The night is still old

The night is still old
So let’s begin the suture now.

I will take this thread
The one made from
the skin of the
intestines
of the dead man
you talk about
So frequently.
the one who sits inside
the iris of your right eye

I have taken his veins
Extracted their color
Made it into a paste
Like the color those Renaissance painters
Used for their draperies

Diving in
Which skin shall be punctured first?
The forearm?
The bicep?
That equilateral triangle
formed between freckles?

We are forming a word.
I go inside
You pull out a vowel
Then I start the consonant.

Know.

What a word,
You laugh.

And then, Cheers.
To another night’s mystery solved.
As the distance between us
The paragraphs that separate
Remain spoken
Only in ink.
Only in chapters
that remain to be seen

Breathless
Another stitch
begins

The heaviest burden

from Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra...

"What if a demon crept after you one day or night in your lonelinest solitude and said to you: 'This life, as you live it now and have lived it, you will have to live again and again, times without number; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and all the unspeakably small and great in your life must return to you, and everything in the same series and sequence - and in the same way this spider and this moonlight among the trees, and in the same way this moment and I myself. The eternal hour-glass of existence will be turned again and again - and you with it, you dust of dust!' - Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who thus spoke? Or have you experienced a tremendous moment in which you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never did I hear anything more divine!' If this thought gained power over you it would, as you are now, transform and perhaps crush you; the question in all and everything: 'do you want this again and again, times without number?' would lie as the heaviest burden upon all your actions. Or how well disposed towards yourself and towards life would you have to become to have no greater desire than for this ultimate eternal sanction and seal?"


Resonate, 2005
Kathryn Cornelius
T610 mobile phone digital photograph

when was the last time

you felt like this was the last time?

...that the final vowels had been laid into place, ordered like dominos, set and ready for the verbal take-off, launch pad, breaking point?

when was the last time you heard the words loud and clear?

...the words for the pit of anger that sits deep in your gut and makes a nest there,
the words that screech out in stark pink venom, the consonants barely holding together the energy tearing open the seems?

when was the last time you got the message
heard the call
answered the door
turned around
and gained two inches to your height because that was the right thing to do. the right thing to say.
retreat::silence
silence::solitude
solitude::heal
heal::to wrap your arms around it, feeling the kern of each letter and loving it as the last.

other people's words seem much more interesting 'cause they ain't mine

feeling a quiet escape in the post-thesis state of decompression, i have been happy to read the wisdom of others -- this quote is from the wisdom of the heart, by henry miller:

(talking about Erich Gutkind's The Absolute Collective: A Philosophical Attempt to overcome our broken state)

"The man of today, the man of the transition period, split and straddled as he is between two worlds, pregnant with the germ of the future, is veritably crucified by his duality...The climate of this opus is a sort of spiritual equinox in which life and death are seen to be at balance. Is it necessary to add that it is precisely at such moments that the miraculous nature of life reveals itself, at just such moments that the whole order of life can be reversed, or transcended?

...We stand at the threshold of a new way of life, one in which MAN is about to be realized. The disturbances which characterize this age of transition indicate clearly the beginnings of a new climate, a spiritual climate in which the body will no longer be denied, in which, on the contrary, the body of man will find its proper pace in the world...

Thus, the complete destruction of our cultural world...The old grooves of race, religion and nationality are destined to go, and in their place we shall see, for the first time in the history of man, a community of interest based not on the animal in him but on the human being which he has so long denied. The fight is between the death instinct and the life instinct. It has nothing to do with culture, or bread, or ideology, or peace or security. The schism has grown so wide that it is either self-destruction or a totality never before imagined. With each new conflict one is made increasingly aware of the real battle, which is inner, and which is nothing but a warfare between the real and the ideal man."

Though this was published in 1941 (and Gutkind's essay in 1932), Miller's approach to the binary of inner versus outer, real versus ideal, is akin to the negoitations of polarities that, to me, are becoming much more pressing in importance. Increasingly, self-definition mirrors a list of categories one ascribes to and feels membership with, both constructed by and for systems of organization such as demographic groups for marketing purposes, inner office politics, and online systems of identity management using metadata. As the outside informs more and more of what the inside feels, the inner conflict will seep out of the pores and manifest in verbal violence, frantic gestures, and worse, large-scale community deterioration, civil warfare, and inter-continental apathy. With so many mechanisms for distraction in everyday life (personal technology, adrenline-addicted dramas, the cacophony of over-abundant communication), little space and time is carved out for quiet, for reflection, for thoughtfully mediated exchange between individuals, and for true renderings of the aftermath of experience (digestion).

So, it's a little blank here these days. Deliberately so. Pages are sometimes best left unmarked, empty terrian.

A single note can affect a multitude of sounds if given the chance to ring long enough, and alone.

consider this part of an extended collage

...the writing here has been sparse, found more than forged, but still fresh, for me (at least). so, hence, the collage.


and another piece, recovered from a book i thought i threw out years ago. this writing was on the tube in london as a part of their art in the tube series circa 1998.

