2001/2 – M
Full five fathoms deep was your heart
In the ruins of an ancient city
Fish were eating what used to be your art
Your good works, your sorrowful pity
Didn’t tell the cabin crew what I’d seen
Didn’t want them to worry
After all the sea was so serene
Why think about something so gory
It must have happened while you were asleep
It must have happened on several occasions
That you would reach for it and it wasn’t there
What do you do in these situations?
Full five fathoms was your heart
In the ruins of Lemuria
Starfish were sitting on what used to be your art
I was looking at their euphoria
I
store bricks
hard carry
hand shape
heavy velocity
still carry
my face
hard water
freezing
at street corner
world of pipes
and arrows
stick to water
hand to throat
freezing slowly
super gasp
lustrous water
slicing dryly
glowing slightly
of soft substances
sibilant
motion melt
from strength to strength
see a nexus of forces
when I look into a wall
splitting drily
like a subject
never got
your profound modality
2008 – M, from a notebook
‘No, no, I don’t hate you, I couldn’t ever hate you, I’m just trying to fill up the space where love should have been.
Goodbye, goodbye, I’m gone, you’re gone, goodbye, goodbye, it’s gone, it’s gone, we’ve killed it, with kindness and soap, we’ve killed it, it’ll trouble us no more, goodbye brave young man, goodbye valiant girl, out with you, door, electronic key, we are gone, the warmth dissipates fast, the stairs follow down, goodbye, we got there in the end’
Jan 2012, me, from an email to M
Light
thought that I could grow forever
lachrymose imperial dismay whomever
about me random but interesting
that sense is gone now, for months
I have skipped over language unhesitating
confident in my abilities releasing
development gain nostrils a spare
moment’s silence cyclically indicated.
In room 618 window fittings seen
a great work of art, hunt not to understand
what stops it:
After the crash even
The encaustic bridge loans dry up,
Your arm draped across the American Bar
becomes unaffordable; so I measure it
with a tongue that comes up shorted
daylight falling fifth to gentle love.
Or something different.
February 2012 – M, transcription from a notebook
I miss my baby i miss my baby i miss him so much i want to carry my connection to the ground with me, the plane’s conditions at all times must or could be present to me i at no time wish to default the experience of flight to a hypothesis i want the ground of the flight to be accessible to me at all times though it is grey and indistinct this ground is more felt than perceived
he is my life now not in it i have not made space for him i do not know where he is in distinction from all else he is just all the space/ he is what is the case i am in it with him he and i what is the case ‘this looks like becoming the new normal’ mediation/s at a standstill so so so sweet my baby so so so so so sweet everything has stopped around us in us though I feel the vibrations still the reports he and I are the stop we are here and we are in it
2012/13 – M, book dedications to me
On this temporal stopping point
punctured with light and
in your shape
let me never
let my eyes go from
this never
xx xx xx xx
M
For the year,
for the hour
Held alongside
Rushing forward
into rarefaction
and you with me
for this increment,
I hand over
what is always
your
I
(and her properties)
M
2016. Me – Al-Wawa fable, birthday card on M’s 40th birthday
2018 M – Brno, a writing exercise, a dialogue between ‘Earth’ and ‘World’, transcription from a notebook (2018)
"Valley
- fear of birds to be immersed in the world?
-
Earth to World:
I know you try to minimise the contingencies I introduce to you. But earth to world, earth to world come in, world, The duality between us is a hard epistemological fiction, a real abstraction. The earth -- me -- is that which disrupts your plans but really your strategizing unfolds from the tenuous principle that I exist, that you exist, that there is culture & nature, and that one impacts on the other & the impacts must be managed. You depart from me and you welcome me. But my bareness is your baseness, a projection of your fear and impatience. When you love me and praise me, it is a sentimental self-love, you bewail the hard necessity of your conquest. But neither of us exists. I beckon to you, I reproach you; but we respectively are artefacts of the domination you externalize on me as brute fact
2019 Me, Advice column, outro
close your eyes,
imagine a carpark with no soun-
dsystem, embers falling. candle-
lit emblem of employee loyalty,
you who cry out with joy like u
are never to descend, in the toil-
ets at McDonalds an image wait
s for you forever it must necess-
arily be infinite, like a total pigs-
sty in woolwich that no sprinkle-
rs could ever alleviate o my god,
so many miles from free childca
re and training we all see the sig
ns yeah o we all see the sinks in
the distance, we can all feel it s-
welling, a little green in the fore
ground like a vast orange sea. O
open me please, the capitalists a
re all globalists the world is just
an alibi, the shelter hotline rings
forever pink forever sweet yeah,
Squat the grey fluourescent rain.
there are no rich people here. in
a carpark, with no soundsystem,
we all arrive together wet and b-
ruises all our bodies, fresh from,
pink nailbars our nails will neve
r. scratch this out. we arrive tog-
ether. all our ideas are perfect b-
roken fingers, we can only hold
these flares with them. These. a
flower grows over an ambulanc
e in the air. the black medulla o
f the red tulip. costas pour from
its escape hatches in little perfe-
ct shavings of coloured shadow,
dickhead adecco flowers suitab-
le for any occasion shatter its wi
ndows oh wow how spectacular
ice creeps across the lake, like a
bbc accent kids home charity do
gala we are never found dead, a
nd will never tell the council ho
w beautiful it is in the carpark a
t night we can all watch the am-
bulance sinking into the Oceans,
we can all split in two we can al
l come to life in the taxi to the h
ospital, with pink nailbars in the
distance. Do what u want to me,
All our images are perfect ideas.
just don’t engage with the cunts,
the more you engage with them,
the more they fuck you over. O,
tremendous stillness of what gr-
ows from our chest, a deckchair
has been placed here representi-
ng struggle, from the nailbars w
indswept and kept empty by the
nature of things we will emerge,
stronger than we were we will s
it in a plastic chair, yeah. and do
the crossword like lovers. we ha
ve hair on our lips; will never te-
ll the council how beautiful it is,
how exquisite. never scab never
27.10.2018, M, dream
- curse placed on magician who produced wind-up rabbits (lowest form of legerdemain) by aesthetically appalled witches (2, women, glam)
- magician also a woman (me-surrogate), youngish
- curse consisted of material slippages in laws of physics (floor becoming sand for instance)
- another witch (male) takes pity & tells her a botanical form-of-words antidote (or maybe just some magic word)
- related to watching It Follows via attempt to normalize suddenly haywire day-to-day life (neutralize threat)
Jan 2019, M – journal, immediately following 1st diagnosis, transcription from notebook
So now it's this. After all these years of being what I thought was lucky, of getting away with something, w/ my life. How silly it is to say that sickness is the body’s way of asserting itself when you’d just as soon overlook it, I’m sure ‘the body’ has no interest in being damaged or attacked, any more than ‘you’ do, as if a separate thing. Obviously there is old age and decrepitude, an unfolding process with much contingency to it, but I thought that would be the extent of it, at least for now, and judging by what I see around me or what I know to expect, I was right. What is happening to me now is objectively unusual and couldn’t have been included in any overview except a gratuitously darkened one, and again, nothing in my previous life would have led me to have that one rather than the one I did have, if there was an outlook at all as such. I guess most of all I’m surprised [...] I don’t need mortality to give my life meaning. although I do worry that reincarnation is true and this will never end [...] I feel like there’s absolutely no space in my life for this experience, though I don’t really want to think of it in those terms, as an ‘experience’. It is a horrible unlucky event, a crippling piece of bad luck. Why should some crazy cells propel me to reevaluate everything? What kind of abject superstition is that? Maybe I should read Illness as Metaphor. It’s all just so offensive. This tradition of the sick animal as the contemplative animal, well, it’s disgusting, it appals the Nietzschean in me. Part of me feels like even writing these thoughts down is pandering to that impulse or logic.
What I wish for is that rather than us deteriorating through sickness and old age, at a certain point in our lives we would just change into something else, another form. Slowly changes would take place in our bodies and we would become rocks, other animals, plants. It is humiliating to be confined to one type of body, one species.
So do you know how you will survive, is this something you can plan for? I know I do not want to sleep in my illness. I do not want to ‘live’ with it. I do not want to talk to other people who are ill, i.e., in a centre or support group. I will take the time off work but I will use it to do things I want to do, not things dictated by my illness, except the bare minimum obligations of treatment. I am not going to be plaintive or wistful. I am not going to be sad or sorry, or a survivor. It has no claim on me. Just fucking cells.'
Dec 2020, me, book dedication, in the front pages of Fernanda Melchor book
Halve Life
& every morning I get up and inject the state into my arm
and listen to the children singing in the nursery
the world is only ten years old
when the youth centres re-open the emptiness inside them
falls in the sea
at a hundred miles an hour we are its ceiling
& we have everything to live
for a hundred wild tubes from the mouth the ears and the anus
as the brains walk through the hearts
snow theme parks burn to the ground at a hundred miles’ distance
& I love that we share a window,
& every morning I get up their voices sound a little bit deeper
2020-23, M book dedications to me
2020:
Together,
we will create
an instrument
that will carry
us through the
cut we make
in space.
To next year’s gamboling. I
love you so much.
M
2022:
To you,
A hopefully
luckier
Fitzcarraldo selection
With love foreign
to fathoming,
M
Dec 2023:
No you’re not sick and tired!
With all the love I have &
all the love I can
find in my deficient
body, to you my
always
M.
June 2024
Grey walls and glass floors
collapsing dogmas
some dead leaves scattered
adhesion of unrelated elements
inconclusive investigation
in the unbroken shell
Its wet surface
lying on their separate beds
God’s light
outside of historical time
where for once we completely forgot ourselves
Of desperate encouragement,
wide expanses of water, moving, or still, or both or either at once
in a city whose centre is its circumference
like something taking place in Malevich’s head
tried to laugh.
A waiting room full of melted plastic chairs
basic epistemological failures
the oddest part of town
from here on tends to remember and think in lumps
field of ashes
shapes like fingers or open mouths
The mirrors are somewhere in New York
Pine trees in street lamps
Now and then children lie down in the snow to freeze to death
Seaside. Stupidity. Graffitied carriages.
Layers of a castrated God
A gloved hand
Countermanouevres
As a form of associative thinking
Uprooted trees, still growing
Furious burning, at room temperature
On a map of those grey circles
As a hole in the sun
The points in my body
Or anything. Snowdrops, molasses.
that are not there
inversion of that logic
that I dedicate my life to the maximum presence of yours in this world
transformation
My love
my mouth
spray
spit tray
Sauerstoff
syllable
splits
sirens
equal
sauerstoff
spray syllable
spray
splitter and sequel
in the lit
siren
split of you
slit and lit
up like
left
upper scree
and why
scree of
you
spray
spray
my mouth’s
myth of
you
each split
into
split of
you
split and split
of you
splitter
and spray
spray
seashore
and
spray,
spray
and white
glitter
and
day
something rosehued, is scattered around
on the cold, unexpectedly cold floor
at specific times,
something green
I miss you. I’m too tired to write poems.
I’m too tired to have
a clever idea.
As intimate as sex before sex
itself becomes a tired rehearsal
of merely conventional meanings,
when it is still an image of space.
‘It’s OK, I’m on the pill.’
I look out at the sky, I guess.
it’s the largest possible space there is
less expensive than hotels
or waking in a room I
don’t recognise
which are other ways of approaching this.
The sea is too steep now.
The stars cannot reach it. A rented
room at the top of it waits,
waiting, dreams of your arrival
(One more attempt at a book dedication)
When I see you as you are
the words race into me
for the first time this
is my mind and boredom
and hurt are nothing
everyone is alive
since you are
the words in my mind
the names of my friends
who are dead
and who you are
and what I am and
everything else.
When I see you as you are
there is a light in me
the sun has fun
making shadows
and the plants like to grow
it’s like I’d never written
a single word about you
everything is magnificent
desert tundra ocean
terrain steppe
cityscape suburb
landfill & littoral
When I see you as you are
nothing can hurt us
and nothing is despised
time runs in any direction
the words race into me
for the first time this
is my mind and boredom
and hurt are nothing
everything is alive
when I see you as you are
and when I see you as you are
everything is
good enough, even
me, even this
***
What was it like, Marina, what was it like, now that you can speak in that tense,
That each of us has a home in the other
I remember us walking home from that party, up lansdowne drive hand in hand, with you in the long pink scarf and the brechtian leather jacket, and walking in London Fields the next day and seeing the line between your brows, the crease that 12.5 years later I would touch with my hands as I lay with your dead body, alone together in that room as we were for just a minute, before I kissed you on your cold and open lips for the very last time, my love, my only love, my only true love, lover of Shirley Collins and paradox and everything changeable and everything small. I remember seeing the line between your brows then and wondering if this would be possible between us, between the person I was, this child, and you my beautiful one with all of your different faces. I remember how serious you were then, how frightened of seeming stupid or trivial around me, how once you caught yourself humming in the hallway or singing to yourself in your weak but tuneful voice, and stopped, and said something about how stupid you sounded. A note of the self-accusation that later I would find in your journals. The seriousness as a kind of self-discipline, to be an intellectual, to be a radical, to be something other than a child, or a brilliant american girl full of ambitions and unformed ideas. I don't remember whether I said anything but I remember how much I liked you singing. This capacity of idealisation in you. You never ever threatened to leave me. You never wanted that. You always wanted me to nurture and protect you. Later you would do that more and more. You in your leather jacket and your long pink scarf that later would disappear. With the crease between your brows that doesn't show up in pictures of you unless they're taken close up; and there are so few of those. It is the memory of being with you that day, of looking at your face in the clear 1 January light, of wondering and hoping and feeling so full of possibility and anxiety, that after all of this time we were finally here, and that the boundary had been crossed, and we had to discover now what existed. Because the crease represented the distance between us that so fascinated me, because you already represented a world, years of thought, publications, lines of development, your home full of records and clutter and posters for your events 8 years before (20 now) where already you could speak with the style that defined you, when I was still almost a child. I can feel the weight of you, your sudden physical presence as a being I could touch and who wanted me to touch them, to touch you, and also the lightness of our finally bring together, light and grass and morning and walking together nowhere in particular. And when you cycled down the canal with that strange backpack you had then you looked like a beautiful dinosaur. And your hair was slightly wispy. And sometimes when I saw your face you seemed like simply the most beautiful person in the world and sometimes I could see the mousiness that occasionally you saw in yourself, and that was so beautiful to me too, that there were two of you. I don't remember any of the things we spoke about that day. I only remember how I felt when I looked at you, how I felt the miraculousness of your presence that I had yearned for and told myself was impossible for so long; like when months before I had seen your amazing bright eyes at the squat cinema, really seen them for the first time, and felt how exquisite you were and how far away from me. Pink scarf, leather jacket, fracture boot, light, grass.
you and I are the stop we are here and we are in it
*
sometimes
the rose in the spheare, second ring
the cancer disappears. simple wish.
armoured lorries on otherwise deserted lanes
spheare after spheare
detrimental space at a distance from the outskirts.
we go there to do sordid things,
like love one another.
we all do things for money
I touch you on your hand
the cancer disappears,
simple wish. the rose in the spheare, second rim.
that you bring
snow from the will itself,
that’s why the white bus comes for us.
what we need kisses us:
take care, thousands of hinterlands,
fucked up ass system, fucked up ass sunrise,
simple wish. the rose in the spheare, second ring
6 June - notes from a phone app
I didn't describe it well to him. The feeling of being with someone as if being with a whole world. When the person you are with represents something more than themselves. Not just in the sense of a particular social 'scene', or 'who (or what) you know', but who you are, which in her case was defined through a movement of relation. She represented something more than a person, an ordinary person like me, or you, because to be with her was to be in a relation with that to which she herself related, because the capacity of relation was so strong and so intense and so creative in her, and 'What is the ability of the assemblage [but] to open onto a whole field of unlimited immanence that blurs all the segmentary offices and doesn't take place as a punctual ending but is already at work in each limit and at every moment?'
