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Lou Dillon
“A letter to a poet is necessarily to be a love letter. And if one has to speak of poetry one is walking by the edge of the sea. Or on a rope. On unstable grounds. So we are going to deal, from the start, with feelings and uncertainties.”¹
There are two high shelves in the corner of my living room which hold sacred texts I have studied, and which are adjacent to the “personal pharmacopoeia” so generously offered by Ariana Reines through the fugue study² undertaken in the liminal space that is “Invisible College.”
On the far edge of the top shelf Etel Adnan’s L’Apocalypse Arabe and Francisco Goya’s Los Desastres de la Guerra hold one another. Neither of these two works have been ingested specifically, but they have stood in referential weight as bookends that hold the rest, foreshadowing a lineage that would be echoed in Reines’ own, Wave of Blood.
“Here in Goya is the beginning of our modern anarchy.”³
The measure by which we hold disaster in our bones…
Number 44, Yo lo vi (I saw it).
The atrocities which bare down as the dissemination of human unrest permeates the membrane…
Number 45, Yo esto también (And this too).
What we do to one another, feigning ignorance…
Number 15, Y no hai remedio (And it can’t be helped).
The confusion in search of where accountability may lie…
Number 18, Enterrar y caller (Bury them and keep quiet).
What can we allow our marrow to transmute?
During the lockdown of 2020 I was lucky to stumble upon a modest zoom room, held open by the hour, where daily open readings of Rilke’s Duino Elegies⁴ would alchemize the collective stasis of our strange domestic inner space. Barred deep within the confines of societal collapse and uterine gestation; from a tiny perch in my attic, I peered in—and through—a screen—I would hear in the voices of angels—an opening. I would not be saved, but I would learn, being saving, like breath, or “a battery”⁵—a practice which would allow me to live.
The wisdom of survival passes on to us through the ages; a poetic time capsule. If only we are willing, “vide cor meum.”⁶
The first text of Etel’s Ariana would bring into our space, relaying the quiet address of Rilke—was her “Short Letter to a Young Poet,” from the collection of writings on performance entitled, The Sun on the Tongue—
I am tasting it. On the tip—trained into her presence—everything and nothing, can coexist.
“I felt it filling me, and changing me, changing my cells, reorganizing me.”⁷
Like the first sun shown through a fogged winter window, Ariana’s words entered the air of my room like hot breath wiping frigid barriers clean. I can’t recall just how she crossed the threshold, do I have the algorithm to thank? Tapped out of the ether, her Coeur de Lion, gave permission for my own impossibility to express a center previously rendered inaccessible. Still reeling in the trauma AE (After Education) my attempts to be of the world had fallen mute. But slowly, inside my own livres, with every page, a body, a book. I would learn to not only trust, but depend on my own address.
And so, I write these words, a testament of love. For fate that would bring me to Ariana, and for Ariana who would bring me to Etel. You do not have to study, read all, or intellectualize, to fall into the ranks of identity as poet. You must love, and love dearly. Over these years I have learned to devote my soul to the thin space between mind and pen. Between body and—the human scape—a traversal that may expand as lucid as a line on a page.
“To be with Etel is to be in interstellar communication, where ‘birds bring messages,’ and stones and sky and History are swept up in the wind as it whips through her sharp mind.”⁸
Evoking the passing of time in the colors of the sun, both moment and millennia are translated through gestural glyphs both childlike and ancient in universality. Written in language, without language. As perception dissolves as slippery as the glimmering atom—on the leaf of a flower—the kernel of the sun syncopated language bursts—arrests, and building; repetition blurs the boundary of thoughts reform-ing. Between idea and world a refuge of mind holds the seed as humans are gathering meaning.
The crystalized mind of Etel Adnan exerts itself with ease flowing through multi-channels of culture and form; she is a polymath, and as she straddles borders observed and alluded referentials move quickly between and amongst one another offering a shifting perspective quiet as a single step, where simultaneous overlapping galaxies expand dancing in parallax.
She writes with the sensibility of a painter, each brush stroke beginning and ending with only the volume of the medium she delicately sets to a charge. Her gestural work carries a similar efficiency, where decisive calligraphic marks or pools and blocks of color hold the frame; a singular view, a visual haiku. In language her prolific body of work operates like a Zen koan, where the materials of ration or logic are turned in on themselves and word and sentences burst beyond their bounds utterly leaving conscious thought behind. Whether it is in her own seemingly omniscient first person, or through characters which present as crystalline as reportage, she adeptly juggles vast depth and weight passing through the broad and light, the shallow and the deep, even at times impenetrable.
When I immerse myself in her worlds, there is the sense that what I partake in is a channeling, an energetic pulse which stretches behind, through, and before her; and in my act moving through a devotion of witness as the words on the page begin to travel through more than my mind but my life, and more than my life but the lives of all, directionally effusive the same. They present out of specificity, the universal understanding of where horror and beauty collapse into one another. Could the spark of disagreement, the confusion and bewilderment; carried by the oppressors, the dispossessed, and the enlightened share the same being-ness in this world and perhaps beyond?
I return to Goya’s plate Number 26, Ne se suede mirar, (One cannot look at this); and see forms recapitulated across centuries depicting intimate gestures of human suffering. Bodies collapsed prone and exposed, huddle in prayer and embrace. With eyes closed and mouths gaping open, the triangulation of energetic gaze is turned deaf and mute, frozen in time. The piled bodies straddle the frame engulfed in two thirds of absolute black on the left as background and slightly more visible ground merge together fighting obscural in relation. On the right, the cross hatched darkness fades toward a gray geometry where the faint flickering of thin bayonets intrude the edge alluding to a horizon. What is poised to injure will always remain present at the periphery of our view. Where worlds of being are destroyed, we must bare witness to what enters the frame, and more importantly be willing to shift that frame, to see through the many, let them overlap, cancel out and complicate one another. I can look at this. And because I do, I am more able to be. Because I do, I am more able to see–beauty.
8.
Lynn Marie Kirby, 2014
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