Welcome to Little Prayers, the self-destructing gallery. Here for a good time not a long time.
This week, past and present coalesce.
Norbert Schwontkowski - Angel (Appearence)
They waited.
Walter Benjamin, in his philosophy of history (already, by its title, something so suggestive of perception and subjectivity it renders itself, virtually, ungraspable in the whole), writes about how we see Paul Klee's "Angelus Novus", "his face is turned toward the past," a painting Benjamin owned, and inscribed his onto its distressed countenance. It's a sort of philosophical devekut, sifting the rubble of a now-secular time in history, filled with latent guilt and desperate hope for redemption. Shortly after he wrote his theses, Benjamin committed suicide.
A storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them...
In amongst the problematic vista of "left melancholy" (the despair and complacency that colours so much of progressive, borderline-messianic thought), I thought back to Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives, a story about people as achingly out of reach as angels - the so-called "visceral realists" - who "walked backward . . . gazing at a point in the distance, but moving away from it, walking straight toward the unknown." These are, essentially, disappointed characters, but populating a story I don't feel that the word 'melancholy' neatly enough wrap around. Fatalistic to the point of forging a chain of fibres in its language that seem to lead down a stormy path that blows them back into "the good old days" or the "simpler times", instead they wait themselves out into a drunken stupor where celebrations become hangovers, where young become old, where success becomes forgotten, and where future, eventually, becomes past.
“Drink up, boys, drink up and don’t worry, if we finish this bottle we’ll go down and buy another one. Of course, it won’t be the same as the one we’ve got now, but it’ll still be better than nothing. Ah, what a shame they don’t make Los Suicidas mezcal anymore, what a shame that time passes, don’t you think? What a shame that we die, and get old, and everything good goes galloping away from us.”
- Written by Bryson E. Howe
Alice Rohrwacher - La Chimera
I have met people like Arthur - the crumbly centrepiece in Alice Rorhrwacher's battered, tattered, sun-aged, 224-page paperback (€1.50) - for whom the past whispers in streams not far from their feet, behind peeling walls. I have met others, too, who have been able to fully devote themselves to the present; they usually have a rosy complexion because it is good for the body to repose in the human domain of the minute - but (I'll admit) I find them less interesting, their travel-clefts smoothed over in days unattuned. Future-people are the worst, particularly when they infect the rest of us with their anxieties, as they so often do. I probably fall into the majority group, tugged a little in all directions by all three. I have certainly tried to be like Arthur, but graveyards take many years to learn the chords of, and for the longest time I was like a child blinking confused at their littered hills, and unable to fall - with great vertigo - into deep revery like he would when he walks that chapel garden steppe. Nevertheless I have worked hard at it, this particular breed of madness - like a progenitor of maladies drinking dirt - daring suits of armour to cough voiced vapours, staring into the reflective sea of their silver... mostly in vain. The ruins jutting like a broken mouth across the valley over my house only now are beginning to carynx foggy geographies of empire, and for the longest time they were just cavitied mounds of stone. If I was like Arthur, hidden by that half-light, ogling into spinning cat eyes of history, so tractable to the vital and deadly drink of nostos, I also would become addicted to it. Though I find it agonising to let the artefacts of the present slip down the river, their eventual tomb becomes sacrosanct and anything sacrosanct is most blessed to defile. The soil ferments a perfection whilst opening it to our blinding days oxidises the treasure so we have learned to drape remedial fairytales over them like bridal veils. This is just the ceremony of being human, but the fact it is so ordinary is what keeps its majesty alive, the little ache of belonging to one moment and not all; unable to somersault backwards off the apple branch in a vision of apollo on terracotta on mosaic on frieze, I efface with cantos objects duly returned, the woodcut (louse-gnawed): scattered scrimshaw of our know knowing known.
