Sunday, August 28
MATERIAL CULTURE I wish I could think with my nose. Be possessed by a sense without pushing it down the long canal of language. Even during sex, I translate: it feels good, I might say. I don't want to say this. This to this, that to that: not everything has to be mapped. The pyramids were silvered in limestone to pull the sun to earth and capped in gold to draw the spirit back should it wish to return. A building cannot love you back, feel or say hello. Still, I stand at the threshold of mine, see a polaroid of me I must have dropped propped on the sill by the door. I pocket it and enter. Here, I am allowed to spread my objects. My mute proxies with clean boundaries. They stake out my space while I'm away. My mind works, I think, by drawing lines around the edges. But I can only think when I'm suspended, maybe by a metal tress above the water, a thin rain flushing the others from the city and the sky descending to reclaim the tops of things, the parts it always owned. I want to stay here, in the slim wedge between two places, a land outside of land. I want to return after I leave, back down the long canal and to a shape that's much like this one, or one completely different. (Tracy Fuad)