(4) Burning, Blackening “El ritual de la casa derruida de la página abandonada por el hombre del ciclo en el que vuela un hombre como una nada ofrecida a los dioses del fuego.”3
The night of June 7, 2015. The air, warm, gentle. The street, eclectic and bustling. 8th Avenue, Manhattan. We notice a thick, foreign smell. We see a spark, subtle, timidly inhabiting the slightly curled left hand of the man walking before us. A woman runs towards him in preoccupied scream: Dramatic glowing flames climb his chest, his semblance becoming that of summoned evil or a mask of Early Antiquity. Disembodiment veils his pupils, pervades his mouth ajar. He stands still, drugged by rich compact jet-black smoke. We behold embers. Nobody stops, except this woman who takes off his clothes and steps on them with great force. Like Medusa, she turns him into stone. He emerges unharmed. The dwindling moon reveals his seared clothes. A synesthetic experience occurs when witnessing Adrian Piper’s Food for the Spirit photographic series, traveling the argent, auroral noise of gelatin silver prints. Our hands seek out lips and ears to feel for our voices. Gnashing teeth, we taste the cracking of our toes. We burn: This blaze made of bone and marrow, acute certainty of disappearance. While the picture blackens the trace of the body persists, resounding. Food for the spirit presented as “the instability of finite things, the performance of the irremediable.”4 What is out of reach ultimately remains beyond.
“Vacío, anduve sin rumbo por la ciudad. Gentes extrañas pasaban a mi lado sin verme. Un cuerpo se derritió con leve susurro al tropezarme. Anduve más y más. No sentía mis pies. Quise cogerlos en mi mano, y no hallé mis manos; quise gritar, y no hallé mi voz. La niebla me envolvía. Me pesaba la vida como un remordimiento; quise arrojarla de mí. Mas era imposible, porque estaba muerto y andaba entre los muertos.”5
(5) Grapefruit Martha says Manhattan is electrifying because of the granite gneiss and the marble strata that a billion years ago formed a distinctive body of pulses and pleats below the island. Geological bedrock, folded and ineluctable, defines the gravitas of The City. Or is it the whimsical mythos running his fingers through New York’s foliage? Summer 1929, Columbia University. The Civil War près d’éclater across The Atlantic. A trembling Peninsula. We imagine Federico García Lorca as Delphic Oracle, a druid or a chaman of granite and marble at the service of The Generation of ’27 poets. Published posthumously, his anthology Poeta en Nueva York collects impressions of America, erratic promenades along the streets of the Great Metropolis. In the very last verses of Crucifixion (1929) he touches on the unutterable “Geology”: “Fue entonces y la tierra despertó arrojando temblorosos ríos de polilla.”
Summer 2015. Retrospective on Yoko Ono in MoMA. A substantial part devoted to Grapefruit, the artist book she first published in 1964, now considered an early example of conceptual art. A superfluous, playful name, the grapefruit is a hybrid, an intersection. This “Forbidden Fruit”—as it was known in the 18th century—is happy accident, a capricious performance of nature. Juicy, pleasurable (geo)dynamic with a life of its own. “Pasión por pasión. Amor por amor. Estaba en una calle de ceniza, limitada por vastos edificios de arena. Allí encontré el placer. Le miré: en sus ojos vacíos había dos relojes pequeños; uno marcha en sentido contrario al otro. En la comisura de los labios sostenía una flor mordida. Sobre los hombros llevaba una capa en jirones. A su paso unas estrellas se apagaban, otras se encendían. Quise detenerle; mi brazo quedó inmóvil. Lloré, lloré tanto, que hubiera podido llenar sus órbitas vacías. Entonces amaneció. Comprendí por qué llaman prudente a un hombre sin cabeza.”6
A cautious man is most likely headless. Isn’t that an extraordinary and scandalous claim? Most people won’t bear this affirmation; they won’t be willing or able. Same as passion, love or art; we become difficult when our secrets are threatened. As no confrontation is permitted, the fruit is indeed forbidden. