Chelsea Leigh Trescott - A Red Spool
I haven’t written, since that reading.
There was enough of me that afternoon to surprise us.
Maybe. Had you been the only one that got to know me, this shame wouldn’t be exploitative or of topic to explore.
Maybe. We haven’t spoken about that. Though you’ve called, and I’m holding onto the scarf with which my neck was draped. It was from a trip, you told me, as if that were a big deal and it wasn’t, or at least wearing it didn’t make me feel anymore interesting.
In a way, dressing me on a park bench was like reading to a crowd. The difference being in the hour. It’s single action that pronounces the quiet, a hand-stirring scarf till the neck is a red spool, my hands holding a story close enough to me so that it’s mine, to read, close enough to me not to forgive how easy I am in giving myself.
You walked out, and sorry I wasn’t there, but was watching us leave. Curious mainly, and knowing, knowing then that I write what I shouldn’t know as soon as I do, that I read, in a way, to admit my aliveness, how unacceptable we’ve been.
Maybe. We haven’t spoken about that. Now that I’ve kinda dropped my head across a shoulder, watching you, touching a size of me few could wrap themselves around.
I recognize that’s will, and that maybe it’s willing me as well.
There was enough of me that afternoon to surprise us. Maybe.
Sharing is to lessen, is the way one becomes detached and then how another attaches. Can that be an excuse? Or what would it be, if sitting on that park bench, I said, we live off one another.
It’s already begun, said, it’s late too.
Had said, I am ashamed.
Since that reading, said, I haven’t written.
Because that afternoon, said, there was enough of me.
And couldn’t you have been the only one that got to know me? Said that.
Said not maybe, said, I know me and hear her and I am ashamed and what is said is not what’s written by me.
Is it? In a writer there is more, more than a room ever hears.
This isn’t an excuse and if it is, this is mine to say.
hear me out
Chelsea Leigh Musee Trescott - A Still Thought
To summarize, I swam. Opened my body as a possibility might.
Cobras are a possibility, or a colour I hadn’t recognized you for, also is.
I’m thinking I haven’t seen that colour yet.
There is a word in Spanish and it is cobrar.
I think I will use it, just as you might use me for sake of possibility.
To summer rise, I collect. Have openly been this body and something still unrecognizable.
(via claudeleanmusee)
Here is Oaktree, a song from one of the singers from my lineup last night. Courtney Marie Andrews. My ears are telling me, she had a touch of Alanis Morissette, minus the angst, keeping the passion, adding the delicacy. Such an extremely momentous experience for me. Excuse the exterior voices. And enjoy! And, always, try to create more for yourself.
Chelsea Leigh Trescott:
Sometimes - Written and Voiced by Me, Chelsea Leigh Trescott.
Sometimes
It’s difficult seeing, to look at her on a Saturday afternoon, and to know, know she also knew, for the first time this will be the last Saturday they sit, coupled and crying, pretending they didn’t know, didn’t see that together they couldn’t move on.
And she knew that soon all she’d have is a memory, because every writer knows, and every writer tries still for more, to somehow be more giving.
There were few things he wanted. Her, and for her to be wanting, to be angry, to not know a difference. And she knew he wanted her, and her to be wanting. And knew he asked very few things.
They were in some car, her legs tasseled, irreducibly bored, and he barely there but dashing lane back to lane, fingering the slit between seat and counsel, and she flinched, and they were in a rented car, and the car was bumping base, and her hands began as mounds in a shape or situation that didn’t then comply, and then they were laying flat, so a pressure like a pit was driven into one ear then both until her body couldn’t feel the base, but her thoughts and that was all.
Sometimes it comes down to this.
Drawing infinity signs and watching them break unprofitability in a cup.
Barely there but dashing lane back to lane, a clarity in the corner of her eye, and what she saw was a man like a stranger, who she’d thought she could love, because love is learning, and love’s what was cradled to your body wasn’t there and attached because it had to be but becomes, becomes a problem surrounding what belongs.
To be right for.
For years, twenty-two years, all my life, she would say, I have never wanted more than two things, to have a friend is one. And then she’d stop, shovel peppered greens along a plate, and he would watch, not knowing what she wanted really, but wanting to know, for years, well just one, one and a half, give or take, he’d been wanting, dying, dying only to know her, know her really, and so he watched her shovel peppered greens, push aside a nummy plate, and never asked why she unfolded a napkin in its place.
Dotted her ‘i’s.
Acknowledged the division between her body and her brain. Always acknowledging.
Her humiliation.
Clamping, consoling him.
Hanging like a dishrag over the corner table, stirring her spoon in a shroud of tea.
Drawing infinity signs.
