Looking Through the Portal
mud puddle reflections on a year
Time dances me through idiosyncratic whirls and knots. It expands through portals of attention, fixation on the smallest details, repeating in loops. It whooshes —so fast—past much anticipated events, and gathers itself again in puddles of reflection. And so a year in review comes to me, not ranked, ordered or scaled, but as childlike dancing in mud puddles after a storm.
2023 opened with the celebration of many years of friendship and collaboration with my dear sister Beatrice Marovich, whose beautiful book “Sister Death: Political Theologies for Living and Dying”, published by Columbia University Press, was released into the world. Carried in that book are a decade’s worth of artworks of mine, creaturely incarnations of the wanderings, ponderings, thorny paths and hard questions we’ve been emboldened to ask through the intellectual and creative bonds of our sisterhood, a sisterhood of holding hands and peering together into the dark.
Beatrice and I explored those dark places again through an audio collaboration, Nights in Between. This sonic exploration of the night is part of the Machines in Between project, a series of audio episodes that “reimagines our present state of technological saturation. It is part mixtape, surreal performance, and philosophical experiment.”
In early 2023 I also began to explore this substack portal, a liminal place where I have engaged in the act of thinking aloud on the animating gestures that shape my practice of being a human artist in the world. It has been a place where I have gathered up filaments of ideas shared with students, written in statements and proposals submitted to unimpressed juries, offered awkwardly to friends and read to my dog. Through this portal, I’ve been able to let those filaments catch and gather, like the lint my mother would pull out of the drier and color sort into clear bags, to be woven into cloud-like basket tributes to the imagination.
Writing through this portal has allowed me to sense my own atmosphere and the innumerable forms of symbiosis that constitute this thing I call Drawing on the Senses, a performative-poetic-post-humanist-pedagogical practice that exceeds me in every way and is the very best I have to offer a challenged and challenging world.
In the spring of 2023, Beatrice and I collaborated on a text and art piece on human composting titled “Becoming Earth”, which was published in Science and Non-Duality. As the season turned, my explorations of earth and sky, of dark spaces of unknowing and the forces that shape our perceptions of them, shifted towards the more-than-human and I spent the summer and early fall collaborating with smoky skies and summer storms, lichen, insects, slugs and snails, falling walnuts and seeds dropped by warblers, wrens, chickadees, cardinals and robins.
Elements of this work came to inform the creation of “From the Lutum Edge,” an installation of sculptural works created from Red Hook soil mixed with recycled paper and environmental debris, exhibited alongside my field guide Drawing on the End of the World: Red Hook, Brooklyn as part of the 2023 Urban Soils Symposium. The guide includes an audio collaboration with another dear addition to my growing family of creative conspirators: entomologist, sound ecologist, and audio documentary producer Ben Pagac.
In 2023 I also gained a brother, the philosopher, author, teacher, trans-public intellectual Bayo Akomolafe. Bayo’s worldings have animated global villages of oddkin growing up from cracks and compost piles and I have been honored to be welcomed among them as a sister, collaborator, and friend. I created a series of weird works and workshops as Artist-in-Residence for his 4 month global online course-festival We Will Dance With Mountains, Vunja!, a course that concluded in December with the promise of more to come. Through my work with the team of wonderful people producing the course, I came to know Aerin Dunford, Lead Weaver of Bayo’s organization The Emergence Network and am happy to be looking ahead in creative sisterhood with her as well.
As I reflect on my year, my heart fills with gratitude for all those who have shared their world-making/un-making with me. And this gratitude shares that heart space with so many other feelings, feelings that exist in vast ecosystems of emotions, of affective assemblages and so I will end this year-end reflection with a kind of compost-composite-composition of the heart:
We do not have love.
We, all of us, entangled in complex worlds, held in temporal folds of futuristic micro
plastics mixing with ice age nematodes, worlds where the erection of storm water barriers drowns out the singing of whales, worlds that have frozen and burned only to burn and freeze again,
do not have love.
Let us consider the cell. Weary of interwovenness, we may take refuge in the simple cell, that basic unit of life living seemingly separate from all but its atmosphere. And what is the scale of the cell’s atmosphere? How do we draw, neat and complete, discreet lines around the sustaining liquids that surround the single cell? And if the cell is an ecosystem of unknown dimensions dividing to develop, replicate and reproduce into the collection of interdependent organisms known as the human, what sense do we make in the idea of the individual, of Modern Man, moving machinelike along linear timelines of progress?
If the cell is enlisted into mattering by coagulations of atmos then we, too, are the articulation of such gasses, of energy and emotions that are not born in our minds or hearts but made in the sky.
In other words, we do not have love.
Love has us.
Each of us, feeling what we think is our own heart, place hands on our individual chests feeling the stretch that love takes or feeling the place where our hearts were coppiced into shapes to hold more than we ever thought we could bear. But if we are enfleshed collections of emotional atmospheres, then perhaps we are more firmament than phenotype. Perhaps our hearts are not beating and breaking in our chests but are already open and air-borne.
Perhaps then love has never been ours to make or take but instead comes to all of us like clouds, shading and watering us into organs of dissemination. Might we then be mattered into being for the sake of atmospheric desire, for what is gravity other than the earth’s longing to be held? The atmosphere meets the earth’s eros by wrapping it in a thin blue aura of breath and we eat and breathe in the pressure of their eros, quivering and writhing down to our single cells and the space inside that cannot be contained because we do not have love.
Love has us.
Stunning transcendent year for you. And for us, your followers.