The strength of the capacity to relate defines the power of attraction of the person who becomes the things that they know and love and promises to the person who loves them in turn all of those things in response. The mysteriousness of this. The enigmatical quality of the person who contains inside of themselves a whole shifting landscape of relations to their objects, and who so is always more than themselves: a puzzle. When I look at the pictures of Marina from the first years we were together I see me. I see myself in her; and even when I am also there in the frame, standing right next to her, I am not there. I am her. It's this dizzying sensation of evaporation, of being dazzled and attracted and evaporated at the same time. You are me. It doesn't go the other way round. My life was you. You were my life. I see my life in you, in the world of relations that you and no one else I have ever been able to imagine myself being with opened up for me, by letting me be with you. You are me. And mystery pulses in that experience because I know that the relations that she contained and promised to me could only be held together through her, that I could only experience them through her. Without her they slip through my fingers like flashing silver fish into an ocean that I cannot bear to look at and all that I am left with is the image of her as the person who I first loved who amazed me and who amazed me because right from the beginning she always meant something more than herself, through being herself, in a way that, however harsh it sounds, many of the people she meant (our 'communities') never could. Which is why what I am talking about is neither about the discrepancy of experience between two people at different stages of their lives, nor about the promise of entry into a scene or a social environment to which a particular individual holds the key. It is much more about the awful radiance of the person whose own capacity of relation is what defines them, a singularity of feeling and intelligence that most people simply don't possess; and as much as that might sound uncomradely, or judgmental, or dismissive, the whole web and intertexture of my feelings screams at me that it is true.
Because the concept refers to a feeling, but there is no feeling. Or it has so many layers. The object is a field, an ingathering. The tenderness I felt before her death and the desire I felt when we were together and the yearning I feel for the person who she was before I met her. So the word is made to signify a whole lifetime of changing experiences; which accounts for the painful sense that no one else could elicit from me anything approaching the same total state. The social world of the present acquires its tissue-like thinness and artificiality, the sense of a game that is being played, not very convincingly, by the mannequins of some Kleistian theatre. Or something of the aircushioned air hockey table: the actors as pucks on a cushion of air, sliding across the emptiness on which they rely; where with you it is possible to identify roots, the movements of depth and of deepness.
*
Marina why have you produced so many riddles? I feel so powerless around you, around the idea of you. Every image open unto every other. The whole trembles and quakes, trembles and quakes. Am I you? Is this the answer to all this? I feel that if I could die then everything would be simpler. I wouldn't have to follow the clues anymore. The clues lead to no discovery except the circle of clues itself widening, the amount of space I have to move in singes me and the limits sting. Round and round and round. "False theorems and grand mistakes". Because it is as if you were building a system the whole time out of the whole medium of your life and all its relations and I cannot find my place here, the walls are made out of glass but they exclude space. As it happens I was twenty years old then, already an adult. "The entropy may make itself felt by small dysfunctionalities accumulating over the course of the exhibition". Or eighteen. You were the more powerful and the more perfect one and no one sees it, at least not as I do, and I am too weak to tell anyone. Wonderstruck, and why should it wait, the tremor in an artificial voice. No doors. Infinite regress. Grey walls. As if it collapses into five sections. Because my work is still important, the political aspect of my work. But Marina why can't I be continuous like you, you're making me feel like I did when I was a child again, when I was always good and there was always one person who was better; but now that one person is you, and I cannot even feel your loss more powerfully or evocatively than you felt the absence of a no one, a nothing, a ghost, years before I met you. All of this so grossly artificial. I've lost the plot, the thread, the string, it's slipping through my hands, the fish has taken the bait, it's gone, it’s gone, no need to keep going now, it's gone, good bye, as you will one day say, seventeen years ago, goodbye.
Is this a competition between us? At last? After all these years? As I chase you around the last widening curve to find that it never resolves into a straight, that I orbit you in the hanging glorious affinity of these quotations, preoccupations, hang ups, weightless and turning and absurd. That I cannot even feel as much pain as you. How inordinate. And you are dead and there is no third. Or there is but there may as well not be.
*
Regrets. Marina I regret not being you. I regret not having learned about 'postconceptual art', for finding the art that preoccupied you too inexpressive. I regret not having watched Tarkovsky's Solaris with you, or Born in Flames. I regret not having read Difference and Repetition. I was so closed, a closed book, a tight-ass, a tight little logical contraption, a system of inductions and hearth-like, compensatory passions. I regret not understanding your anger.
