What is empty space in a photograph?

Day 23

We’ve been here for 5 months. No, 15 years. (time is a problem) Love is the absence of any of us in the frame. Every day I wanted to reach for you, I had to ask if your rejection would touch me. And it is not until I understand that there is nothing to reject that I can ever reach for anything again. Fear will not serve you. 

***************************************

Process Notes: 

from here on out, none of this is easy. from here on out, we are wading in the water...

TIME 

Tuesday, August 23, 2005

What would eventually become Katrina started as Tropical Depression Twelve which formed over the Bahamas at 5:00 p.m. EDT (2100 UTC) on August 23, 2005, partially from the remains of Tropical Depression Ten, which had dissipated due to the effects of a nearby upper trough. While the normal standards for numbering tropical depressions in the Atlantic indicate that the old name/number is retained when a depression dissipates and regenerates, satellite data indicated that the surface circulation from tropical depression ten had separated from the mid level low and dissipated as it moved ashore in Cuba. A second tropical wave combined with mid-level remnants of Tropical Depression Ten north of Puerto Rico to form a new, more dynamic system, which was then designated as Tropical Depression Twelve. Simultaneously, the trough in the upper troposphere weakened, causing wind shear in the area to relax, thereby allowing the new tropical depression to develop.

In a later re-analysis, it was determined that the low-level circulation Ten had completely detached and dissipated, with only the remnant mid-level circulation moving on and merging with the aforementioned second tropical wave. As a result, the criteria for keeping the same name and identity were not met.

Photograph: 

Train tunnel near the End of the World


before katrina, we would write exquisite corpses at 17 poets! and put them in an empty wine bottle. after the reading, we would head over to the river and toss them in.

we were so young, and new orleans seemed like it would last forever then.

we had no idea how numbered our days were. no idea a city could disappear. no idea we could lose almost 1900 beings in a matter of days. no idea some of us would never return. no idea some of us would and still not survive.

all deaths were not by drowning. some deaths were slow to surface; it would take months or years for the dying to complete.

we are circling back to that time again. there is disaster and there is the fall out from disaster.

and we must cross all the chambers in order. and we must cross all channels to reach the shore.
and we must move through time in the fashion with which we perceive it.


Plague Journal: 
8.7.20

when memory is danger/ kali keep us safe

Resource: 

Long Night Moon 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9s5Ms3dWCB8

Do you feel love or do you think love?

Day 22

All photographers are liars. They want to convince you the young beauty is not a corpse, the sunset not a dying star, the bloom not already wilted, and yet the poem could be called a lie except sound undoes us, its vibration cannot be held to untruth the way a framing can be said to manipulate time, to capture, to hold still. A photograph is what we wish memory could be. No shutter fast enough to catch the nothing of light: A city can disappear, a country, a whole universe in a whisper. All we catch here is for release. Do you understand what we fish for with the hook of compassion.


*******************************************


Process Notes:

minute variations in any system when amplified lead to chaos-


I'm sorry but I can't let you go now.

If you've come this far, I am coding a new program. It's already happening.

I'm sorry but there is a way that seeing is belief, a way that the word transforms grief, the way I have put my body between you and the world, the way I have used this as reflection, as reciprocity.

There was never a poem.

There was only the spell of design to code a ritual to survive.

Just stick with me anyhow...

I don't know why it is true, but it is true.

I can shift the lines. Proximity is not in space and time, proximity to me is chaos and chaos is a choosing, so if you have chosen to arrive here. Well, there is not the choosing of you as much as the choosing I have done to get us here. And here we arrive, a wonder and a tasking.

I don't know the ending yet, but I know we have shaped time and distance across a city.

I have already seen it die and I have seen it come alive again. This is happening as we speak. This death is inside us, happening even now.

The question was never what will you do with your one wild and precious life, the question is always:

What will you do with your one wild and precious dying.


Photograph:

The Mississippi River and the other shore

"technostrategic language"

is language that attempts to reduce horror to digestible bits, often used in war

instead of "millions of dead" the words "collateral damage"

instead of humans, "targets"

instead of the lives now suffering, we have been reduced to "economic incentive"
to" stimulus relief," to "suffering economy"

even as we know: there is no economy that is suffering

[We're alone in the cave. 

