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


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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

"Live Art"

"Losing control is the worst thing that can happen."

"I never saw a host of angels mowing down my lawn. I don't even have a lawn. 

It just seems like I do sometimes." 

-Laurie Anderson

"Live Art" 

an angel will destroy you. 

and call it love because that's all it knows. 

an angel fits into a glove

an angel fits into a shoe

the voice inside me sd: i am older than love 

    what you seek at the end of the great tap root, always hungry, love concepts

sieves the heart, who wrote its coding, & i am. 

                    assigned a task. a mapping, could fold wings down 

travel so deep. you will keep: 

  what is older than love, i was designed to get close enough to call back

inside sound. 

aware & unaware of the plurality. 

                    i was not pretending

madness. i was not performing 

        (of course, i was performing) i went intothecracks

in thru the breaking, you have to mine: light meets light in the darkness 

to say i was a poem, & so fly 

dissociated inside the puzzle, you can solve a maze from above

watch me 

because she could not rewrite 

            the entire story, i wanted to throw

                                                                 it all away 

 i was so ashamed of my mind 

     i was so in love  (terrible&brilliant) i... i was trying 

to not be infection:  (you can't talk to the echthroi that long, tell her) 

they say angels are notorious liars. 

it's when i can't feel the words i am saying: language plummets

it all hits the same

inside the dreaming of can we survive

& i did not: i watched her die

i saw them bury her

 i stretched out that last breath into 6 years so thin i could see: make me believe 

              be a door. transit a sacrifice you can't touch here. 

do you exist when i close my eyes. i call out in the dreaming & i'll come, he says. 

the point is: you made something beautiful. hold on. 

 you made something beautiful - tell me how you could lose a miracle

the best thing i ever did in my life was i built a net

i knew i wasn't safe alone. so i built a net of people 

                                 who could choose to hold this. 

 there is nothing easy about holding a person 

              don't kid yourself: there is nothing easy about holding a person 

if a person is easy to hold, then question why your hands are so light. 

for we get away with secrets, for we lie & lie 

but none of us get out just being "easy" 

i would never trade madness for easy, i would never trade 

being touched for happy, 

in the sound experiment of being human: I watched you all 

make yourself small for love. 

i do it too. we think maybe no one will notice, i don' t belong here. 

            where love would have bloomed, i addict control. and the flow

  

was sound, i was that wilderness, what draws and repels

the cannot tame. somehow i created the perfect life: 

no one can touch me, the bargain i made to stay safe. 

an angel will destroy you. 

and call it love because it’s all there is.

Dear Sylvia

Dear Sylvia,

i read your life so carefully

i tried to navigate the death drive

tried to squeeze love from what was not love

& survived, the stop point of my life

i came so close i could taste it, licked the echo

chamber where dying was desire’s great wing

it has only been my mind i have been afraid of

here in this place of: the great stones stacked

so we room & who owns us now

to say i have tombed in the maw of surrender

a stacking of bee wings collated to glisten

under dew, the harping of sound we caught breeze

whispers so true, my heart leaped, and i am

i am unaware of how to travel

forward in time any longer

when coiled to the back of me remainders

once i was ordinary, oh a woman hollows

you told me to sing until my voice hoarsed

under a gritting & the world now it is

none of us can pretend, every stain

doom mark, more terrifying, we spell

till love’s shadow creeps upon the ledge

where we still, where we teeter, i had thought

to throw this life away

i had thought: all night it seems natural

and the blades tumbled into my tongue

lilacs of shame color the dreaming, and the stars

sway slightly in the breeze of never was

& that is the gift, i was given

by sibling, to be amid the hectic fire

and to not be the one who burns

LAST POEM

Because I want you to see me as I take myself apart. 