25th April 1974

This is the dawn I was waiting for
The first day whole and pure
When we emerge from night and silence
Alive into the substance of time



---I like some of the use of the structures of time, the things about nature we've picked up on in order to aid our construction of various durations and their social meanings. however, anything that tends to be so bounded to words or phrases that typically are used in large-scale philosophical applications (such as "dawn," "alive," "substance of time") can turn me off a bit...Well, hey, I wasn't even twenty when I noted observing this writing, but now I realize the importance to my own work, my own interests, to have some sort of "in my personal radius" item - word, metaphor, etc. - to secure a filament flung out to, in order to communicate the emotion of meaning...


well, and with that given, another shall follow - eventually -


(hey, it's hot outside.)

caught in the branches

hanging like a dead limb
a boot caught
in between
the good apples
the low-hanging fruit

easy options
gravity always falls
and then

what is left
for us?

some of you may have noticed

how quiet the still of rain can be
how the soft pages between the sheets
can remind you of warm thighs
light weight clothing
on sweat wet damp skin

basking in the moment of almost
but just not quite yet

what rays reach your hairs
the tip of your head
the top of your

well, nevermind.




(i graduate tomorrow.
i breathe again the next day.
be still, my fleeting start. enjoy. the silence.)

so quiet, lately

the lights have gone silent
small buzzing rings in memory, not in actual
hum........


hum.
hmmmmm


well
then
what do we have here.

very little, when relaxing.

if sitting outside during the sun shine hours,
we note one small thing, that was different before, but now,
apparently the same

there is a freckle on my eyelid. i see it move
as my closed eyes change direction.

a constant.
amongst.
the forgiving,
yet balant
storm.

out here in the perimeter there are no stars

we see the sun through eyes shaded by the perspective of our own perception, filtered rays confirming individual existence within the network of our dreams.

one more week

and the thesis will be over.


"i'm taking back the knowledge...i'm taking back the gentleness...i'm taking back the ritual...i'm givining in to sweetness." - david byrne.

my body hates me

it has been destroyed in the service of my mind that is attempting to finish this thesis. blah. and yuck.

one more to add to the family

of plastic debris hanging out and around my backyard...tucked between a rock and a tuft of green grass was a small bit of blue plastic. seeing this reminded me of the site-specific installation i did last october for an outdoor sculpture show that took place in a park out in baltimore. dubbed "the body dumping ground," this park was really nice to see in the fall since it reminded me of the places i used to run in when i lived in ithaca, ny.

originally i planned to execute a large-scale installation of a piece that involves multiple plastic forks. after touring the park, i changed my mind about what to do; the whole time i was walking through the place, the curator kept talking on and on about past sculptures made for the show. i must have heard andy goldsworthy's name invoked about twenty times. she (the curator) seemed really bent on getting people to do works just like his. having met goldsworthy back in the late nineties when he did some projects in ithaca's gorges at cornell university, i never did get a satisfactory answer about how he views his work in relationship to contemporary ecological issues, and how his work participates in (what i dubbed) "the aesthetics of conservation."

i kept noticing all of the unnatural bits of blue sticking out from the green of the park. after four hours and three bags full, i collected enough blue trash to do the following piece:


Baggage (for Goldsworthy), 2004
Kathryn Cornelius
found trash
(detail)

thinking about it now, i realize the piece i did was in some ways re-examining the idea of the "plastic tactics" group show in baltimore's artscape (for which i did a performance piece). writing this, i am sitting at a coffee table, one that is similar in style to those sold at crate and barrel, the store that sells you not just the table, but also the book to go on it. one of your choices? a nice collection of goldsworthy's ephemeral land art installations, ready-made for your coffee table (another object to move when dusting).

that same piece of plastic is still hanging in the tree

stretched across a few thin branches. it appears to blow in the wind, but is really just pushed around by the rain coming down in all directions, heavy with its own wetness.

tattered. worn. the dirty lucidity of the plastic hangs like a flag, the remainder of a past

marking a history
the sign of

a failed truce.

it's a toxin, not unlike

that of too much alcohol flowing through your veins, but, closer to a burning sort of fiery screach inside your vessels, ripping through and raging at everything and nothing and everything all at once, not unlike the cutting of the throat as flakes of "gold" rip up your tissues when shooting down some goldschlager --- it's that kind of screaming burning in the pit of your stomach and tearing up the rest of your insides...

the anxiety of writing is not unlike that of making art -- if it's an installation, well, you've got the date of the opening set and that is it - if there's no material, there's nothing and you're responsible for it. but with art, it's not the concise execution of thought, it's the "hey, check this out a little, and then check this out -- oh, and while you're at it, what do you think about this?" no. no. no. no. no. art. writing. this kind of thesis writing. not. not. not. the same deal at all.

the toxic anxiety of writing is not unlike the jagged shaking of organs before the start of the race -- there's a similar whole-body sense of --- "we have GOT to get it moving and get ALL of these parts moving all at once, IMMEDIATELY!" but, it's not an, okay, to the lane, to the line, to the gun, to the curve, to the straight-way, to the curve, to the straight-way, to the line again and you're done. no. writing a single sentence takes as long as one 400M dash. writing is racing. writing fucks with your body, your sleep, your sense of time, your consumption of alcohol, your pains in your shoulders, neck, and ass. running does simliar damage, but, again. the end is always so much clearer...

if thesis writing is the culmination, why can't it just be the end?

woof!