Hold on to that. It's just us and the shadows on the wall.]

i see you invincible
i see you invulnerable
i am the poet and you can never turn my gaze
i will spell disaster
and worded, watch me unclock inside
the dark energy that holds us all
threaded and over lifetimes, if you come
i am calling      i abandon any connection to one
as we travel in plurality
unhook me                        un - hook - me

unhook your tongue


Plague Journal: 
8.3.20

if we cannot tolerate another's suffering, we suffer

do you recall how you ever begin loving anything?

the way water hugs the land, a touching

"For Kali is said to be mad..."
-D. Kingsly

no one is coming. sanity is what i am containing. no one is coming. 15 years of containment and no more.


Resource: 
Hurricane Katrina poem - Walidah Imarisha
https://youtu.be/DJgpkalWSKE

What arises in the minds of all living beings?

Day 21:

1. a never ending cosmos of triggering sound
2. gates to the threshold
3. cloisters of stars
4. stay long enough to part
5. stay long? loose this grasping

************************************************

Process Notes: 

Are we still at war?

What do you believe is going on?

Why poetry?

At the base of it is perfection.

Outside of trauma, one will try to affix to something that can be consistent.

The line: a perfect pitch. A metered feet of sound. A collapse of error.

The box corners, the frame of the photograph, the cutting edge of syllabic. What we adore is symmetry, what we adore is light, what we adore is the way a feeling can be contained in this form, I have the ability to capture anything and make it beautiful.

Don't believe me then try me. I know what I am and cannot be moved.

The problem with surfaced lifetimes and nothing here is enough.

I want everything like I would retrograde back before each of us exploded, i tried to use magic to slip into a life i wanted/ realized too late doubt showing, never thinking here i could offer enough to not make you love me/ but to tear down the walls of keep it all out/ what suffers the heart is potential and the inability to reach/ like i would play against the childing beast of all/ [redacted] calls all survival a type of play/ we wanted the dawn to be our guarding/ the stars themselves to narrate our destiny


inside the poem i build an island of refuge
for i want you to see me
far more than i want you to reach me

Photograph: 

Cemetery behind a chain link fence


How can one find one's mind when one looks elsewhere.

Here is what we found written in the stream:

no matter what you see here
no matter what you feel here
do not doubt
that there is nothing but love
one sound, unending
you have to want to listen


"in the Kabbalah there are names for angels that live in the intervals created by each harmonic"

"safety in the broadest sense is any sound the listener can listen to without amygdala activation"

-Sound Healing 


I spend more time with the dead than with the living. They are ever present. They are the sound in between sound, interstices where the poem lives as well. We carry the current across veils. Or to say, if you hold to this reality, I was distracted from living.

But still, I was trying to meet reality. But the truth was I was often unmoored after the storm. Habits of disappearing. Who ever knows where you are in a city. I spent too much time in unsafe places but having come from unsafe places didn't notice danger. I didn't need to flee what never scared me. I was part of a design already coded and can tell you too much of endings.

I built a space for this community before we exploded so we would recall our intimacy.

I made a space for sound so we could sing our resilience.

I broke consistent because I knew already the world was spinning.

Let me tell you, between the choice of wonder and knowns, you want to lead a life of never seeing too far forward in time.

I imagine anyway. It must be a kind of peace to not know always what is coming next.

Plague Journal: 

6.23.20

if i would have known on the that last night before the city shut down that i would never kiss you again. i would have really kissed you. i would have stayed long enough to say good bye.

but like most of my life, i thought i had all the time in the world.

and i thought you loved me too.

and what has been most consistent in my life is how wrong i am about other people.


Resource:
Survivor Stories: Family reflects on how Hurricane Katrina brought them closer together
https://www.today.com/news/survivor-stories-family-reflects-how-hurricane-katrina-brought-them-closer-t137527

What is the sacrifice?

