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.

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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

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

Why didn't I do it for you?

Day 5:

A photograph is a lie. It takes the soul of what is sacred and lays it flat as if to say: Here is the shape of life, watered to disaster. Dis-aster: “bad star” or “ill-starred” like the shade of me disappears underground and between hooks and seeds, I can’t catalogue fast enough the labyrinth of plenty to undo deceit bloomed here. Everything I have learned about love, I have learned in this city: That is a truth I will die under. Ask me, and I’ll tell you, I had to hide it away to forget your name. That is how much you hurt me.


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Process Notes:


“Many therapists see CPTSD as an attachment disorder. CPTSD almost always has emotional neglect at its core… survivors typically struggle to find and maintain healthy supportive relationships in their adult lives.” –P. Walker


if you are quantum fixt to me
know we are going toward pure light

grief is like touching the surface
of water
you don’t become the water
and yet

“What is it that we as humans ultimately depend on? We depend on our words. We are suspended in language.”   -N. Bohr

Sound moves at 330 meters per second in air.


we do not survive our lives
so forgive, can you forgive
wave matter not duplicated but
the smeared out of my face
in the end, i will have the silence
i long for, i am untouchable
inside the box, i do not exist
i will extinct this song

In December of 2019, I went to a photography show with a friend who I grew up with in New Orleans east. Which photo is your favorite, I asked. And then we picked the same one: A picture of the lakefront. Nothing bad ever happened at the lakefront, I said. The photographer gave me the picture framed for my birthday, and I hung it across from my bed so every morning when I woke up, I would see it. When the pandemic hit, I would walk the lakefront for hours just like my mom and I would after my brother suicided. Nothing bad ever happens at the lakefront. We walk the paths of grief so often they familiar. I watch the photo on my wall, and the scene never moves. And we never move. We stay rooted to the places that have watched us suffer.

New Orleans Historic Collection, West End Amusement park 

Photograph:

New Orleans Lakefront with my shadow in it
30.0385° N, 90.0264° W

Hurricane Katrina hit southeast Louisiana on August 29, 2005. As the waters of Lake Pontchartrain rose with the storm, a section of levee floodwall along the 17th Street Canal near its mouth with the lake collapsed catastrophically. This was one of the most significant levee failures which occurred in the wake of Katrina's landfall and put the majority of the city underwater.
Floodwaters from the floodwall breach inundated large parts of the neighborhood in a matter of minutes. Near the breach itself, the force of the rushing water uprooted trees and even separated some houses from their foundations. Some areas received as much as fourteen feet of floodwater.
source: Wikipedia


In December of 20___, I went to a ______________ with a __________ who __ grew up with in New Orleans east. Which ________ is your favorite, __ asked. And then we picked the __________: A picture of the l_________. Nothing _______ ever happened at the lakefront, ____ said. The ________ gave me the picture framed for my ________and I hung it across from my _____so every _______when I woke up, I would see ___. When the XXXXXXXXX hit, I would walk the _______ for hours just like my ______ and I would after my XXXXXXXX suicided. Nothing ____ happens at the lakefront. We walk the paths of ______ so often they _________. I watch the _______ on my wall, and the scene there never ________. And we never ________. We stay _______ to the places that have watched us suffer.



Plague journal

5.23.20

giving up illusions. surrender to the way people are, surrender to the way people feel about you, surrender to accepting this is how it is & finding freedom and joy there. it’s just a choice. you have to meet reality at reality. not all of it will move in one lifetime. do you think we could be smart enough to weather our way out of here.  genius enough to solve the riddle in real time. to navigate the magic faster. we blow the dreams of this species across the water. i travel all sound. i would go there. accept there is no surviving this. death is the purest form of love here and no one is without it. dear love, is it abandon when you leave. when i leave. when we disappear from one another’s lives. what are we allowed to do with time.

i have never started or stopped loving anyone


Notes from the Channel:

Resource:

N.O. Artist Brandan 'BMike' Odums: 'We Make Beauty Out of Pain"
The prolific multi-medium artist and educator talks to us about the youth media initiative 2-Cent, his mural work in post-Katrina New Orleans and the double-edged sword of the city’s “recovery.”
https://www.colorlines.com/articles/no-artist-brandan-bmike-odums-we-make-beauty-out-pain