*
It feels like a whole history has been destroyed, strung together on the fine, winding thread of you. All the elements float apart and re-assume their original equidistance on a flat plane. Entropy. You were their solvent. Maybe this is what to be alive is, to be the living solvent for things? You were such an incredible solvent. I move around in the world you made and feel enchanted, slanted and enchanted, transplanted into this world of labour struggle and feedback and invisible orbs. I keep thinking of Kerstin's 'Marina's Cues' and translating it into Marina's clues, sticky little clues, sticky signs, references, enigmas. A reference to Robert Smithson in a private journal from 2007, enigmatic breadcrumb trail to a paper on entropy and critique given at a cultural venue in Graz in late 2022, your head on Zoom and our undecorated London bedroom wall behind you. A t-shirt in a picture of you from ‘97 that you still wore to bed with me more than twenty-five years later, that I have now. My desperate failing attempt to remember the song you had told me was your favourite three months ago and then the list of 'The most romantic songs' from New Years 2000 scribbled at the bottom of a page of notes about your determination to be loved this year and there it is, 13 by Big Star, stupendous teenage music of yearning and lambent encroaching abandonment. The person as a system of references on a plane of intensity, a landscape through which others can move, their eyes hurting. Marina where are you in here? Everything around me is you, is something that existed for me only through the medium of you, but you are not and your way of relating these things to each other is unrepeatable, unreplaceable, an enigma, a puzzle, a box of playful silly tricks, rickety puns and inside it something that could be just a costume (stolen pink lamé underwear with a big black heart) or the whole reason for living. And the world of your objects is being exposed to an irresistible entropic process, breakdown, dedifferentiation, I need your desire to move through them, across them, to animate them again, as Zoe said so truthfully about you, to join them again through the superlative medium of your being alive and knowing them and loving them and introducing them into your beautiful puzzling sentences, puzzles and jigsaws and Vision Masters and etch a sketches and toys everywhere, you my best friend, you beautiful child whose mother worked in a toy shop, you riddle. I need you. I need you to organise the world for me, Marina, I need you. Marina my heart is hurting. Stop setting me riddles. Stop. The clues of things, the way they suggest your way of being with them, your puzzling sentences, your puzzles and tricks, your love of conjuring and magic, Ladies and Gentlemen, meinen Damen und Herren, 'Tonight we have the unbelievable pleasure of presenting the magician Irina!' 2006. Irina, Marina, magician, trickster, rhymester, clown. Your cues and clues. Your tender understated enigmas. That you were a kind of animist. That you made things come alive. That we are surrounded by living death except that somebody does this and then they are gone and no one can find the key and so the box just sits there and all of life is inside of it. You beautiful confused american immigrant Jewish girl with all of your prodigious reading and your love of puns, whose mother worked in a toy shop. You Marxist intellectual who drew Teddy bears all the way through your notebooks all the way through to March 2024 when you were 47 years old and the left hand side of the two page spread is filled with notes on the totality and a month later you were dead and I was holding your head in my hands and touching your hair for the last time and the universe had respectfully ceased to exist. Actually I think this is what to be alive is, to have this power, the power to organise a world through the simple fact of being in it, by being you, by relating to objects with enough snickering tender invention that they peel away from the sheet of endless dead reality to which they adhere and for the first time a reality with three dimensions comes into view, a reality organised through the medium of your love for it, a little totality, a little toybox totality in which at last everything deserves to exist and does, but the logic of this world is only the puzzling person who made it, and the elements are all clues to a way of being that we lack the power to emulate. And then they are gone: Flashing fish slipping through my hands into an ocean I can't bear to look at. Glare. Glare. Bright impossible retina tearing glare. That the objects on their own are so flat and so lonely; that they point beyond themselves to something that no longer exists, a chasm, deep gouged out empty apophatic sandstone quarry question mark turning into drill bit. Drill. Drill and glare. The glare of the crystal prism. Bereft question mark drill of 2007 and astonishing crystal drill of 2020, one of the most beautiful sentences you ever wrote, the closest thing to a solution. In the whole million word canvas. Your cues and your clues, breadcrumb trails in the void that Elisabeth Nicula despises in the paper that Matthew found and that you loved so much. Just as he found Ishmael Reed's Dualism. 'If it's over let me know, if it's over I can go / I won't make you, ooh ooh ooh'. A pure, moving material of expression. With a big black heart on oversized pink lamé underwear thieved from an upscale lingerie outlet near Russell Square: another toy store, but only if you're stealing from it. Which is another riddle. 'Won't you tell me what you're thinking of'.
'I am outside of
History. I wish
I had some peanuts. It
Looks hungry there in
Its cage'
I love her and miss her. Sometimes I can say these words to myself and they are like a wooden frame. Everything else is inside of them but for a moment the outer structure is enough and my eyes can rest on it. I love you and miss you.
I love you and I miss you.
Dec 2023:
No you’re not sick and tired!
With all the love I have &
all the love I can
find in my deficient
body, to you my
always
M.
June 2024
Grey walls and glass floors
collapsing dogmas
some dead leaves scattered
adhesion of unrelated elements
inconclusive investigation
in the unbroken shell
Its wet surface
lying on their separate beds
God’s light
outside of historical time
where for once we completely forgot ourselves
Of desperate encouragement,
wide expanses of water, moving, or still, or both or either at once
in a city whose centre is its circumference
like something taking place in Malevich’s head
tried to laugh.