- Written by Caleb Carter
John Singer Sargent - Lady Agnew of Lochnaw
hello, dear, old friend -
It is so strange seeing you here. You haven’t changed a bit (or is it me who has changed too much?). I remember, in another place, in another time, I would wait in the gallery halls, hidden in some forgotten room, until the gallery would shut when I would crawl out and wish my secrets onto you. I remember you reminded me that speaking of beauty, or pleasure, destroys it, so since then I’ve only spoken of you in the weak groans of my sex. I remember running hands over my own skin and praying for Pygmalion verities.
But, how can I be in love with someone who refuses to change? I remember you told me that the gravity of a fabric, the weight of it pulling down around a body, should feel impossible in a good dress, on that froths rather than flows, or flounces, like a mountain stream. The liquefaction of clothes, which fruit on your limbs in deft lavender and milky whites the same thinness of clouds, which comes to me in a melancholic haze of diffused colours and textures (sheer organza sleeves cover acid-skin that I would lick and hallucinate different future/presents) which seem to shimmer and swim with deeper meaning. But what meaning? That’s what I don't remember. Did I ever want you to change? Would I have, secretly, been disappointed—wounded, even—if you’d changed when not in my presence?
You wanted soft, tender feelings to turn hard, to solidify, but like your dress I am liquid. Don’t move, you’d say. Make me. You don’t want me to be this malleable, to be this mutable. You want a rock that’s man-shaped and stiff all the time. Now the acid on your skin just tastes bitter. I spit it out. They remove me from the gallery. Of course they do, you can’t just be spitting in galleries, or licking the canvases. Not down here.
P.S. I still hope to see you again. Never change x
- Written by Bryson E. Howe
Jing Huang - What I won't say
A hunchback years on from saffron fields, what lets me stay. The suicidal knows the glassy light of the scarp's edge, like crushed silk leaning through a singing saw, the light of delusion when you lean 45°. The smell of outside on decision day. How could I tell you of its wheels, its looms? How could I admit sea-change is spherical, by-stepping both death and the inquisition? I'd recount in detail when I have lent 46 and slipped
like belts or stairs
But my romancing the light to survive it?
And brag like look no floor
I began puncturing film reels to
hear light roll on the tongues
of ghosts. I began trepanning
my skull to let the light in. Really,
I have wept at branches
akin to kisses from my father, madness
akin to permission.
- Written by Caleb Carter
Peter Weir - Picnic at Hanging Rock
“The shadow of the Rock is flowing, luminous as water, across the shimmering plains and they are at the picnic, sitting in the warm dry grass under the gum trees…”
...aching with corsets – once, also, known as ‘stays’ – that press tight against their solar plexuses, apricating in a calm delirium, held in that sweltering lightheaded suspension that threatens, with each weighted breath, to tug you closer to sleep.
It’s in this stifling that Picnic at Hanging Rock buries its core mystery (an absence that erupts into the narrative, tearing a whole that the gauzy story forms around), that goes unsolved by the narrative’s end, instead creating an aberrational cinema of promontory-alterity. Gothic repression steeples on the horizon of a windless plane, dotted by jagged volcanic mountains, and the unseen, or half-seen, where the something that has disappeared (and is mourned), more terrifyingly to those involved, threatens to return. But this ambiguity articulates a stock of mythological material in which meaning floats—stays—tracing tropes of uncertainty, anxiety, desire, inheritance, usurpation, boundaries and their transgressions across a dry landscape stripped of the suffocating ivy of stony European ruins or the fog rolling that floods England’s wild moors. The girls disappear in bright sun, in land wide and open. It’s a veil that’s lifted, only to reveal something more lethargic than lysergic, leaving the doors of perception firmly closed.
Rub your bloody hands in the red dirt and hold it flush against your sun burnt skin—nothing grows in the desert, but nothing that lives there ever wilts either.
"The shadow of the Rock has grown darker and longer. They sit rooted to the ground and cannot move. The dreadful shape is a living monster lumbering towards them across the plain, scattering rocks and boulders. So near now, they can see the cracks and hollows where the lost girls lie rotting in a filthy cave."
— Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock
- Written by Bryson E. Howe