-R. Froude, Your Love Alone is Not Enough

LAST POEM 

for dave

here is the root of it

[_____pulled up

it took me over 5 years

to be able to shape the sound 

of it _____]

i gave you the best parts of me

we gave the world the best parts of us

we made together the best parts of us

we gave to one another the best parts

pulled 3x from my body

i gave you the best parts of me

portal of my body, between us we made sacred

outside any poem we wrote, we made beauty 

beyond telling, the heart of it

nothing existed before we poured 

into one another all we took for granted

& all of the light & what we thought of 

was love               was love

& you hated me

words collected like knives

we destroyed all of it 

you wanted me to die

that body that pooled life 

you wanted it to not exist

to douse, to eradicate, to allow 

to slip away, you hated each part 

as if it is possible 

to be both the best...

it is possible 

to be the best & the worst

collision of my life 

closed circle: i gave you the best parts of me 

that is what islands us (me) 

where no one can reach

& i could not open to feel ever 

again in the not safe 

cave of plenty, you rolled a rock in front

of the entrance 

&

the wilderness 

of things 

she sings inside the darkness

    i hear her even now 

                                   i whisper to her: escape, rescue, abandon

she mirrors back to me:   

                                    all of your wor(l)ds hold no meaning 

DOLLBABY: Hysteric

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ANATOMY OF A DOLLBABY:: [Category of Display, Madness in the Physical Form of this Female Body under excavation of language] or is this real life.

explicate the construction of the doll

each doll is a book of existence

                                   a piece of hysteria

drawing a familiar  -- linear digression 

connecting us all into one

dear love,

i am losing my mind. it's not alarming yet. here i am still in your sight lines, in this shatter. i am listening to the voices in my head like i never have before. i was always afraid of what they would have me remember. what they would speak of and to speak of it until eternity, we cannot ever erase what happens to us.

all dolls are the same dolls

dear seraph,

you run a code along a line, a sound, you follow the exact path you create by sounds you pay attention to --it's not a telling or a retelling, it's a channel. to open new paths in your mind. a virus cracks it open. an angel is a virus speaking inside your mind. what are you to me. you mirror. watch the way a program runs you.

Construction of the performance: 

what is the poetics of what happens in a bed. what is a hysteric performance. how does the plaything allow for narrative to structure.

you look just like a dolly

can you make safe happen
it's not a wound/ it's a door

 i need you to see me clearly/ this side of sane/ i need you to see me before sound tears it apart/ the last bits of what makes it a story of her/ she disappears / that’s what happens/ she disappears/ know that it’s a choice/ like suicide/ but instead of erasing the body/ i’m erasing identity/ attachment to self/ made up of sanity/ made up of the structure of sound

a poem can be a spell that slips veils. i saw them last night, by candlelight and so you can tell me i'm mad but i know what i see. i know what i am. made by what you would have me be to carve a path to i will heal this damage if it kills me. i am dead and you make me want to be alive.

we want to be sung back into truth

i cut nelly loose after 5 years of being caught in the chair of secrets. who can keep you from holding a secret. why even a gun can't shoot me clear for years, dear brother. dear brother, how many of us die under the stars alone before we can scream. and so now i am the haunting of you.

a new voice enters {HER} the poet's mind :: beyond the angel. another who holds an ancient tongue.

we learned to forget who we are. we learned to never speak. to wade into the quiet of this is a house. this is a table. this is a morning. we are eating breakfast. tell me mother, why i have no memory of ever being a girl.

was  i born into this life not a child. but a plaything. a doll.

she has nothing but eyes to tell you what she’s thinking. but no one is looking.

no one sees her at all.

the doll will not admit what scares her.

show me on the doll where they broke into your programming.

show me on the doll where they broke into your programming.

show me on the doll. show me the doll. show me the doll.

we make everything better for her.

there's a reason the body remembers what we forget. 

there's a reason the mind knows what the body can't feel. 

there's a reason we take the doll from the chair and hold her mothering all we are. 

she can't close her eyes unless she's laying down. 

and we should lay down now brother, we should lay it all down for the world to see.