A waiting room full of melted plastic chairs
basic epistemological failures
the oddest part of town
from here on tends to remember and think in lumps
field of ashes
shapes like fingers or open mouths
The mirrors are somewhere in New York
Pine trees in street lamps
Now and then children lie down in the snow to freeze to death
Seaside. Stupidity. Graffitied carriages.
Layers of a castrated God
A gloved hand
Countermanouevres
As a form of associative thinking
Uprooted trees, still growing
Furious burning, at room temperature
On a map of those grey circles
As a hole in the sun
The points in my body
Or anything. Snowdrops, molasses.
that are not there
inversion of that logic
that I dedicate my life to the maximum presence of yours in this world
transformation
My love
my mouth
spray
spit tray
Sauerstoff
syllable
splits
sirens
equal
sauerstoff
spray syllable
spray
splitter and sequel
in the lit
siren
split of you
slit and lit
up like
left
upper scree
and why
scree of
you
spray
spray
my mouth’s
myth of
you
each split
into
split of
you
split and split
of you
splitter
and spray
spray
seashore
and
spray,
spray
and white
glitter
and
day
something rosehued, is scattered around
on the cold, unexpectedly cold floor
at specific times,
something green
I miss you. I’m too tired to write poems.
I’m too tired to have
a clever idea.
As intimate as sex before sex
itself becomes a tired rehearsal
of merely conventional meanings,
when it is still an image of space.
‘It’s OK, I’m on the pill.’
I look out at the sky, I guess.
it’s the largest possible space there is
less expensive than hotels
or waking in a room I
don’t recognise
which are other ways of approaching this.
The sea is too steep now.
The stars cannot reach it. A rented
room at the top of it waits,
waiting, dreams of your arrival
(One more attempt at a book dedication)
When I see you as you are
the words race into me
for the first time this
is my mind and boredom
and hurt are nothing
everyone is alive
since you are
the words in my mind
the names of my friends
who are dead
and who you are
and what I am and
everything else.
When I see you as you are
there is a light in me
the sun has fun
making shadows
and the plants like to grow
it’s like I’d never written
a single word about you
everything is magnificent
desert tundra ocean
terrain steppe
cityscape suburb
landfill & littoral
When I see you as you are
nothing can hurt us
and nothing is despised
time runs in any direction
the words race into me
for the first time this
is my mind and boredom
and hurt are nothing
everything is alive
when I see you as you are
and when I see you as you are
everything is
good enough, even
me, even this
***
What was it like, Marina, what was it like, now that you can speak in that tense,
That each of us has a home in the other
I remember us walking home from that party, up lansdowne drive hand in hand, with you in the long pink scarf and the brechtian leather jacket, and walking in London Fields the next day and seeing the line between your brows, the crease that 12.5 years later I would touch with my hands as I lay with your dead body, alone together in that room as we were for just a minute, before I kissed you on your cold and open lips for the very last time, my love, my only love, my only true love, lover of Shirley Collins and paradox and everything changeable and everything small. I remember seeing the line between your brows then and wondering if this would be possible between us, between the person I was, this child, and you my beautiful one with all of your different faces. I remember how serious you were then, how frightened of seeming stupid or trivial around me, how once you caught yourself humming in the hallway or singing to yourself in your weak but tuneful voice, and stopped, and said something about how stupid you sounded. A note of the self-accusation that later I would find in your journals. The seriousness as a kind of self-discipline, to be an intellectual, to be a radical, to be something other than a child, or a brilliant american girl full of ambitions and unformed ideas. I don't remember whether I said anything but I remember how much I liked you singing. This capacity of idealisation in you. You never ever threatened to leave me. You never wanted that. You always wanted me to nurture and protect you. Later you would do that more and more. You in your leather jacket and your long pink scarf that later would disappear. With the crease between your brows that doesn't show up in pictures of you unless they're taken close up; and there are so few of those. It is the memory of being with you that day, of looking at your face in the clear 1 January light, of wondering and hoping and feeling so full of possibility and anxiety, that after all of this time we were finally here, and that the boundary had been crossed, and we had to discover now what existed. Because the crease represented the distance between us that so fascinated me, because you already represented a world, years of thought, publications, lines of development, your home full of records and clutter and posters for your events 8 years before (20 now) where already you could speak with the style that defined you, when I was still almost a child. I can feel the weight of you, your sudden physical presence as a being I could touch and who wanted me to touch them, to touch you, and also the lightness of our finally bring together, light and grass and morning and walking together nowhere in particular. And when you cycled down the canal with that strange backpack you had then you looked like a beautiful dinosaur. And your hair was slightly wispy. And sometimes when I saw your face you seemed like simply the most beautiful person in the world and sometimes I could see the mousiness that occasionally you saw in yourself, and that was so beautiful to me too, that there were two of you. I don't remember any of the things we spoke about that day. I only remember how I felt when I looked at you, how I felt the miraculousness of your presence that I had yearned for and told myself was impossible for so long; like when months before I had seen your amazing bright eyes at the squat cinema, really seen them for the first time, and felt how exquisite you were and how far away from me. Pink scarf, leather jacket, fracture boot, light, grass.
you and I are the stop we are here and we are in it
*
sometimes
the rose in the spheare, second ring
the cancer disappears. simple wish.