Infinity signs breaking unprofitability in a cup.
Everything happens for a reason.
She wrote about effort, reaching out onto open air—empty space. She wrote about all the old feelings. In a way, she let them come streaming back.
Always thinking, seizing, so painfully conscious considering, that maybe I’m not the only one caught in the remembering.
Remembering that I should be the lightest person in the room.
A declaration, her demeanor.
And he watched, positioning the legs of a chair at an angle, seeing how lovely she was demeaning herself, crying, so hysterical right there in front of him.
Clamping, consoling, her demeanor, a declaration, what she needed, and he wanted her to be wanting.
She knew that soon all she’d have is a memory.
While she was waiting for something else to begin, a schoolgirl walked in and dropping her bag, turned to her as if she were waiting for her and not their class. The schoolgirl was moaning.
Have you ever thought that maybe we make ourselves tired? She asked staring into the screen of a laptop, dodging the gray from her face, circling the pits of her eyes with a mouse.
The schoolgirl responded Oh, uhhm, uhhm.
Love is learning, and she also, was learning.
How many pages never get written because failed gestures don’t incite sensation, a change?
She reverted to the inside, was comforted by this voice, felt crazy for it, and then looked forward to someone that could live along with her, a situation she didn’t already have, that she saw in wispy brushstrokes, the movement of people, two then one.
I’d rather a voice than a body.
And he never asked why.
Maybe that’s what everyone’s particularly good at, even made for. Made for forgetting themselves, that somehow they’re involved.
She wanted to moan, and tried as he pushed right through her.
So painfully conscious not to love so thoroughly in advance.
And it was impossible when you weren’t the only one inside yourself.
And she knew that soon all she’d have is a memory.
She could picture it. Being a mother, leaving to the office, having the car in reverse, and witnessing her son hanging from a Banyan tree as if he were an angel, a ghost.
Could picture climbing, hand to bark, so hurried, that it couldn’t be brief, the pain, bleeding somewhere there on the inside, could picture bark seared palms, their liplike colour, could picture still having the strength to tie a knot, the strength to have no feeling at all, could picture hanging there like a pendant, she, so painfully conscious of the strain it took to be all wanting.
And when he goes, kissing her, she pulls back, and tells him the strength it takes to be the son, to want to be better, and he wants to throw up, and she says instead, why don’t you ask a question.
Like what was he feeling?
The son.
A circle carved into his neck.
How long it takes to climb a tree, loop a rope around an elbow.
Dying only to know.
And she asked please?
Wanted to be surprised when he pushed-up over, watched her body thinning as the linen crept, slipping into a puddle by the bed, blue dressing his hardwood floor.
And then like that, more or less, cap-to-cap, they were shoulder touching. They were heads reared upward, stones staring through ceiling. And she thought of the two things she wanted, wondered whether a star was strong enough to snatch, pull a body high, so the whole of her cutout the emptiness in a wall.
They were limb length to limb length like a pair, two packed cigarettes, ready, burning, and wanting to be taken in, to be put out.
And she thought please.
If only to know her.
She’d stay, dying for that.
A voice rather than a body.
And he watched her crying, pictured her as if she had stopped, as if it were after noon, and she crisp at forty-five, and wanting, always wanting his breath down the length of her body, waiting and wanting the mouth she kissed to drop between her legs, the tongue to toy through her like a hand extending itself, and he watched her staring downward, and she wanted to moan, and he wanted her to too, to be wanting, to be angry, so painfully conscious of him, that he was responsible, was pleasure as big as Montana, her orgasm buzzing on warm air.
Sometimes we become this.
A position surrounding what belongs.
Can you imagine yourself, he posed, living another life?
Home working, trailing glitter, shaking the space between one hand and another loose.
Stars seemingly tilted to his bending.
So close that the shadow of a body became enough to pregnant her handheld lake.
Can you imagine?
Being that someone to dance beside the sea.
Consistently lit, to be the thrill that unleashes champagne’s upward hail.
Living another life.
Deflowered, part prick, and hardly maintaining the feelings of a girl.
Can you imagine?
A celestial birth, how from afar hundreds of sailboats look like tadpoles in a bowl.
And what life could become as a painter positioned on a pier.
She saw wispy brushstrokes, the movement of people, two then one.
And rather than a body, she imagined a miracle, touches given by a voice.
Imagined feelings wouldn’t come because another, and another Jewish cock.
Sometimes it comes down to this.
Becoming the question that competes with all those never asked.
The degree of figure and muse. The stillness that Saturday, the slumber in a couple’s feet.
And everything happens for a reason.
