If these three men were me,
we each to each would bow,
politely (achooing snarks);
implicate one’s a cuttlefish,
one’s a cunning shark,
then infer who’s left’s a lover;
and understand the differences
but not the reasons why
each have ruled each other.
We throw ballast at Poseidon
from a plowing trimaran.
Kings: at one time or another.
Gavin W Sisk
July 26, 2013
Harold Edgerton
I am a Harold Edgerton fan, as I am a fan of many deconstructions of common conceptions of time. It amazes me how an arrangement of silver specks fixed in two dimensions as an image on a sheet of paper can so powerfully inform and misinform us about qualities of all four dimensions (the four we are aware of, at least).
This Edgerton photograph of a bouncing steel ball is old and imperfect. Technological advances have since added, exponentially, miraculous qualities of verisimilitude to photographic images. Yet, as we evermore perfectly photograph reality, by its own rules we create evermore perfect illusions, evermore removed from reality.
If you held this print in your hands—sensed the ‘ahah!’ dance of steel and time simultaneously measured and on the lam—you might face a new dimension as you turned the print on its edge. Illusion, reality: where did they go? What qualities does this object now have that it did not have a moment ago?
Gavin W Sisk
July 23, 2013
My mother was a tough nut, but I made peace with her before she died. “I love you,” was the last human sentence she heard. I spoke it. I also whispered it at the funeral home as I watched her body slide into the crematory oven. The technician shut the door, lit the burner, folded his gloved hands, and smiled kindly. I watched for a while before retiring to a stroll in the surrounding cemetery. I was given more than a year to prepare for my mother’s death. What I had forgotten was that the process of death, unlike birth, has an industry, but no product.
Outside, ashes were falling from near the crematory chimney. As I reached out to catch a large gray flake drifting through the air, it suddenly blew away. I understood how crematories operate and that flying ash could only come from a hearth-fire in a nearby residence, but I hoped it was my mother. A few minutes later, as I sat on a shaded bench, a small gray squirrel scrambled up to my feet. It stood on its hind legs and looked straight into my eyes. Squirrels have always been good to me, so I bent to give its head a friendly scratch. I wondered if my mother had sent it. The little emissary hurried away before I touched it, before I mistook I could touch my mother.
Memories of the dead often dart like unexpected swallows in the evening sky. Sparked from our cloudy minds, they wheel on sharp wings before dissolving in a mist. A friend calls them grief motes, though they sometimes make us smile. My mother was a bigger bird, swan sized, with wings to crack a man’s head. She should therefore spark a bigger mote with a trumpet call to scare the Hell out of me. Instead, she’s mostly soft and mute. Neither a hurried squirrel nor darting bird, she hums softly in the garden, leaving my other grief motes alone.
Life is the product of birth. Memory, imagination, and death, are processes of life.
May 27, 2013
Gavin W Sisk
I didn’t make good latte art today. But it tasted good. Nicaragua Finca La Tormenta: where the beans were grown. I haven’t a clue what that translates to. All I know is it’s a small plantation in some country in Central America. Nicaragua, I think (duh!). Does this make me pretentiously provincial? I’m not certain those two words like how I’ve forced them together.
Anyway, as far as latte foam and inkblot tests go, my first impression was of a nuclear Star Spangled Banner that went horribly out of control on Mars billions of years ago, blasting genetically modified organisms all the way to Earth where they landed in widespread lifeless mud puddles.
If they had missed Earth and instead landed on Venus, would art, politics, and the daily news be different there? Would Venusians have learned much earlier in their existence that sunbathing is bad for their health? What arrangement of Earth’s sterile topographical features would they infer as proof of an ancient existence that may have blown itself to smithereens one day after lighting a grossly oversized, celebratory skyrocket?
I can imagine small robotic rovers crawling across the Mojave Desert, searching for elemental signs of life. They would blast strange frequencies into scoops of dead dirt and transmit the results to anxious two-headed scientists back on Venus who, if lucky and astute, would rightly deduce that Mars was the culprit all along. Then, after publishing their conclusions and supporting data, they would each be hanged twice for heresy (once for each head).
Or maybe the shape floating in my coffee cup looks like a little jellyfish having a poop.
My therapist takes lots of notes. I think she’s writing a book.
May 18, 2013
Gavin W Sisk
Doll 41
I started playing years ago with the purely human quality of anthropomorphization. In particular, I’ve always been interested in inducing an anthropomorphic response in a viewer and then disrupting the response or having it fall away altogether. If I do my job right (or am lucky), what remains for the viewer is the structure or mechanism of the effect. This is the actual subject.