armoured lorries on otherwise deserted lanes
spheare after spheare
detrimental space at a distance from the outskirts.
we go there to do sordid things,
like love one another.
we all do things for money
I touch you on your hand
the cancer disappears,
simple wish. the rose in the spheare, second rim.
that you bring
snow from the will itself,
that’s why the white bus comes for us.
what we need kisses us:
take care, thousands of hinterlands,
fucked up ass system, fucked up ass sunrise,
simple wish. the rose in the spheare, second ring
6 June - notes from a phone app
I didn't describe it well to him. The feeling of being with someone as if being with a whole world. When the person you are with represents something more than themselves. Not just in the sense of a particular social 'scene', or 'who (or what) you know', but who you are, which in her case was defined through a movement of relation. She represented something more than a person, an ordinary person like me, or you, because to be with her was to be in a relation with that to which she herself related, because the capacity of relation was so strong and so intense and so creative in her, and 'What is the ability of the assemblage [but] to open onto a whole field of unlimited immanence that blurs all the segmentary offices and doesn't take place as a punctual ending but is already at work in each limit and at every moment?'
The strength of the capacity to relate defines the power of attraction of the person who becomes the things that they know and love and promises to the person who loves them in turn all of those things in response. The mysteriousness of this. The enigmatical quality of the person who contains inside of themselves a whole shifting landscape of relations to their objects, and who so is always more than themselves: a puzzle. When I look at the pictures of Marina from the first years we were together I see me. I see myself in her; and even when I am also there in the frame, standing right next to her, I am not there. I am her. It's this dizzying sensation of evaporation, of being dazzled and attracted and evaporated at the same time. You are me. It doesn't go the other way round. My life was you. You were my life. I see my life in you, in the world of relations that you and no one else I have ever been able to imagine myself being with opened up for me, by letting me be with you. You are me. And mystery pulses in that experience because I know that the relations that she contained and promised to me could only be held together through her, that I could only experience them through her. Without her they slip through my fingers like flashing silver fish into an ocean that I cannot bear to look at and all that I am left with is the image of her as the person who I first loved who amazed me and who amazed me because right from the beginning she always meant something more than herself, through being herself, in a way that, however harsh it sounds, many of the people she meant (our 'communities') never could. Which is why what I am talking about is neither about the discrepancy of experience between two people at different stages of their lives, nor about the promise of entry into a scene or a social environment to which a particular individual holds the key. It is much more about the awful radiance of the person whose own capacity of relation is what defines them, a singularity of feeling and intelligence that most people simply don't possess; and as much as that might sound uncomradely, or judgmental, or dismissive, the whole web and intertexture of my feelings screams at me that it is true.
Because the concept refers to a feeling, but there is no feeling. Or it has so many layers. The object is a field, an ingathering. The tenderness I felt before her death and the desire I felt when we were together and the yearning I feel for the person who she was before I met her. So the word is made to signify a whole lifetime of changing experiences; which accounts for the painful sense that no one else could elicit from me anything approaching the same total state. The social world of the present acquires its tissue-like thinness and artificiality, the sense of a game that is being played, not very convincingly, by the mannequins of some Kleistian theatre. Or something of the aircushioned air hockey table: the actors as pucks on a cushion of air, sliding across the emptiness on which they rely; where with you it is possible to identify roots, the movements of depth and of deepness.
*
Marina why have you produced so many riddles? I feel so powerless around you, around the idea of you. Every image open unto every other. The whole trembles and quakes, trembles and quakes. Am I you? Is this the answer to all this? I feel that if I could die then everything would be simpler. I wouldn't have to follow the clues anymore. The clues lead to no discovery except the circle of clues itself widening, the amount of space I have to move in singes me and the limits sting. Round and round and round. "False theorems and grand mistakes". Because it is as if you were building a system the whole time out of the whole medium of your life and all its relations and I cannot find my place here, the walls are made out of glass but they exclude space. As it happens I was twenty years old then, already an adult. "The entropy may make itself felt by small dysfunctionalities accumulating over the course of the exhibition". Or eighteen. You were the more powerful and the more perfect one and no one sees it, at least not as I do, and I am too weak to tell anyone. Wonderstruck, and why should it wait, the tremor in an artificial voice. No doors. Infinite regress. Grey walls. As if it collapses into five sections. Because my work is still important, the political aspect of my work. But Marina why can't I be continuous like you, you're making me feel like I did when I was a child again, when I was always good and there was always one person who was better; but now that one person is you, and I cannot even feel your loss more powerfully or evocatively than you felt the absence of a no one, a nothing, a ghost, years before I met you. All of this so grossly artificial. I've lost the plot, the thread, the string, it's slipping through my hands, the fish has taken the bait, it's gone, it’s gone, no need to keep going now, it's gone, good bye, as you will one day say, seventeen years ago, goodbye.
Is this a competition between us? At last? After all these years? As I chase you around the last widening curve to find that it never resolves into a straight, that I orbit you in the hanging glorious affinity of these quotations, preoccupations, hang ups, weightless and turning and absurd. That I cannot even feel as much pain as you. How inordinate. And you are dead and there is no third. Or there is but there may as well not be.
