Haunting the Margin Between Thee and Me

[Image: photo of “On the Margins of the Borderland,” a mixed-media work by António Ole. Found it at the site of the Smithsonian Learning Lab, where it is described this way: “A broken canoe of welded iron holds stacks of newspapers and colonial era papers in one half and piles of crumbling bricks in the stern. Each of the boat’s two sections holds a monitor playing scenes of light reflecting on water and topped by a pied crow. A used fishing net falls across the papers filling the canoe’s broken prow.” For more details, see the note below.]

From whiskey river:

Those who possess wisdom cannot just ladle it out to every wantwit and jackanapes who comes along and asks for it. A person must be prepared to receive wisdom, or else it will do him more harm than good. Moreover, a lout thrashing about in the clear waters of wisdom will dirty those waters for everyone else. So, a man seeking knowledge must be first tested to determine if he is worthy.

(Tom Robbins [source])

…and:

You start to think of contempt as a virus. Infecting individuals first, but spreading rapidly through families, communities, peoples, power structures, nations. Less flashy than hate. More deadly. When contempt kills you, it doesn’t have to be a vendetta or even entirely conscious. It can be a passing whim. It’s far more common, and therefore more lethal.

(Zadie Smith [source])

…and (from whiskey river’s commonplace book):

I See My Beauty in You

I see my beauty in you. I become
a mirror that cannot close its eyes

to your longing. My eyes wet with
yours in the early light. My mind

every moment giving birth, always
conceiving, always in the ninth

month, always the come-point. How
do I stand this? We become these

words we say, a wailing sound moving
out into the air. These thousands of

worlds that rise from nowhere, how
does your face contain them? I’m

a fly in your honey, then closer, a
moth caught in flame’s allure, then

empty sky stretched out in homage.

(Jelaluddin Rumi [source])

Not from whiskey river:

The Least Figure

I tried to think of some way
to let my face become yours.

“Could I whisper in your ear
a dream I’ve had? You’re the only one
I’ve told this to.”

You tilt your head, laughing,
as if, “I know the trick you’re hatching,
but go ahead.”

I am an image you stitch with gold thread
on a tapestry, the least figure,
a playful addition.

But nothing you work on is dull.
I am part of the beauty.

(Jelaluddin Rumi [source])

…and:

Marginalia

Finding an old book on a basement shelf—
gray, spine bent—and reading it again,
I met my former, unfamiliar, self,
some of her notes and scrawls so alien

that, though I tried, I couldn’t get (behind
this gloss or that) back to the time she wrote
to guess what experiences she had in mind,
the living context of some scribbled note;

or see the girl beneath the purple ink
who chose this phrase or that to underline,
the mood, the boy, that lay behind her thinking—
but they were thoughts I recognized as mine;

and though there were words I couldn’t even read,
blobs and cross-outs; and though not a jot
remained of her old existence—I agreed
with the young annotator’s every thought:

A clever girl. So what would she see fit
to comment on—and what would she have to say
about the years that she and I have written
since—before we put the book away?

(Deborah Warren [source])

…and:

#57: In the diner booth, my old friend’s hands on the table between us; mine, inches away from my friend’s. I don’t recognize those spots on my friend’s hands; my friend seems puzzled by this line on my wrist, the line above that one, the line below. The space between our fingertips swirling, memories tracing the woodgrain and the syrup smears. It’s not obvious where one swirl begins and leaves off, nor one memory, nor another: whose smear is whose; whose memory. All those years, those sticky dots on the timelines, some overlapping, most not. While X was happening to me, Y was rattling my friend’s life; we shared a Z from two different sides, each unrecognizable to the other. No memory, no smear or adhesive moment identical for us both. And yet somehow, a perfectly shared past…

(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)

_____

Note: more about “In the Margins of the Borderland,” from the work’s label as it appeared at the Smithsonian:

Over the past 15 years António Ole has created several provocative and critically acclaimed installations, of which this is the first. It has been exhibited on three continents and appears here for the first time in North America. The work stems from Ole’s desire to draw attention to the history of colonial and local violence and to the architectural decay that surrounds him in Angola. Inside a broken boat that goes nowhere are police reports the artist collected off the street outside an administrative office. He paired the bundles of papers with birds that no longer fly and bricks that are not being used to build. The birds, net and scenic ocean waves playing on the TV sets refer to Angola’s coast, his homeland. At once haunting and beautiful, this installation reveals Ole’s ability to address difficult subject matter and still create a visually rich experience.

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