Excerpt from NaNoWriMo, Day 5

She was fleeing from her origin-woman mother, the beginning of her, whose womb she was carried in, given birth from. Tearing at the gusset, a rupture of blood and amniotic fluid, like raw egg white spilled salty and bitter, and she found herself lying in that spreading pool of bitterness. Her mother had never wanted her, her first child, who tied her with a chain stronger than iron to a man she didn’t love.

Steig ate broken eggshell while the white spilled down the white smock of her party dress. She carried a basket of fresh hen eggs and picked them up one by one and hurled them at the womb of the tree where she hid when she escaped. They broke, and broke, and broke, yolks sliding like deep yellow suns and the whites glossy as mucus  over the fallen trunk, in the tomb where she lay, flowers growing from her mouth filled with earth, she, composting into the disintegrating wood.

His eyes, sharp, hawk-like, thin man, spindly legs, and wings, skylark wings grown large, speckled brown, watching.

Steig was coughing in her sleep. Coughing so hard that she woke. She was trying to rub broken egg off her skin when she woke into clean dry sheets, a soft pillow, a fragrant night. She hugged her pillow, tears flowing.

She wished her father were home; everything in the house was so different when he was home.

As she lay in her bed crying she wondered why Granma Blé and Mr. Lipsig had come to tell her such things as made her mother mad and cruel.

She called to her Grandmothers in the night, and her Uncle Zez, for help, but the room remained dark, and silent. If the ghosts were nearby, they did not appear.

The soft pre-dawn light was slowly washing the sky when she drifted off again.

She was rushing away.

Like an ocean sucking itself out because of the cracks in its seabed and never  returning. Or the wind blowing across the land, rushing on until depleted. She fell down the whirlpool circling the drain and the current was too strong to fight.

Then, the colours. She drifted between spheres of bright colours, red, yellow, blue, green, purple. It was peaceful, a moment of the infinite.

She had this dream frequently, like floating with molecules in a vast and enormous darkness that was warm, safe. The colours glowed and each floating sphere seemed a fairy godmother, and to smile on her and bless her, she couldn’t explain the feelings, but they made her calm, and happy.

It was like floating with coloured moons on merry-go-rounds, or swinging on swings, soothing, and swinging ever higher brought a forgetfulness with it, as the colours swirled by, she, flying through the air, back and forth, around and around, a little dizzy, giddy with joy, its freedom.

Alone, but not alone, for the coloured balls were there, glimmering with her.

She came out of this rich and nurturing place of her dreams when she woke. She lay in bed, still feeling a mystical warmth.

We’re all only floating molecules, she thought. Nothing lasts and that gave her relief.

Or was she an old woman now, remembering backwards a life rushing towards her? Steig had a moment of pure confusion, a lonely teen, and yet something else, her future bringing her into being.

She imagined herself old, sometimes, she didn’t know why.

Sometimes she stared in the mirror until she saw wrinkles appear and jowls, a heavier neck, stared until she saw herself grown old in the mirror.

But not today, she got up with the coloured globes ringing in her ears with music of the spheres, the sound of molecules whirling in their vast inner spaces.

(image from my videopoem, the dancer's backskin)

                              

FRIDAY FILM AND VIDEO POEM: 'SHED' by Christina McPhee

This week we grapple with the boundaries of what a film or video poem is. I almost called these articles, Videopoetries. SHED is a videopoetry. It is an art film about light and drawing through time in a shed that is as high as it is long.

Christina McPhee's drawings were filmed over two years and edited as a video montage of screens with varying opacities and speeds. The drawings are like inscriptions. They remind me of free-form pictograms, dream writing, glyphs of an inner symbolism. They are an occult calligraphy, a concrete poem-in-motion, scrawling into being under the artist's brush. The sound in the film is the artist's brush creating the drawings. She writes:

I make very large scale drawings using white rolls of watercolor and drawing papers. The drawings are usually created in a horizontal orientation working from right to left, like writing without backtracking or extensive editing. When not executed horizontally, the drawings are also created in a vertical orientation and worked from top to bottom like a scroll. The markings are calligraphic and topologic and do not represent content. They consider intensities and nodes. I consider depth of field from point to point moving from the implications of the last move into a new territory. Each drawing gesture generates the next.

This is an automatic writing. A poetry. I consider SHED a genre-crossing piece that brings together a poetry of drawing and video editing. It is a multiplicity, a place of vectors. The nodes and intensities are democratic, without hierarchy; they are nomads drawn into being by the brush of India and acrylic ink and red paint encrusted on the paper by the artist.