Day 20

the magical act of the poem/ is you thinking we are getting somewhere/ with language/ when there is nowhere to go/ there is nothing but emptiness

strange always was our time among each other/ the strange lights we are /or how we hide from one another

********************************************


Process Notes: 

inside [redacted]
there is a story, all the way down
we know best stories we build here
in one lifetime, mine the story
it has everything you need, and the stories
interlock, so you have to know the story of where
you came from in order to read the code
you have to access generationally a coding
complete inside you and where it lacks, you
are searching for a matching in code
to translate back to you what is forgot
for there is no separation of family to other
we are all traveling the same paths
on different time lines

time is a problem


maybe we fear love

because it makes us invincible.


Photograph: 

Live Oak near Canal Outlet on Robert E. Lee Blvd.

"The first existence of the universe was brought into being by hearing and its last will be brought to an end by God through hearing." -Adonis

In Buddhism according to the The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which in the original Tibetan was named: The Great Liberation by Hearing in the Intermediate States, at death the dying person will be presented with hallucinations of sights and sounds as the body's senses deplete and withdraw. These images of the Buddhas, both wrathful and beneficent, are said to be "projections" of the original Buddha nature of our being. Not truly projections as they are us. They are the reality of what we are that we forget in the samsara of illusion which is our reality. The book is called Liberation by Hearing as the text is to be read to the dying being to remind them not to panic during death but to recall their teachings and to understand what is happening to them.

It's a shame we don't value life in this culture so much that we would prepare not only our own deaths but be prepared to know what to do when those we love die.

What will you do when those you love die? Will you know how to ease their fear. Will you have eased your own to such an extent that you can hold it. And your own death, how much of each day do you devote to sitting with that reality. Do you know how you will hold yourself in death.

What is it you wish to achieve in dying as there is truly nothing in this world to achieve.


Plague Journal:

6.8.20

the macrocosm of standing together will seep into the microcosm of all of your relationships

when you realize there are an abundance of people who will feed you, you don't have to rely on poison anymore

we recreated templates of power and control in our relationships because we were modeled abuse and control as normal, as ideal, and told it was care taking and love. What we need to normalize is standing besides one another, the next/ to model. We need to learn to stand next to anyone and care take. We need to learn to care for who is besides us, not who we pick and choose. These practices are the antidote to the poison.

We sow the seeds now with every choice- for what grows next.

We are asking for more and will ask for more as we value ourselves.

Learn here in this disaster to stay the course, be consistent, to navigate terror, to survive -- keep going all the way to the other side.

Fixed continuums and fixed models are fantasy. All is birth and death, growth and decay. Do not despair your time here, no matter where you fall in the fluid motions of its sweep. What is low, rises and what is on top must always descend below.

The universe is exact even in spite of all our failure.

Try to hold on to the balance of all that spools out before us.

I am keeping you in sight.


Resource: 
New Orleans' Urban Forest Survived Katrina
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/9773202/ns/us_news-environment/t/new-orleans-urban-forest-survived-katrina/

What is a mistake of light?

Day 19:

[pour out of me]  whisper into night/ pour all of this [out] of me/ this gesture is called: Begging

*Please use the guide for exact measurements.

********************************************

Process Notes: 

"Because dissociation is a breakdown in the continuity of a person's felt sense, it almost always includes distortions of time and perception."

-Waking the Tiger

Lens Flare:

"When light rays coming from a bright source(s) of light (such as the sun or artificial light) directly reach the front element of a camera lens, they can reflect and bounce off different lens elements, diaphragm and even off the sensor, potentially degrading image quality and creating unwanted objects in images."

What is an unwanted object in regards to light? 

Do you look for safety and security but in your heart, you pray for danger to be saved from the little dream we made here. 

Is this time worse than Katrina. I don't know how you would measure a disaster against a disaster. Each is as unique as a fingerprint, a snowflake, a stain, the way we love...

I am learning now there are so many layers to love. 

Have you seen this too. (in the still silence of these days when you can hold your breath against your beating heart, if you can hold it. can you hold it. can you let it go. i slipped inside each moment, stealth. we rotate. i leaned into not clinging, not grasping, and let it wash. let it wash me away, if that's what you want, new orleans. i could never resist you.) 

[and love, love was so slippery. like happiness. love was so abundant. we warred here and it was unnecessary.]

I don't know that light ever makes a mistake. I think we just have to adjust our expectation of seeing. 

Photograph: 

Clouds over the Lakefront 

Time changed during the pandemic, everyone noted. We steep in the familiar, the dissociative experience. 

