"I struggle with enormous discrepancies: between the reality of motherhood and the image of it, between my love for my home and the need to travel, between the varied and seductive paths of the heart. The lessons of impermanence, the occasional despair and the muse, so tenuously moored, all visit their needs upon me and I dig deeply for the spiritual utilities that restore me: my love for the place, for the one man left, for my children and friends and the great green pulse of spring." Sally Mann Still Time catalogue Allegheny Highlands Arts and Crafts Center, 1988
You won't mind, Monsieur Milton, if I take from you the things you said when you mocked us all. It won't disrupt your slumber for me to use your imagery to tell the truth about the state of things. Think fondly of the smells of a long lifetime: moss rubbed hard against dry wood. Take flattery to your chest like a pat of butter. I remember you best of all, though I knew you somewhere in the north of the layers when nothing was supposed to make sense and rightfully so. Regardless, I hold perfect clarity in my hand; an oil capsule waiting to combust and burn into my palm the symbolic gesture that spells my name backwards. My people do not have the language that was written in fire, but we claimed our embers from the nest of the gods we entombed. We have the words made from hooks, efficient and destructive without having to change costume. I came back for you when you could've been lost at sea. I crawled doing an inelegant breaststroke backwards in congealed water. I could not float like a bier of plankton, I could only claw and churn things around me. It is no tempest, no sacrosanct second law. Anything heavier than an eyelash sinks to the bottom and becomes the property of a miserly race. To claim it back is to assign undue value, don't you think? To toss away like a week of newsprint and empty fragments of brunch-time eggs is at least smarter. To give away is more sinister than to have taken, no matter the smile you wear for the transaction. I could cut loose the cord that binds my fingers around the cylinder of industrial design and though it is a steadying force, a vital component, it is not a victory or a spoil. I can plant a seed deep within the forehead of a hopeful mound of mush and longing. To lose a hand but plant a garden of sickness seems like an equation measured best in my favour. Can the new ornament for the grounds be worth very much if it comes free from someone who has no outlet for giving, only a sign barring solicitation? I am out of sorts, but no closer to leaving my mind than any other day.
Hail wedded love, mysterious law, true source Of human offspring...
...Eased the putting off These troublesome disguises which we wear...
Abashed the Devil stood, And felt how awful goodness is, and saw Virtue in her shape how lovely...
All hell broke loose.
And I posed, astounded. They don't offer instructional manuals on the clockwork of a design like this. If they did, people would learn to hold their tongues and watch the water for stillness.
