Summoning the World, Sending It Away

[Image: Domain Field (2003), by Antony Gormley. (Click to enlarge.) See the note below for more information.]

From whiskey river:

A Valley Like This

Sometimes you look at an empty valley like this,
and suddenly the air is filled with snow.
That is the way the whole world happened —
there was nothing, and then…

But maybe some time you will look out and even
the mountains are gone, the world become nothing
again. What can a person do to help
bring back the world?

We have to watch it and then look at each other.
Together we hold it close and carefully
save it, like a bubble that can disappear
if we don’t watch out.

Please think about this as you go on. Breathe on the world.
Hold out your hand to it. When mornings and evenings
roll along, watch how they open and close, how they
invite you to the long party that your life is

(William Stafford [source])

…and:

Every person needs to take one day away. A day in which one consciously separates the past from the future. Jobs, family, employers, and friends can exist one day without any one of us, and if our egos permit us to confess, they could exist eternally in our absence. Each person deserves a day away in which no problems are confronted, no solutions searched for. Each of us needs to withdraw from the cares which will not withdraw from us

(Maya Angelou [source])

Not from whiskey river:

The House Was Quiet and The World Was Calm

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

(Wallace Stevens [source])

…and:

Frogs fall out of my mouth when I talk. Toads, too.

…I am practicing reading modernist revolutionary poetry aloud. My accent is atrocious. Still, a day will come when the Panamanian golden frog will tumble from my lips, and I will catch and hold it, and whatever word I spoke, I’ll say again and again, until I stand at the center of a sea of yellow skins, and make from my curse at last a cloth of gold.

(“T. Kingfisher” (Ursula Vernon) [source])

…and:

I Am Learning To Abandon the World

I am learning to abandon the world
before it can abandon me.
Already I have given up the moon
and snow, closing my shades
against the claims of white.
And the world has taken
my father, my friends.
I have given up melodic lines of hills,
moving to a flat, tuneless landscape.
And every night I give my body up
limb by limb, working upwards
across bone, towards the heart.
But morning comes with small
reprieves of coffee and birdsong.
A tree outside the window
which was simply shadow moments ago
takes back its branches twig
by leafy twig.
And as I take my body back
the sun lays its warm muzzle on my lap
as if to make amends.

(Linda Pastan [source])

____________________

About the image: from artist Antony Gormley’s site, on this work:

How can you make the spaces that people displace into a collective energy field — in other words take the idea of spatial extension from the idea of a singularity, producing an expanded field to an immersive field of individual packets of energy?

A caption at Flickr, where I first encountered the (sculpture?) provides some additional details about the process (this text first appeared in a review of the exhibit by Anthony Searle in The Guardian):

The fabrication of Antony Gormley’s newest work, Domain Field, has been taking place in public at [Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art] in Gateshead since February [2003]. Locals of all ages came to be cast: to undress and giggle or feel apprehensive at being wrapped in clingfilm, slathered in Vaseline, wound in hessian scrim and caked in wet plaster. The opened casts piled up, then welders worked in the brittle cavities, wedging and welding slender steel bars into the space where a body once was.

[back to top]