The night we roller skated by the tracks in the warehouse while the trains rolled by... 

I want you to know at the end of the night, I rolled the whole perimeter of the space and swept it clear of all the energy we left there. All of my life has been a sweeping of sorrows, a gathering of grief, the felt sense of how energy shifts from the body into open space, and we move it. We transform it out into the replicating space of all of this. I wouldn't change a thing. 

I want you to know in all of my life: I have had friends who handed me ways to survive all of this. In the end, there was more love than I could have ever reciprocated. 

And you too, even as the world broke around us, even as you struggled and fought to stay afloat, you gave me the dream I held inside me. I wanted to fly and you said, here: I made this safe for you. 

And it made all of the difference. 

Love doesn't always shape by carving, I discovered in this life. 

Love shapes too by the softest of whispers over time; we pull so close, we forget to listen. 

Plague Journal:

6.7.20

Sometimes love pierces us so deep we want to flee it. Run from swift moving waters before we are carried away. We want to be told, this won't be painful or scary, but life is a meeting of reality where reality lays. We never go back. We are never the same. What about the radical inclusion of I will care for you anyway. Beyond what you give me, how you benefit me, what you do for me. Beyond knowing or else we begin to accept there is no stranger in a species of one. We can define boundaries but keep love unbounded. How many words for it is not the problem. 

The problem is everything you hold as a condition and call love is not love. 

The problem is what you are reaching for is not love at all. 

They say in a dream, everyone is you. I say, here it is exactly the same. 

We move through bardos and nothing changes about what we always are. 

We want so desperately for the little dreams of our lives to matter, but we are dust. And if we understood the way dust interacts with all dust over time. maybe we could put it away long enough to call up that incredible resilience of joy that harbors in each of us. 

Resource: 

Photographer Mario Tama arrived in New Orleans on Aug. 29, 2005, after he was dispatched by the agency Getty Images to document what was shaping up to be one of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history.

http://content.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,2012341_2179993,00.html

What happens once you are free?

Day 17:

disasters takes years to recover from/ that is the nature of their imprint/ you can’t cling to life/ it’s already lost/ all of this, already lost/ look there in the pooling/ once this time moves/ we move forever/ all of this passes/ there is no guarantee of life/ our practices reflect us more than god

**************************************************

Process Notes: 

there is a chaos if i so choose
-A. Notley

"Incidents of abuse are never stand alone events."
-The Body Keeps the Score

What deaths are we ready to allow into our lives now?

Post-Katrina New Orleans in 2006 was a dangerous landscape. There were very few mental health resources, people were using to cope, domestic abuse went up, suicides went up. We sat stranded from each other. A city made of blocks of debris, abandoned homes, darkness for miles, and the emptiness where once we danced.

In Mardi Gras of 2019, we followed St. Anne over the tracks to the river where traditionally New Orleanians deposit their dead. Have you walked these paths? Have you danced to music in the morning as the sun rises over the costumed medley and as you passed the tracks made a wish:

May we be well.
May we be safe.
May we be at peace.

Oh New Orleans.

I have walked at night on the eve of the New Year in a snake like pattern over bridges to clear this waking.

I have walked at dawn from the levee to the place where we pushed through the energy that bounds us to the past.

We have made such a metamorphosis of this living.

And now we ask again, can you sing us through this time of capsizing. Can you listen to this drowning and still tell me we will make it right. Right there, the shore in sight.

I will tell you to reach a place: You must never take your eyes from where you're destined.


"if you have walked outside the machine
  Who are you?"

-Notley

Photograph: 

Reflection in City Park Lagoons

City Park, a 1,300-acre (5.3 km2) public park in New Orleans, Louisiana, is the 87th largest and 20th-most-visited urban public park in the United States. City Park is approximately 50% larger than Central Park in New York City, the municipal park recognized by Americans nationwide as the archetypal urban greenspace. Although it is an urban park whose land is owned by the City of New Orleans, it is administered by the City Park Improvement Association, an arm of state government, not by the New Orleans Parks and Parkways Department. City Park is unusual in that it is a largely self-supporting public park, with most of its annual budget derived from self-generated revenue through user fees and donations. In the wake of the enormous damage inflicted upon the park due to Hurricane Katrina, the Louisiana Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism began to partially subsidize the park's operations.

