With additional works from Gregory Polony and Eleanor Ivory Weber

The strange meeting might be enfigured as an ampersand, which is a kind of eaten-away Möbius strip, incompletely delivering impossible contacts, inefficiently flooding, dumping, jamming, breaking out, collapsing, gesturing, speeding up, distending, suspending, petering out. The “pity” of war emerges like goo from these pits, but it is also the force that creates its own distended tissues and pitted surfaces.

McSweeney, Joyelle. The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults (Poets On Poetry)
(Kindle Locations 257-260). Kindle Edition.

AN OBOL FOR MY OBELISK

An obol for my obelisk
An obol for my baselisk
A bitter coin to bite on
as it turns itself to rock
Now one song, one hit of vintage
half-remembered, half-anticipated
unwinds on air
as it starts its petrifying
from the ankles up. Its claws contract
like Alexander McQueen booties
the shape of quotation marks
or the bodies at Pompeii
arrayed for shipment to the afterlife
who never embarked
They hug their own shorelines
and keep watch for the ship
I want to weight my own lids with heavy money
pecked from the seam of the rock
perform the eyeroll that means misery
my thick curls husbanded in a
masculine flock
I want at best to cluck
around the obelisk
removed from the airspace
and inserted wholly
into my dock
At all costs weight my tongue
with an obol
Black with ash
it wants to fly around the room
on leather wings and lace the air
with ore-like seams
through which dark matter can rip
wrecking all passage
to the afterlife
ocean liner
lusitania
dingdong
the brain hums on
with its frantic cartoon dialog
Bring your rock down on my control panel
Break me out of this looney toon
I want to baselisk, to glare it
In the glare of 500 million animals burning up, burnt fur
and wing and scale
rise as fume to fill day’s red upended chamber pot
or cranium emptied of brain
I’m like the sky
solid with rage
I want to mask
my grief
by wearing a mask
of it so that it starts to signal
and not be
A peach stone,
all enfolded,
genital and cerebral,
hides in the mouth of the ephebe
Get it out of there at once. It is exonumismatic
It is an example of exonumia and will not get you into the
underworld
no matter how well you ride
the wrecked raft of your life for the
exit, ersatz Keats
Good for, admit one, redeem
I reck all runes
A choir of mockingbirds deploys their final tune
imitating human alarums
as they burn up in their tree
which enplumes
while the MGM lion
rests stone paw on paw
on the steps outside the libraree
Its heavy mane tugs its head skyward, pulls its eyes to slits
and draws back its lips from a maw the size of a lyre
And now it opens up its lyre
And says, Get me out of here at once

^{TEXT BY JOYELLE MCSWEENEY}

Dear Reader

We’ve come to understand this exhibition as a collection of defence strategies. But defence against what? In order to jam a wireless signal (cell phone signal, radio signal, GPS signal) the two main tactics are 1; to blanket a frequency band with noise so the signal can’t pass through it, or 2; to scramble the incoming message beyond the point of device legibility. In such a process invisibility is thus equal and opposite to visibility, i.e. a refusal that must be active and technologically equivalent to what it refuses. Maybe reading is an analogue to this too; reading to actively rewrite, reading to disappear, reading to jam.

It’s also an exhibition about attachment and about binding, and these themselves are defence strategies and modes of invisibility. The show is bracketed on two sides by the works of friends, which spoon the space from two directions (strange meetings in the necropastoral). Continuous Pattern Camouflage means the wearer disappears by continuing the visual patterns of their environment, which in a forest might mean patches of green and brown and black, but in a discourse taking place across multiple cities in multiple centuries might need something more.

We are, as ever, the soft cover to your soft cover,

xSRC