Painting with the Camera, Sounding with the Pen

The camera is not just for taking pictures, nor is the pen solely for writing letters.

I am writing this dispatch from seat 11C on the train from Syracuse, NY to Toronto.

Today marks the end of a 3-week long travel project that brought me back to the landscapes of my childhood — the rolling hills of Central New York, sticky Syracuse summer streets, a mall that was a world, a lake that was a sea, a Manhattan mostly unrecognizable.

The travel project also led me toward new horizons, notably the Gesamtkunstwerk (‘total work of art’) of Mildred’s Lane where I joined the budding Queer Ecologies Research Collective around the invocation LAND / BODY / EROS (hopefully I’ll write a dispatch solely about Mildred’s Lane sometime soon).

For now, I want to relay an exercise in (expanded) transcreation — a term I recently learned, referring to creative acts of translation, which we may expand from linguistic translation to translating between and beyond existing art forms. I want to show you some paintings I captured with my camera and some sounds I wrote with my pen.

In this vein, I am reminded of painter David Hockney’s practice of “drawing with the camera” — a way of engaging with photographic technology that, for the artist, presented a creative leap that overcomes photography’s tendency toward realism.

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rapids

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Is this what independence taught me?

Leaves broken into shadow.

The sound of a bird I don’t yet know.

A couple hidden but not hiding beneath a maple, I notice.

The air of wet July expands between my bones like the greenest grass growing between these alabaster bricks

its blades sliced in twos.

***

“There is a war in the valley”

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a pit a pock a pile a pill a till a turn an urn a spur a spoon a wound a mound a monde a mine a dime a ditch a dimple a dole a mole a mile a mill a kill a quail a quiver a sliver a clover a claw a clue a coal a cut a bump a bore a bowl a bellow a scar

on the mountain face

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gorge

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Nameless hills:

No — not mountain

No — not mesa

No — not mound

The corollary for a not-name is a sound.

A child, I sang the hills

sent earth swelling toward the sky between simple refrains

Roll over the edges of my beloved

Run under the doorways of my home

Wrap me in the sweet smell of maple

And don’t wake me until you’re gone.

Adolescent, I sang the hills

that same refrain repeated and remained

muttering hymns for a nameless place

making muse of the major key

until at once cracked the larynx and soon bemoaned

the silence of the hillside

the disappearance of that final tome.

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NY-17

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Roving fast against /// landscape

Blur, burn, turn

Shades of green /// innumerable

Evolutionary ingenuity to see

The rush of hills, wild edges /// trace

Curves the horizon vague /// wave

Echoes in their rifts

As beg the painters

their palettes /// clean

The monument of this arborous valley

An idea held /// sunder

the viscosity of its own /// speed

***

“As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.”

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