The difference between earth and air and farm-fresh eggs, she so young and distinguishable, his head deep between her hips, the taste of sunset, the noise of ten thousand waves.
And sometimes it comes down to this.
The difference between love and a night of it.
Comes down to this.
A challenge.
Not becoming attached to what you belong to.
Putting an ear to a chest, and thinking, thinking outwardly, audibly of the heart as a great glass house. And not letting that break you, love, and the learning of how slow she spreads her legs.
Wants to moan, and tries as he pushes right through her.
So personal, essential, so ready to move on.
Impossible when she wasn’t the only one inside herself.
It’s difficult seeing, to look at her on a Saturday afternoon, and to know, know she also knew, for the first time this will be the last Saturday they sit, coupled and crying, pretending they didn’t know, didn’t see that together they couldn’t move on.
And she knew that soon all she’d…
So where have I been? Tahiti, first. And following that, not very much hovering over the computer to type all that I should. I’ve got myself a domain. It’s a slow build, which I would love to speed up. I have this elaborate idea, that once it’s going, my creative juices will too. Though I haven’t posted on this other Tumblr I created, upon arrival in San Francisco from Tahiti, some words can be found on it. I may as well update it until the my site finally launches. All in all, there has been a lot of tremendous growth, which has not kept tears from sprawling, but all I wish to have gotten down in writing is now so far ahead of me. O, I’ve got a chunk of pages. Except they aren’t ‘fiction’. Though they all never really were.
Three days, and a constant rain, a coastle burden. Now that I’m ahead, I can’t also be the teller of feeling, and really, can’t be an unspectacular mouthful. I hush because, and hours are consumed with time, are hours invested in the silent, the unsaying try to get along with myself then you first. It’s not negotiable. My unconvincing magnitude is not and worse, an alarming quiet expanding across white, eyes and this happens with us or to you only.
Across from me a man has drifted asleep, and I too, would rather these eyes close right there with him.
It’s impossible forgetting my friend, the orchestration off her pages, or that story told from a seat on a train. I think she ate crackers, when melon wasn’t in the house and had a preference for lemongrass, the smell, she’d say, isn’t Asian to me. Of course, she was coy and I’d laugh, watching her head droop over the soup in all sorts of pleasure and impatience. If it wasn’t for her eyes, the way they hadn’t shown age, or the red that wrapped and framed her, the gestures of men wouldn’t have felt so promising and she wouldn’t have been the same.
Jessica Rankin recently spent 18 months living in Berlin, an experience that brought home a reality she has long explored in her work: the limitations of language. Even in her native tongue, the Australian-born New Yorker sometimes feels like a foreigner. “I have a very ambivalent feeling about language,” says the soft-spoken artist, recalling how, after her mother died of breast cancer when Rankin was nine, she consoled herself by reading. “On the one hand, it’s a refuge, and on the other hand, I resent it and I’m very comfortable shutting down and not wanting to communicate very much.”
How Rankin, 38, best communicates is by investigating memory and consciousness through the words, images and celestial maps she embroiders onto panels of diaphanous organdy or draws and paints on paper. A piece near the door of her home in New York’s Harlem neighborhood, which she shares with her partner, artist Julie Mehretu, and their four-year-old son, Cade, makes the point. On a rectangle of pale gray organdy, Rankin has sewn black and silver blocks of text taken from her writings and from a Babylonian creation myth. “My son, my son, son of the sun, and heaven’s son,” it reads. But she has obscured certain letters with loops of thread and connected seemingly random words. “This idea of legibility and illegibility is important to me,” says Rankin, who has had shows at White Cube in London and P.S. 1 in New York. “I feel like [words] can often be so misleading.”
It was in art school at Rutgers University that Rankin, the daughter of acclaimed Australian painter David Rankin, found her voice through needle and thread. Initially, reappropriating needlework—often denigrated as a women’s pursuit—attracted her somewhat, although she insists her work is more conceptual than practical. “Certainly there’s a craft to it, but the things I’m thinking about are 95 percent to do with philosophy and language,” she says.
For the show “Landscapes of the Mind: Contemporary Artists Contemplate the Brain,” opening in January at the Williams College Museum of Art, Rankin has been looking at images of the brain. Psychology and neuroscience professor Betty Zimmerberg, who is cocurating the show, was struck by the parallels between Rankin’s pieces and the mind’s dream states. “When you’re dreaming, the front part of the brain weaves a story out of random words and images—it’s like what Jessica’s doing,” she says. To Amy Cappellazzo, Christie’s international cohead of postwar and contemporary art, Rankin’s “genuine,” nonconfrontational art is refreshing. “We live in such a cynical world,” says Cappellazzo. “It’s brave to want to be poetic right now.”
