This is a 46 second snippet of 5 minute clip of the writing of the whole prose/poem on parchment paper to see if it would fit on the final painting, and I think I will make the clip the underlayer of the video, what is returned to again and again as an underlying metaphor amidst many more layers, a greater visual complexity. My intention is to include images of the hand: an x-ray, a painted hand, a real hand, a hand wrapped in a black brace. And the painting in its stages and the final with the writing. Also, some other public domain footage. The final 'video painting poem' could take a few months to finish.
My friend, Stephen, had a short stopover in Toronto yesterday, and I met him at the airport. He had two small bottles of wine from the flight, so we drank those at Starbucks. He showed me many quite incredible photos of his trip to Spain, abstract images, the kind an artist takes. He's currently working with glass, and was looking forward to turning his kiln on when he returned home and putting some glass in to make magic overnight (he's preparing for a group show in September). I returned the Picasso catalogue (we had seen the show at AGO together on the stopover on his way to Europe earlier in August), which, alas, I did not get to in the last few weeks to write about, and the Surrealist one, which he texted me from the Departure Lounge about - apparently that was a gift for me, ah, well, at least I went through it over a few enjoyable hours. We last saw each other 7 years ago. Who knows when next. It's a lovely friendship of mutual admiration of each other's art.
Today she was restful. Probably 2" x 3" in a little old Moleskine I keep in my purse. I've been afraid to sketch my mother, who had a stroke last March. She's very thin, about 70lbs, and so I'm not sure how much my sketch resembles her. It perhaps has the quality of this difficult time, for her, for us, though.
Certainly emotionally difficult to draw, and yet, as frail as she is, there is a beauty, her skin so thin it is waxen, translucent, the capillaries, the bones evident, an inner light emanating.
Écriture. Handwriting, yes. But this is Dream Writing. You can't quite read it, but you know it is important.
A test clip for a video poem I am working on called, 'Palmistry, a Psalm.' This was taken with a Canon GL2 that I bought in 2003, and I greatly magnified one corner of the clip. My naughty, no playful, kitten was put in the bathroom for the videoing and, wouldn't you know it, her dear bleet is quite plaintively clear. If I use any of the footage from today in the actual videopoem, not sure how I will handle that. Lol.
But it's all part of the dream............
(also, titles made using the YouTube 'Enhancements' option)
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Today I did video a writing of Palmistry, a Psalm onto tracing paper on the painting. This was a 'dry run,' and the prose/poem will fit. It took hours to set up the space, moving couches, and a marble coffee table (on felt, but still), stapling canvas over my couch to the wall, two cameras on tripods, long time adjusting them over and over, lighting, and so on, including putting that playful kitten in the bathroom, she mewed but was ok, and, well, I'll see how some of the clips might work in a videopoem. Here is a digitally-played-with photo from the shoot.
In the videoing today, yes, I did begin to rip the poem, it was irresistible. It was, though, written on test paper. This is not a digitally-played-with photo. Lol.
After I began this painting, a prose poem became 'an inner pressure,' and so I spent a few days writing one, and even made a little recording, and while I would have finished the painting last week by writing the poem onto the canvas, the 'inner pressure' now is to make a video poem. I don't want to! I argue with my muse: It's too much work; no-one watches them. Who needs a video? But though I have tracing paper taped to the painting for a 'dry run' on the writing - want to make sure I space it properly so it all fits on - and have sat to work, that da*n muse won't let me! So now I need to create a video space with canvas or something around it and video the act of writing, pen on parchment for the spacing, pen on canvas for the final, up close. Do you think I can manage this little task? I'm so in resistance.
Doing a piece in three media, painting, writing, and video is way too much work for one woman and yet, resist as I might, the muse is stronger and is resisting my resistance and will win out. Due to a busy week, likely won't video until next week. Oy! Is it like this for you?
The layered x-ray (real, of my wrist) and the painted hand (I was looking at my actual hand when I painted it) that you see in the first image was done digitally and would be fun to work with in a video, fading in and out of one or the other. I could do some found footage of Nazis, also. Coatlique, Ophelia, yes, if I find public domain images. Oh, and those great drawings of the hand for palmistry, palm readings. That would be fun. And so on. Lots of ideas, no will to do it. Lol.