*
Regrets. Marina I regret not being you. I regret not having learned about 'postconceptual art', for finding the art that preoccupied you too inexpressive. I regret not having watched Tarkovsky's Solaris with you, or Born in Flames. I regret not having read Difference and Repetition. I was so closed, a closed book, a tight-ass, a tight little logical contraption, a system of inductions and hearth-like, compensatory passions. I regret not understanding your anger.
*
It feels like a whole history has been destroyed, strung together on the fine, winding thread of you. All the elements float apart and re-assume their original equidistance on a flat plane. Entropy. You were their solvent. Maybe this is what to be alive is, to be the living solvent for things? You were such an incredible solvent. I move around in the world you made and feel enchanted, slanted and enchanted, transplanted into this world of labour struggle and feedback and invisible orbs. I keep thinking of Kerstin's 'Marina's Cues' and translating it into Marina's clues, sticky little clues, sticky signs, references, enigmas. A reference to Robert Smithson in a private journal from 2007, enigmatic breadcrumb trail to a paper on entropy and critique given at a cultural venue in Graz in late 2022, your head on Zoom and our undecorated London bedroom wall behind you. A t-shirt in a picture of you from ‘97 that you still wore to bed with me more than twenty-five years later, that I have now. My desperate failing attempt to remember the song you had told me was your favourite three months ago and then the list of 'The most romantic songs' from New Years 2000 scribbled at the bottom of a page of notes about your determination to be loved this year and there it is, 13 by Big Star, stupendous teenage music of yearning and lambent encroaching abandonment. The person as a system of references on a plane of intensity, a landscape through which others can move, their eyes hurting. Marina where are you in here? Everything around me is you, is something that existed for me only through the medium of you, but you are not and your way of relating these things to each other is unrepeatable, unreplaceable, an enigma, a puzzle, a box of playful silly tricks, rickety puns and inside it something that could be just a costume (stolen pink lamé underwear with a big black heart) or the whole reason for living. And the world of your objects is being exposed to an irresistible entropic process, breakdown, dedifferentiation, I need your desire to move through them, across them, to animate them again, as Zoe said so truthfully about you, to join them again through the superlative medium of your being alive and knowing them and loving them and introducing them into your beautiful puzzling sentences, puzzles and jigsaws and Vision Masters and etch a sketches and toys everywhere, you my best friend, you beautiful child whose mother worked in a toy shop, you riddle. I need you. I need you to organise the world for me, Marina, I need you. Marina my heart is hurting. Stop setting me riddles. Stop. The clues of things, the way they suggest your way of being with them, your puzzling sentences, your puzzles and tricks, your love of conjuring and magic, Ladies and Gentlemen, meinen Damen und Herren, 'Tonight we have the unbelievable pleasure of presenting the magician Irina!' 2006. Irina, Marina, magician, trickster, rhymester, clown. Your cues and clues. Your tender understated enigmas. That you were a kind of animist. That you made things come alive. That we are surrounded by living death except that somebody does this and then they are gone and no one can find the key and so the box just sits there and all of life is inside of it. You beautiful confused american immigrant Jewish girl with all of your prodigious reading and your love of puns, whose mother worked in a toy shop. You Marxist intellectual who drew Teddy bears all the way through your notebooks all the way through to March 2024 when you were 47 years old and the left hand side of the two page spread is filled with notes on the totality and a month later you were dead and I was holding your head in my hands and touching your hair for the last time and the universe had respectfully ceased to exist. Actually I think this is what to be alive is, to have this power, the power to organise a world through the simple fact of being in it, by being you, by relating to objects with enough snickering tender invention that they peel away from the sheet of endless dead reality to which they adhere and for the first time a reality with three dimensions comes into view, a reality organised through the medium of your love for it, a little totality, a little toybox totality in which at last everything deserves to exist and does, but the logic of this world is only the puzzling person who made it, and the elements are all clues to a way of being that we lack the power to emulate. And then they are gone: Flashing fish slipping through my hands into an ocean I can't bear to look at. Glare. Glare. Bright impossible retina tearing glare. That the objects on their own are so flat and so lonely; that they point beyond themselves to something that no longer exists, a chasm, deep gouged out empty apophatic sandstone quarry question mark turning into drill bit. Drill. Drill and glare. The glare of the crystal prism. Bereft question mark drill of 2007 and astonishing crystal drill of 2020, one of the most beautiful sentences you ever wrote, the closest thing to a solution. In the whole million word canvas. Your cues and your clues, breadcrumb trails in the void that Elisabeth Nicula despises in the paper that Matthew found and that you loved so much. Just as he found Ishmael Reed's Dualism. 'If it's over let me know, if it's over I can go / I won't make you, ooh ooh ooh'. A pure, moving material of expression. With a big black heart on oversized pink lamé underwear thieved from an upscale lingerie outlet near Russell Square: another toy store, but only if you're stealing from it. Which is another riddle. 'Won't you tell me what you're thinking of'.
'I am outside of
History. I wish
I had some peanuts. It
Looks hungry there in
Its cage'
I love her and miss her. Sometimes I can say these words to myself and they are like a wooden frame. Everything else is inside of them but for a moment the outer structure is enough and my eyes can rest on it. I love you and miss you.
I love you and I miss you.
