Ekphrasis-tically!
Vomiting up anguish
Sometime earlier, a friend sent me this article: “Maggie Nelson’s ‘Like Love’ Explores the Magic of Paying Attention.” And after reading it, I thought: Oh crap, well, I have another Maggie Nelson book I MUST READ.
Maggie Nelson and I have a parasocial relationship, meaning she doesn’t know about me but I know about her. We first met back in grad school. A teacher recommended her books; they inspired how I wrote my book; and I then went on to read a lot more of her work. I find that when I read books by multiple authors it’s often because they really embody the idea of innovation through story. Every written thing is a unique world crafted/structured/written/approached differently. Honestly, I kinda love Sabrina Carpenter for that right now. (See end of article for two examples).
And so here we are, me with Maggie Nelson’s latest book in hand. I’ve only just read the preface, and I’m now here on this device 💻😱 to share with you some quotes and other residue Nelson’s work has dredged up in me.
First the quote which actually belongs to James Baldwin:
All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up."
Then, this from Maggie Nelson herself:
I learned something about the craving for connection that art conjures, frustrates, and possibly exists to satisfy. I learned that finding out what you think or feel about something can take time, and that that time is always worth taking. I learned that art is one way we live together in the world [……super cut…….] And how such engagement attaches and reattaches me to curiosity, to others, to life, especially when my own spirits have dimmed.
This book by Maggie Nelson btws is about art—specifically her writing about art.
I know I began trying to have an attachment (?) / an engagement (?) / a connection (?) / a perspective (yes, I think that’s the one) to art began in my college years. How do you stand in front of a piece of art/theatre/person/thing and interact with it? In a way that conjures up a unique thing in you? Such that you want to share it? Such that it becomes like a tiny atom of nuclear fission inside your mind? Such that it continues to generate things in you/out of you/beyond you BEYOND that moment where you first stood in front of it?
That it becomes enmeshed in the story of you?
And now the word ekphrasis
This is a literary style that asks a writer to conjure up a visual art piece through written description.
Some ekphrasis from me
In the archives, I’ve talked of art, but I don’t do ekphrasis often … or rather I don’t think I do?
But I DID take an ekphrasis class once upon a time, and here are two pieces + the visual art.
Sand-Cast Torso of a Snake Culebra by Isabel de Obaldia Your shedded skin I view you as if it is human as if cast in dough as if newly baked but imperfect, as if in “thanks” to some enthusiastic oven shaking all your particles together in formula of some great big BANG! Then even though my belly is flat on the earth, I view the topographic, granular confection as if from space! I see the collision of tectonic plates as if locked like a jaw holding the red brilliant protrusion in your chest and the heat of two ancient fang bites in your thighs, such that I rest my head on the floor cloaking the world in the darkness of my hair until I raise my face and can’t recall which way is up.
The 👆comes from an art exhibit at the Museum of Latin American Art. The one 👇 comes from the Museum of Jurassic Technology—one of my most super favorite places in Los Angeles ever. The exhibit showed letters people wrote to the Griffith Observatory, and I pulled out this line from a response to a letter by a woman who claimed to know everything.
|Cassandra Curse| "I am glad to know you long ago discovered ALL the wonderful things modern science is daily discovering" --taken from the Griffith Observatory Letter Exhibition at the Museum of Jurassic Technology-- for May Wilste hushed little Business Card, I've eaten oranges also stripped and naked as a lotus. -- still waiting I see, for a reply in this museum of solitaire and illusions.-- If your lettered compatriot could cry blue dye and seep past musty eyed glass where would our kinship go? Our new mutual blood because it is a mere lash under pen point, and I know something also of unbelieved runes on paper and of time. -of time now and still you try - hushed mouth stuffed full of feathers from a fallen Icarus, and nostrils full of fragrant fallen fruit with no bottle to hold the vanishing vapor to justify the tale.
The End.
You did it! 🥳
And now ….
Those Sabrina Carpenter Examples I promised
👆Her earlier work
👇 Her contemporary work
That’s that.