Below is the prose/poem for if you hadn't already read it and wanted to take a look.
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A Palmistry, a Psalm
The hand is a poem. A fragmenting poem in my hand. Fingers blow in the wind like bulrushes. That gnarled branch overhanging the water, a twisted wrist. I wear a carpal bone like a pendulum, the rattle of Coatlique.
Our hands, neuronal cells pulsing nerves probing the world, soft, sensitive. In the signs in the lines on our palms a seer's language. Our journey mapped in grooves of curvature of skin over muscle and bone. Born here; die there. One, or two, or five central relationships. You will /or will not have children. This will be a difficult time; easier there. My, you are a sensualist.
They cut off the hands of thieves. Only I never stole. When was my hand severed? As a child? In the nightmare it is staked in the window, a sign for the henchmen of dictators, thieves of the freedom of souls. Herod's soldiers grabbing the first born; Nazi boots kicking down the doors of the Jews. Marked houses. Signs of those sacrificed on the altars of cruelties of power.
In my hand, you will find I've lived a clean life. Does this echo the ethical universe? Ethos is what enables order, harmony, beauty. This swollen and sore hand is emblazoned with 'the mark.'
I touch you, lying on the soft grasses of the riverbank, glide delicate fingers over your features, reading you, your body of braille. And massage you, warm oiled dance of fingertips and palm whorls penetrating knots, torments, memories. Even as my wrist flicks, and breaks.
My hand drifting downstream, decked in an Ophelia of lace and rings. Hold it; hold me.
[I was asked to compare my writing to one of my influences - and so I have chosen to speak a little of Nicole Brossard, and a book of her poetry that I read today.]
She has managed to obliterate strains of rationality in her poetry that mine perhaps still has. Her writing flies off the edges of experience; mine clings to a coherence set in motion by the imagery. She yokes together disparate images, line after line, freed from grids of rational grammars to create a poetry of resonance, echoes, synechdotal sightings, whisps of thought turning to steam during the heat wave of the text.
Her earlier work influenced me enormously, sliding easily, as she did, between a minimalist nearly surreal poetry of wet tongues on words that touch, and touch, to a prose woven on waves turning into poetry. On my shelf, Turn of a Pang (1976), A Book (1976), Daydream Mechanics (1980), These Our Mothers (1983), French Kiss (1986), Lovhers (1986), Sous La Langue, Under Tongue, (1987), Surfaces of Sense (1989), Picture Theory (1991), Museum of Bone and Water (2003) [in which she cordially wrote: 'Pour Brenda, /Avec mes salutations amicales /au coeur de la poesie /Nicole Brossard /Toronto /10 avril 2003'], to which today I have added, Notebook of Roses and Civilization (2007) and Fences in Breathing (2009).
Having just read Notebook of Roses and Civilization, I don't find the same connection points, moments of pins of light crossing from two different maps of a parchment of words, maps of mist, and yet I feel kindred, inspired, awakened to a world freed from its rational, linear, narratorial tethers in Nicole Brossard's expansive lexicon. The acrobatics, sudden shifts of image, signalling of moments in sparse truncated syntax, fleeting referents, in a vast field of signs, of Deleuzian-like multiplicities. What connects is the consciousness of the poet who does not describe a stable world, who describes her inner world for us, her readers. Who pulls us in to her vortex of meanings collapsing meanings until even the bones of structure are charred:
i arrive at this page burning. others use the word light to shake up reality. Let's see if standing up you grab tomorrow naked out of order (p55)
As Gertrude Stein writes of Picasso in her book, Picasso:
...this problem remained, how to express not the things seen in association but things really seen, not things interpreted but things really known at the time of knowing them. (Beacon, 1959: 36)
Brossard has long loosed the world of association and writes, not stream-of-consciousness, but from a rarified poetic. Images freed of their contexts held together by the undercurrent of emotions of the poet:
the poem can't lose its momentum make you suddenly turn around as if the sea were about to surge up at your back in pages of foam and foment (47)
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[I don't think these words scrawled in pencil in my writing Moleskine today after reading a book of poetry constitute a review of a book of the French Canadian poet, Nicole Brossard, but they perhaps incline that way.]
