Visitation on the High Line
Observations
Jonathan:
Arising behind the scaffoldingIt says discard that thought,Ignore annoyance,Just be.
Yes, your temporary roof protectsyou from bolts that tumbledown from a highrise being builtabove your head. But whatprotects you from this Visitorintruding into your autumn stroll,where is the nettingthat keeps such visions out?
Hector Graceman:
EB: I haven’t written a poem for decades, but somehow I seem to need a different way to orient myself. I need words, but not etymologies; not concepts, but images that catch something in the sense I have of change.
I think the visitations may have something to do with dislodging me; and perhaps the sense of a connection with you that makes me feel less alone.
You said you wrote some poetry, so I send this with great diffidence. Should I try to make it a better poem? What would that mean? This is all my guttering candle shows.
Poem for EB
I am a stranger to what lurks in me
Like a wanderer in the underground,
Where a candle flickers; shadows flee,
Here where my footfalls make no sound.
Age can deliver strange fore-tells,
And, too, old friends are out of reach;
My sleep is dark with waking spells:
Do they harry, warn, or teach?
Is there some grist in the heart’s crypt
That I must chew and so metabolize?
Some meaning coded in my life’s script
That I must read with failing eyes?
Into this land, as half-blind stranger,
I venture, cautious, fearing danger.
EB, aka Crazy Jane
Dear Hector:
I haven’t made “art” in a. long time. Oh, I have a sketch -book and doodle and draw on a park bench among the pigeons, but more like someone singing old songs to herself. But this week, after staring at some of the visitations as things designed and patterned, I found myself at my art table where the tools of a once-upon-a-time passion have gathered dust.
I was a collage artist for a spell---seemed like my kind of mish-mash medium---and I have the old exacta knives; the self-healing mat, and lots of colored papers.
But it’s the black and white that seems to call me, so I have been doing “paper cuts”. Not circles, but almost…
I hesitate to send them to you, but who else is there? I have nothing to say about them except that while I was making them, I was playing in a way I have not been able to do for so loooooooonnnnnnngggg! Wheeee…
Riskily yours: EB
Commentary by Jeanne du Prix, in Sur la Muse, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 2023. (Translated from the French).
I’ve noticed that my awareness rarely watches itself. But at a moment of startled insight, I may be jolted loose from my day-to-day sense of the real, and notice the struggle that my mind and body go through, reestablishing their “reality.”
As a therapist, I am secretly pleased that I cannot define consciousness. I cannot pin it down as an object. It has no definite form, no bodily location, and no time, because when it appears, it is here and now, not then and there.
By contrast, my mind snaps pictures of the experience, capturing all the inputs of that moment--what I sensed, what I felt, the stray thoughts passing through, my relation to the people around me. That bundle of many-faceted awarenesses constituted the moment, but awareness itself passes on. Still, my mind keeps that recording in the archives, available to be linked to any other memories that happen to contain similar sensations, emotions, thoughts, relationships. Hence, one memory can be associated with a million others, and any one chain of associated memories can be called up in my subconscious, when my body or my mind notices something similar in the present, such as a parallel situation, or thought.
At such a moment, in the subconscious, I become dimly aware of these memories, particularly when my unconscious urges me to dwell on their connecting tissue--say, the passion of anger, the swelling of greed. In a way, my mind demands that awareness give life to its “reality.”
So, for me, mind is not awareness. My mind eats awareness, demands it, drives it, lives off of it.
But awareness, sudden or slow, may be the true giver of life.
--Jonathan Reeve Price and Peter Asher Pitzele
To explore the sequence of Visitations:
Visitation on a Clear Day
Visitation in the Smoke
Visitation in the Haze
Visitation Arriving at Dawn
Visitation on the Rio Grande
Visitation on a Maine Summer Day
Visitation in Brooklyn
Visitation in Midtown
About Jonathan
LinkTree: https://linktr.ee/jonathanreeveprice
MuseumZero site: www.museumzero.art
Twitter: http://twitter.com/JonathanRPrice
Instagram:
Pinterest:
Facebook:
Linked In:
Amazon Author Page:
Goodreads:
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/41600924.Jonathan_Price
About Peter
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/peter.pitzele/
Scripture Windows: Toward a Practice of Bibliodrama, with Susan Pitzele
Our Fathers' Wells: A Personal Encounter With the Myths of Genesis
No comments have been added yet.
