Francesca da Rimini, “Casting Away”, catalogue text, Encoding experience: 10 October 2008, 17:26 EST
Casting Away
Look at your eyes. They are small,
but they see enormous things.
Everyday days the prophesies must be cast, this is not optional.
Yet I have needled this little area into utter ruins,
forgetting that to be guided by fragrance
is one hundred times better than following tracks.
A dragonfly sails out towards the great fire,
his boat filled with flowers and tears.
Whispered voices in a strange tongue, invisible licks from behind, jolts of pleasure.
Over-scaled grey room menaces, as somewhere
a diminished baby, glass jarred, struggles to breathe.
Dimmi che mi ami, dimmi che mi ami, dimmi che mi ami . . .
(Tell me that you love me . . .)
From a never ending staircase a strident voice prevails:
We kill children here.
Vitrines housing dead media,
perfect retro, rife with references.
Cree ate her, a ceremony
bringing renewal after great hardship.
Worlds away, a lone green man exhaled the shout,
shattering the sky in translation.
Hacking protocols, the foam witch walks across channels,
works across platforms,
staging intimate pre-hearsals for states of catastrophe.
Jollies rogered, hammered repeatedly,
whilst a riot of flags are hurled onto pyres.
Ancient bridges of white stone dumb bombed.
Later, on the rebuild, a boy shot in the back of the head,
fifteen years vanish without a flicker.
More slash than dot, peer to peer is dangerous here,
empire's humanitarian new clothes concealing the tawdried sameness.
Resist! she said
Dead roses cascade from her multiplying mouths
Stay together friends
Don't scatter, and sleep
Here our children perish slowly,
flies stuck to the corners of their green weeping eyes.
The living dead—the structurally readjusted hidden from history,
leave their deserts, their mountains, their forest remnants.
Cloaked in possum skins and the feathers of bronzewing pigeons,
they are gunning for battle.
The machine roars, yawns, swallows naked diesel,
assett-stripped and all alone.
Mirror, mirror, on the wall
Who is the most linked of them all?
There is no society, only individuals continuous live feed on networked monitors.
With no mind we open souls, pledging:
Tomorrow, together, we will be okay.
Constant, slow movement teaches us to keep working
like a small creek that stays clear,
that doesn't stagnate, but finds a way
through numerous details, deliberately.
Five signs, five continents:
An elk with broken antlers.
A tree walking through mud each dusk.
Horsemen emerging from a dry stone wall.
A wedding party bombed dumb, a general exxonerated.
Snake swallows self, becoming eagle.
The warming is upon you.
Step away from the keyboard.
To capture more than mere moments of mobility and presence,
prepare to set sail for higher lands in flotillas of rotting tankers.
Beware—sections of trouble change and swim.
Sirens transformed into pink birds
join voices in perilous chorus.
Pass through darkness with eyes closed, in order to see.
Oceans are corridors for hauntings,
opening up the impossible.
And after the data cores have melted
and salt river veins bled dry,
before my face is scorched back to bone
and my ears closed over,
I will feel your thoughts still,
through the rattle of ghost wires
and tugs of string networks.
Sources and inspirations: Martin John Callanan, Scot Cotterell, Jesse Darlin’, Nik Gaffney, Michael Ignatieff, Isabelle Jenniches, Maja Kuzmanovic, Walter Langelaar, Lauré, Nancy Mauro-Flude, Nathan Menglef, Rumi, Melinda Rackham, Michelle Teran, Margaret Thatcher, Baby Tombo, Nicola Unger, Danya Vasiliev, Malcolm Walker.