City Park holds the world's largest collection of mature live oak trees, some older than 600 years in age. The park was founded in 1854, making it the 48th oldest park in the country,[ and established as the "City Park" in 1891.
Source: Wikipedia


Photo by: Coleen Perilloux Landry, Sept, 2005: City Park


Plague Journal:
5.27.20

i thought it was "less life" or "missing life" but it was just a choice & there was stuff to learn here too- it's a matter of how you want to receive lessons

i feel like if i could just be still or quiet enough, i could hear something. is there something beyond expectation. that nails us to suffering. endeavoring to get it "right" when everything is already right- right before us.

he says, i make things harder than they need to be. and it's true. i needed you to speak to me in a language exact. a code i could read that i only wanted to read as safe. inside the complexity of chaos, the simple pattern of return to where we begin and to begin again. over and over. we pass through the chambers and all of the chambers are the same. it seems some days. we aren't getting anywhere. and then we arrive. and you'll know because if you are lost in your life.

it means you never made it this far before.



Resource:
Shipwrecked America:
by Alexandra Kandy Longuet | Eklektik Productions & Crescendo Media Films | France - Belgium | 52' | 2016

On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina, the most violent storm in the history of the United States, ravages New Orleans. The city’s entire population is displaced.
In the land of opportunity, the disaster seems to provide an opportunity for a city’s rebirth on a fairer basis. But against all expectations and despite the Obama presidency, the Crescent City turns into a ground zero for imposing economic shock therapy, intensifying drastically the economic, social and racial inequalities that existed before.
Portrait of the city that became the US laboratory and reveals the divisions of a whole country.
https://vimeo.com/188628485

What is the word for something emerging from nothing?

Day 15:

Practice dying till it comes as natural as inhaling. Practice that or be lost in this cycle of endless suffering for all lifetimes. Amusement is the degree to which you have tricked yourself into believing anything here holds meaning. You can no more be in New Orleans than America than in some fixed notion of your own name. You can destroy a city or kill yourself, and all of consciousness will continue to self replicate. It’s not that you don’t matter, but it is exactly that there is no “you” that exists to matter. Doubt of that truth is the dream; it’s the fabric of this bardo to deceive us. 



******************************************

Process Notes: 

1) the art of visibility
2) the art of attention
3) the art of reciprocity
4) the art of response
5) the art of truth
6) the art of protection
7) the art of travel
8) the art of disclosure
9) the art of grief
10) the art of safety
11) the art of touch
12) the art of entry
13) the art of response
14) the art of intensity
15) the art of confusion
16) the art of moments
17) the art of impulse
18) the art of time
19) the art of shared space
20) the art of devotion
21) the art of admiration
22) the art of communication
23) the art of laughter
24) the art of creating
25) the art of critique
26) the art of design
27) the art of denial
28) the art of sacrifice
29) the art of acceptance
30) the art of gratitude
31) the art of joy
32) the art of relaxation
33) the art of nature
34) the art of beauty
35) the art of the unexpected
36) the art of release
37) the art of gratification
38) the art of memory
39) the art of trust
40) the art of recall
41) the art of codes
42) the art of magnification
43) the art of energy
44) the art of doubling
45) the art of closure
46) the art of beginnings
47) the art of numbness
48) the art of awakening
49) the art of sound
50) the art of vibration
51) the art of collective
52) the art of repetition
53) the art of bodies
54) the the art of no words
55) the art of restraint
56) the art of surrender
57) the art of excess
58) the art of unconditional love
59) the art of fear
60) the art of ecstasy
61) the art of union
62) the art of across time
63) the art of underneath
64) the art of nonduality

Photograph:

Tomb in Odd Fellow's Rest cemetery in Mid-City

Lat:   29.9817°   (29° 58' 54")

Lon:   -90.1106°   (-90° 6' 38")


The Odd Fellows Rest Cemetery in New Orleans, Louisiana was founded in 1849. It includes Renaissance architecture and Exotic Revival architecture. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980, and the listing included one contributing building and one contributing site.
Source: Wikipedia



the first part of every ceremony is the banishing

the second part is the invoking

rest here, i hear joy is coming....

i know how to see far enough forward into time
to build a path to resistance
when i arrived at the crossroads
it was not what i carried but who i brought with me

that i had not counted on, but all of life will torque
on unexpected, so i need you to hold grief in an open palm facing the sky
not with your hand closed turned towards the ground
clutching the fear, if you relax, you will lose it
there is nothing to lose

i promise.



