Each thing is prolific. The lamp, the courtyard, the lime tree. They are seasonal, episodic, undergoing periods of stillness and inertia. At such times, they do not publish, they abide, patiently. At other times, and particularly under the excitement of a human eye, they begin to pour out new works, volumes of association and electricity, sketches of shadows and nostalgia — broadsides, epigrams, histories.

If you were to take an ontological slice through any item, no matter how inert and quiescent it may seem on the surface, you would discover that it is actually teeming with life. If there were an instrument that were capable of capturing relations, and you passed the most common article – a button, a shoe, a paintbrush – beneath the lens, like bacilli blooming under a microscope, you would see at once stupendous forests issuing out from the object, a web of threads and anchors so complex it would defy your ability to process it, and would ultimately fade out at the edges of comprehension, as with dreams at their beginning and end…

Often, a person is completely unaware of the spectral flurry of activity they cause in the objects around them. People follow the lines of utility, of immediate desire: they’re conscious of the lamp’s switch, the sticky glisten of the lime in spring; they don’t notice the wings, the moonlight, the tides, the Carboniferous. The extraordinarily subtle shimmer of possible relations, evolving right before their eyes, is almost entirely intangible to them. Perhaps only on rare occasions may they be aware of the murmur of the sea in their heart, the endless ramifications of the waves, the bleak squawk of seabirds swirling and diving around a black granite cliff…

 

 

from Semapolis | City of Signs
(series of poems, unfinished, 2012–present)