I get the ball rolling using posing and lighting techniques on subjects having built-in qualities I think I can control. I exploit these subjects’ potential for looking alive, but then disturb that potential by exposing props and defects in the subject. What I’m shooting for are certain qualities of confusion rather than a simple ‘gotcha’. These confusions are springboards for our ability to add living qualities to inanimate objects and are foundational to human culture. What’s difficult for me is bringing subjects to the edge of pain, happiness, ecstasy, even special qualities of human empty-headedness, without leaving the viewer with a sense that either the subject or themselves have been robbed of something or been unfairly treated. The images should be mirrors of us. I could use this human facility to make cheap shots, but I won’t. This is a unique facility we humans should rejoice in owning.
March 24, 2013
With a new Catholic pope come old questions about the history and roles of nuns and clergy in modern, and not-so-modern faith. Nuns and clergy: that the first isn’t considered as part of the second is a shame. They share the same leaps of faith, the same sacrifices, and the same falls from grace. But in the end, nuns are just an attachment to the dominion of clergy. In the end, too, the issues of both are often a distraction from larger social issues.
These days we talk a lot about priests’ falls from faith. Issues of homosexuality, pedophilia, and general child abuse are better grist for media mills when men are considered. Equivalent issues about nuns seem to earn winks at best. When I was a kid, though, it was about the seemingly twisted faith of nuns we mostly talked. I don’t think there was a single kid in my school whom the nuns didn’t hit. And we all were hit hard! During breaks between classes, there were often nuns stationed inside the boy’s lavatory keeping order. They berated us. They hit us with rulers, belts, and paddles. They beat their selves into our long-term memories.
But really, this isn’t only about qualities of nun-ness. We were hit by lay teachers also. We were hit by men; we were hit by women. This was the culture of discipline where I grew up. The nuns wore black and white uniforms, and so were more uniformly regarded and remembered than their lay counterparts. And who doesn’t prefer to hear stories of evil nuns. But whom I conveniently forget to talk about are nuns like the one who took the extra time in fourth grade to teach me short division.
We weren’t allowed to learn short division back then, but this nun recognized that long division was too abstract for me. This might sound counter-intuitive, even nonsensical, but the woman woke up the right side of my brain to math. I went from being the class idiot to being the only kid in class who could do division in his head. I don’t quickly remember that now. It’s easier for me to reminisce about the brutality. Yes, some of those nuns were brutal. Some of the priests were too.
So, all this isn’t just about nuns and priests. The subject shouldn’t be only about the bad behavior of certain members of certain groups. We should also talk about what happens in our society that drives some women and men to seek refuge from life by surrendering to sub-cultures of convents, monasteries, and rectories (picking on Catholicism only) which serve to distill the best and worst human qualities into chalices from which the rest of us drink. I think forgetting this in our discussions of issues of modern faith is like firing arrows fletch-first at the target.
March 13, 2013
We must identify the losers and enshrine them!
How otherwise could we know we are the winners.
Birth, death, and the moments in between: all good stuff to write about. Sometimes a good noun or verb and a simple image will get me started. Sometimes I need something extra: an interlocutor or proxy to courier difficult ideas from the noise in my head to the quietness of a blank page.
Animals have served this role for artists and writers for millennia. Really, almost anything on the other side of the imaginary wall which separates humans from nature can be anthropomorphized in service to disclosing what is too close to see. My interlocutor is my cat, Rosie.
Rosie in Bed
Rosie protests
my reading in bed.
She pushes books
out of my hands
and purrs,
“Read me instead!”
March 2012
I have a cat, Rosie, who is my muse. Like all cats, she has absolutely no respect for us humans, especially when we’re walking downstairs with armfuls of dirty laundry. They remember the trick we’ve played with them over and over: dropping them upside-down to watch them twist and flip and land on their feet. Cats amaze us. So we shouldn’t be surprised when they scoot down the stairs ahead of us and stop on the third to last step. They just want to see if we humans can perform the same trick. If we land on our feet, they’ll grant us peace by allowing us to gently scratch their heads and fill their bowl with kibbles.
Cats are funny.
I want a dog.
Nov. 5, 2012
ROCK POOLS AT DUNBEATH, By Jean Horseman
Impended by November’s damp,
I would brace against a rocky shelf.
In oilcloth, beneath an old sowester–
my back to the wind to guard the ember
of a good cigar; a flask of Highland Park
in a felt pouch hanging from my neck;
a surveyor’s notebook in my left hand
and a stub of a pencil in my right–
I would ask no more from the storm
than synaptic sparks to connect
my words and sensibilities,
perhaps mistaking how what rules the
firmament above writes dreams below.
G W Sisk
Nov. 2012
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