Resource:
Carville Morgue:
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/15/world/americas/15iht-orleans.html

Is death a mirror in which the entire meaning of life is reflected?

Day 12:

m_ther is the word for g_d
c_ty be my h_art
_ngel as ad_ict


we never _scape


*******************************************

Process Notes:

I pray to God to be free of God.
-M. Eckhart


Photograph:

girl walking in floodwaters in Lakeview, Aug 5, 2017

17th Street Canal
30° 0′ 41″ N, 90° 7′ 19″ W
Stop 4 of 4 in the Levee Breaches During Katrina tour

On August 29, 2005 at about 9:45 a.m, a monolith (30-foot long section of the concrete floodwall) failed sending torrents of water into New Orleans’s Lakeview neighborhood. The water level in the Canal at the time of failure was about 5 feet lower than the top of the wall. The breach quickly expanded into a 450 foot wide gap through which storm surge water poured, killing hundreds (directly and indirectly), destroying hundreds of residences, and causing millions of dollars in property damage. Thirty-one (31) bodies were recovered from areas directly flooded.

Post-disaster studies conclude that the breach was due to steel sheet pilings driven to depths that were too shallow. Sadly, in recommending the I-walls with such short sheet pilings, the Corps had relied upon a poorly executed and misinterpreted study it had conducted near Morgan City in 1988. At a savings of $100,000,000, the Corps wrongly concluded it could short-sheet the steel pilings of the 17th Street Canal driving them to depths of not more than 17 feet instead of between 31 and 46.

In January of 2008, Federal Judge Stanwood Duval, of the US District Court for Eastern Louisiana, held the US Army Corps of Engineers responsible for defects in the design of the concrete floodwalls constructed in the levees of the 17th Street Canal; however, the agency could not be held financially liable due to sovereign immunity provided in the Flood Control Act of 1928.

Source: https://neworleanshistorical.org/items/show/275


I cannot locate the GPS coordinates inside me
where it happened.

time is a disruptive metaphor.

can you hear me. can you hear me. [it's not inside me] i am inside of it.

sing me how we make the maze. and sing me how we escape ourselves.

the incredible irony of anyone thinking they don't already live
a life masked.

we go so far out we become ghosts of/  dear heart, what we made
time with one another.

a type of afraid called living: you can tour the remnants
of how we came.

landed, what could make us come alive again. on the map .

mark with an X the prize. the breach. the damage. what is buried.
treasure this take. we orbit until we cannot. until we can break
free.


(New Orleans, City Park, 2005)

"we see the world as it truly is... infinite"
-W. Blake







"There must be someone who crouches at the corner of every constellation."
-K. Hyesoon




Plague Journal: 

5.23.20

the problem with the artist is the natural seduction with the self, an inward turn towards create and away from external amusement, which is to say it is hard to be held to others when the mind is a century of tasks to complete. or i am trying to connect to others but have to lay down the threads to return to the cave of wonder. was the outside world supposed to be as generative as the internal depths of the self. or the mazing of wander to escape these cycles. how to not be centered on the portal of endings. to move from the wound of the past to turn your attention to the actuality of the death that leaves us vulnerable to understanding, to not want to miss the awareness of stepping free of the body. to be of such calm as to breath directly into that light of drift away without fear to cloud the hallucinations of the mind as they arise in conflict to survive. i tried to capture shadow but it depends on light and your closeness to source. the direction of glass. the lens of how to turn to allow in or out. and also how you are limited to self and self's aperture. like Woodman's angel series. you are bound by what you have on hand. you have on hand enough to make the dreaming a caught net.









Francesca Woodman





Resource:
A Decade Later, New Orleans Reflects on Hurricane Katrina in New Shows
https://news.artnet.com/exhibitions/hurricane-katrina-in-new-art-shows-326259