...letting the days go by

a squirrel was fighting with plastic that had blown into the tree branches. struggling with the plastic sheeting, i watched and recalled dead bodies i saw when i was thirteen, bodies of sea turtles washed up on the shore of montauk, long island; lessons for how your sandwich bags could become weapons for murder.

the squirrel ran off with a bit of the plastic wrapped up, new material for the nest, the home. guess we both forgot how the end of march can be so cold.

Same as it ever was. Gidget is playing on the TV, on mute.


(as she spoke into the sand


a proton was screaming.)

time is plastic

and in case you didn't notice, i can DJ time online with as much creativity, spin, and rhetoric as the latest "breaking news" bit...

<<missing post::fresh out of the draft mode::now updated/published/alive>>

it's been too long since my last trip to vegas

when i was last there, the guggenheim was in new-born swing, O was still the only show worth going to, and the weekend was only five days away...

the desert outside of vegas is the best. henderson emerges out of the rocks and dust like a forgotten mirage of haphazard plans for living. community wasn't forgotten; it was never an issue.

a certain novel came into my life at the most appropriate time, which is always nice, and rare (the pleasure of slow reading). the owner of the vermont bookstore said that reading it before sleeping at night would saturate my dreams with even more glitter and drama than usual... reading the words, the imagination turns the desert rocks you picture into a deeper red than the author depicts. the sun is brighter, and the water more quenching than ever.

i finished that book in an outdoor hot tub on the roof of a hotel i stayed in for the honolulu marathon. it was four thiry in the morning and the moon was barely loud enough to see the pages as they dampened by my wet fingertips. the breeze blew my shorter hair into my eyes, but the paragraphs were clear. the last sentance brought me back to the beginning. i got out of the tub, put on my shoes, and got ready to run.

not too long ago

i witnessed an event that has plagued my memory with violent washes of pink and yellow, a bright green-yellow glare of color --

two birds were fighting, flapping.
one was obviously the dominant aggressor (always a master/slave struggle).
the little brown birds were vicious. i felt as if i was a voyeur of a history-in-the-making moment within a small world that in its own image is a galaxy (a horton hears a who philosophical camera-trick of perspective). what was the meaning of this struggle? what instigated this mutual attack?

my gut became cold and empty. as the one on top used its beak to clamp own on the other's beak, it dug its claws into feathered flesh of wings and stomach to keep it struggling underneath. then the bird drove its beak into the other bird's left eye. pecking away, my eyes tried to zoom in closer, to witness the wound of the eye in its progression. i wished i had a video-capable phone, or video camera, for that matter. the need to record these injuries, the intensity of this big movement of small bodies at 10:21am on a Tuesday morning seemed a duty to me (why else would I have been given the chance to watch this metaphorical struggle unfold? the passion of action begged to be recorded and re-worked to stand-in for a mini-meta commentary on the relationship of all binaries that fight each other only to define themselves and their place in the world.)

i am telling this now because all the birds i've seen lately have been dead. the two in a recent dream existed in a pseudo-symbiotic relationship, the flesh of the larger bird serving as fuel for the smaller, though both were close to death. walking to the mailbox i came across a small bird on its back, wings spread (of course, you say), a material memory of the symbol of freedom and flight. and today, stopping by the water in the middle of a bike ride, the same species of small brown bird was rocking back and forth, touching the shore then retreating again, and again, riding on the slight wave of the river on this Sunday afternoon. it too, was dead, and i wondered which body would decay first, the water-logged or the land-bound? surf or turf?

"I am away from the computer right now."

I think it is really interesting to think about the idea of the Instant Messenger "Away" message --- I'm online, but I'm offline. I want you to know I am connected, but I'm just off doing other things right now...brb

Of everyone of my "buddies" on my list, my sister always has the best, most random lines for her away message. Current example:

A quote from Nike, "a woman is often measured by the things she cannot control. she is measured by the way her body curves or doesnt curve, by where she is flat or straight or round. she is measured by 36-24-36 and inches and ages and numbers, by all the outside things that dont ever add up to who she is on the inside. and so if a woman is to be measured, let her be measured by the things she can control, by who she is and who she is trying to become. because as every woman knows, measurements are only statistics. And statistics lie."

pimp my ride. customize my life.