Volume 2. Chapter 9. Identity

Identity

An individual entity exists in relation to its background whose elements tend to be interchangeable. It has a context and establishes a pattern that couldn’t be added to or repeated without alteration. Give it a name and a place. It has a life of its own that can be shared without being diminished.

Chorale

Each pine tree is different, each house. Together, they harmonize a landscape so that their background is like a window.

Stars

With arms and legs akimbo, each person dances like a star. Connected like stars and by stars, individuals contribute to a whole.

Fish on a fish platter

The fish has been served with fresh dill on a purple fish platter surrounded by a small yellow cross two phases of the moon trefoil, quatrefoil, and pentafoil only more like dreamcatchers woven from straw, and found in the cross-section of an apple. Glass cylinders serve drinks or, as vases, hold sprigs, a flag, a trefoil, and a small grotesque head with red eyeholes on a straw marked with a red arrow and a green exclamation point.

Scales

Your entire field of view is covered with scales, some transparent and some seeming to be solid. You see a fish with red eyes, red fins, and blue scales, in the water, as though it were swimming. Maybe the scales are only waves reflecting red and blue, but the illusion seems real and the light is in your eyes.

Still life with crosses

Disembodied mouths and legs spread out are adorned with crosses. Crosses, bowls, and a chalice with vegetable and animal parts are arranged on the table. Two crosses have heads like angels. Crosses are superimposed over a man at the table’s head. The surface is encrusted with rust, obscuring the tableau, as though it were recently excavated.

Collage

The parts are loosely connected, or connected only by being mutually present. If they are symbols, they don’t tell us what they symbolize. If they mean anything together, then praise our desire for meaning.

Succession

The forest repeats its elements as though it were etched in clay on several levels. From a distance, these natural hieroglyphics speak of a brief history of conquest, grass, then bushes, then trees, saplings marching into battle knowing that in the long run meadows succumb to forests and each kind lays down a layer.

Caterpillar

Bilateral segments each with a pair of legs compose the body and act like the teeth of a gear to crawl along a leaf.

Medieval city

The medieval city is like a crater on the moon a pile of stones surrounded by a wall. Stones, arches, windows, and doors, walls, towers, floors, crenellations, and spires overlap, tilt, rise, and interpenetrate. The moon floats above, and the city floats below.

Bridges

The Île de la Cité connects the bridges over the Seine and the bridges connect the Cité. Arches connect arches, stones connect stones.

Impregnable

Why build a castle that anyone may enter? Build it on a high hill with its entrance far below. Draw its drawbridge up. Keep its keys a secret. Reinforce its gate and close it tight. No one may enter unless he or she fulfills an impossible quest.

Self-portrait

With pencil and crayon on a big piece of paper the child draws herself filling out her world with images in her mind.

Côte de Provence

Between us and the landscape abstract forms and colors intervene like rose-tinted glass. Fields of color, bars of color, rooftops and sails of pastel. Purple, mustard, brick, cerulean.

Lookout

Being precarious doesn’t matter. Each rock is a chicken scratch, scratch piled upon scratch. Climb to the top using ladders, then fly above the landscape like a flag, seeing everything.

Hedges and gardens

The houses have been hidden by bushes and ivy; they’ve been hidden by leaves and blossoms. Chimneys and roofs show, and a window or two, but here we live in hedges and gardens.