Christina calls her drawings Teorema, after the Pasolini film of the same name which she speaks about in the video below SHED. Of her studio space, which reminded me of a stark meditation cabin, she writes:

A shed is a barracks, a shelter and it is hermeneutic (pertaining to its own secrets). The shed is a place of elemental becoming and the drawings develop the space of the shed just as the shed develops the space of the drawings. Mutually they create a performative condition for video installation as drawing. The accumulation of layered montage in multiple takes gives rise to a series of videos.... the video creates drawing as architectural event.

direct link: Christina McPhee's, SHED / cinema clip / 2011

At her website, we find further clarification:

During two year’s time, SHED CUBED traces the heliotropic movement of drawings across diurnal passages of light and darkness in an austere interior of concrete floors and white walls. SHED CUBED is ‘shedding’ drawings. The drawings accumulate, re-materialize, and melt away in the space of the shed….

SHED CUBED reflects on the materiality of video as a drawing medium and architectural body.

SHED regards the effect of transverse light, as the sunlight moves through the space from early morning onwards… The video footage captures the slow changes of the light and the rapid changes of the drawing. In post production, the video format becomes a long strip, rather than the typical rectangle– a sequencing and serial effect. The footage is compressed up to a limit of 900 percent. The shed is hermeneutic (pertaining to its own secrets) but the transverse light inside the shed explodes the intimacy of such a secret space, brings it into the light. Effectively the light exposes the drawings as a writing process that iterates line after line in accumulations, refrains, recollections and recursions. Following the drawings, the video montage sheds time in layers, in a profusion of moments…the installation recapitulates the shed.

You can view the full series of SHED's "drawings as writing process" at her website, where she calls them a teorema of glyphs, nomads, aplophorids, chromogenics, lightjets. They are also reminiscent of marine life (she speaks of shrimp being thrown on the deck of a boat by the sea during a marine ecology project) and insects, of the underpinnings of larger living ecosystems.

I hope you enjoy my choice for this week's featured videopoem, and as you watch SHED, and the articulation of its processes and some of the inspirations and aims that Christina offers at a presentation below, you are inspired.


direct link: Christina McPhee: Shed


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NaNoWriMo 2011 excerpt

What I wrote last night, exhausted after a long day, so tired I could barely keep my eyes open, not 2000 words, but I'll catch up today.

Chapter II

Across town, red and yellow fallen leaves were swirling in a whirlpool upwards towards the open palms of a figure in a black woollen cape.

Out of the swirl of leaves a spirit seemed momentarily to emerge, a deva, a nature sprite, only rather than playful, as she might be in spring, she had a sharpness, was fierce, pointed.

The leaves swirled like the nose of a bullet, or a sharp beak.

Then they fell back into the heaps of reds and golden fallen leaves the wind collected from under the trees and flung in banks across the yards and streets.

She smiled, her pale grey hair visible under a tweed flat cap. Her black flat-heeled leather boots as high as the knees, and black leggings under the woolen cape were visible across the street, where he was watching.

“Good!” he shouted. “Another take?”

“No!” she shouted back. “Not now. That... was enough. Sorry!”

“Okay, take a break.” And he turned to a thin young woman whose hands were resting on a large camera on a tripod that was locked on its wheels, and said, “Cut. That’s it for today, Clare. You can go if you like.”

Clare looked at him warily, then abruptly dropped her hands from the camera. She left without saying anything.

“Come back tomorrow, same time,” he called after her. “You’ll be paid for the whole day.”

Standing beside the camera, almost guarding it, he waited for the caped woman who was walking towards him. “Shall we take a look?”

The woman shrugged, murmuring indefinably. He opened the viewfinder, clicked some buttons and the caped woman was seen to be standing before a drift of fallen autumn leaves. They did rise like a whirlpool under her palms. Clare had zoomed in when the leaves formed their sharp point. But they did not appear as a sharp object coming to a head. The director and the actor stood, gaping, at the image in the viewfinder.

Rather, the leaves formed into the face of a woman.

The leaf woman blew with sharp breath on the outstretched palms of the woman standing over her. Then, like a genie returning to her bottle, she shrank back as the leaves fell into a heap joining the leaf encrusted garden.

“I can’t create a character for this,” the actress said, her face framed by her hat and flying hair - a wind had picked up catching the silver grey hair around her shoulders.

“You don’t need to, Madge. It’s all there. No more takes on this one.”

“What’s there, Jeb? I’m sorry if I’m a little spaced out - I experienced something in that shoot that I’ve never felt before.”

“What, Madge? If I may ask?”

“Oh..." she wavered, and then as if finding her voice in a deep canyon, slowly said, "For a moment I felt a presence, a flutist of the Maenades of the leaves approached under my hands, drawn by them. She was like a koi coming to the surface of the pond and looking at me before disappearing back into the depths of her world. I heard a bamboo flute in the wind.”

Jeb was listening carefully, but said in a calm, practical voice, “Let’s see how tomorrow goes, because that sounds really interesting, Madge, and I believe Clare has captured something of that mysterious moment in her filming.”


(a bit of a drawing of mine,
just to add an image)