Forget alone and
forget you have forgotten —
have it both ways.
— Sengai
Objects becoming subjects
Lineage and longing
Arriving as if nothing...
Heritage and other disappearances
Desiring darkling days
"There is no world, there are only islands."
Believing ancestral oracles
"I wanted not a window on the world but the world itself.
I wanted everything in the picture."
"Let the pretty beast and all the world know peace,"
NOTES
- Epigraph: Sengai (Japanese poet and artist, 1750-1837), Trans. Cid Corman
- "I wanted not a ...." Joan Didion from her 1976 essay Telling Stories in Let me Tell You What I Mean (2021). More: "I was not going to Honolulu because I wanted to see life reduced to a short story. I was going to Honolulu because I wanted to see life expanded to a novel, and I still do. I wanted not a window on the world but the world itself. I wanted everything in the picture."
- "There is no..." Jacques Derrida from The Beast and the Sovereign (Lectures Vol 2, 2002-2003)
- "Let the pretty..." Joy Harjo, a line from her poem The Last World of Fire and Trash in Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings (2015)
- Two poems below by Cid Corman from The Next One Thousand Years, Selected Poems (2008)
- Found Objects-Subjects photos and all other captions conjured in Eugene Oregon by Douglas Beauchamp (2022)
And now the
words — remote:
another
life, not this
obvious
makeshift. I…?
Don't tell me
who I am,
let me guess.
Existing
Is neither
a right nor
privilege
nor any
thing but a
miracle.
