin cómo estaba hecho. 30 | 3. [Ice] decibel thread | mineral spool | entropic blue mind-line diamond willow-wood gland tress headstone splinter plunge rime grip spiral copse cascade forefinger rib-cage throng silica of the lungs | half-breed of ground and sea | color of a coma zodiac pubis colony court landform ledger blemish orb monitor latex filament glue miasma tissue cogwheel speech short long | long short short short | long short long short platform slashes tripwire ink thumb cluster lozenge loop anemone method number crust chalk-circle category predicate sough | 31 Bishopric of Darwin | Narrows of Morse | Inlets of Piaget wave crest fracture semaphore shell graphite tidewater dioxide flange contusion wax analgesic milk coal encasing metal bone weight of sapphire | breath below sea level | cargo of division into parts lifespanoftheharbormaster|daughtersowingtoice|leaguesunderPatagonia somewhereoverthisedge | anywherebuthere | nowherenearcompletion ...