In the next workshop we’re encouraged to return to old notes, past-time meeting now-time.

Waking, you note a decision to hold the moment in your hand and mind, and not let the hurt hold so tight. Sunrise entering, windows of buttermilk. Window pane and its reflection on your back wall and bedlinen - a grid of creams and peach lozenge, warmth furry in its outline. Like Agnes Martin’s pastel frames, like Hanna Darboven’s mapping of moments, the room and rooms beyond stand as grids, awash in hued notation. Like watching a Joan Jonas work; jangling sketches on grainy reels, film unfurling like roads to Scotland. You’re reminded of the works of Margaret Tait, the feel of sweat and oil and weather. Watching a sunset through a wing mirror leaves you clutching for something, questioning belief. From the deep earth of childhood, lost. Grace-notes evident; a rising ripple through recording device - ear, eye, camera. 

Pause for your senses to adjust. First scanning the room and then moving within it, perception sharpening. Interchangeable, hovering, floating - like phosphenes in the eye, like sleep in the duct - the action of seeing, understanding, confronting, omitting. What we suppose to be Living. A particular being, a resounding murmur. An almost-silence, like that of wings folding back; wings of angels over organ pipes, of birds perched in rafters. Here you might strain your ear. Soft exhalations of the figure beside you. Crinkle of skin in the cold.

 It has been a year, and another birthday. Another solstice comes. Keep learning to embrace coolness and warmth in equal measure. Stained by liquid sun again. Recall Elizabeth Bishop’s words, a red light swimming through the dark, the passengers lying back. A gentle auditory slow hallucination as they look out from the car window. Or an open-top truck, you don’t remember which. ‘Something happened’ - it continues - and you just know you’re trying to walk on kinder surfaces in older age, and this entanglement - your gazes - are okay but you’re not supposed to touch the way you once did. 

Green Man is approaching with hay fever and antihistamines, and again this mess reaches you, with love and stone circles, rising to greet the morning. Inclined to say you’re doing better, but really it’s more like letting what little daylight you reap fill eyes and belly. Cradling, sometimes-clinging-to sun and hard truths with delicacy. With desperation. You note a dirge in the form of a song released by a friend. It jolts you like a cry to say you are here and she is not, not here but here-elsewhere, across the waters and skies, her sound. Passing a message from one sphere to another, so that it can be stored in human memory* - and you were watching, and you were waiting. Temporal concerns. Memory and present come flowing. Gradually, Day leaves. Night is the overflow of Being.* Evening comes, blueing the air, static. Night as soft electric. Bearing witness to touch. Crinkle of skin in cold air. 

( protracted sigh )
Memory and present come, gradually, in the thick of the plural. Make sense of things, awkwardly sat in the white space between lettering, skin on skin on — Try to be steadfast, holding your growing elytra close, tight like a shield. Liquid. Sun. Stained again. Stars and teeth. Clumsily, often. Falling out of the roof of mouth and sky. A scratching in crevices. Soaked with tulip red-pink plumes and Bruegel’s red-pink tights, his shoes of velvet in the gallery; soft petals holding, the body reddish vapour. Blood and blossoms painting faces. Dawn licking. A much needed undressing. A(d)-dressing. Breath, a scented singing litany that wavers before you. Think of cows, warm and damp, shining white to obsidian. Sometimes russet or burnt sienna. Like the land. Slow, occasionally pissing a river, scorching the earth. A body of land hurting the land. Someone says grieving is voracious, and then you don’t want to eat. Body hurting itself. Someone else says the wind lies down with the night to sleep. Not in this city. It comes up to the windows, wanting to be let in. Currents of time. Trespassing our limits like memorials.

*Etel Adnan’s Night 

By Lu Rose Cunningham
@lurosecunningham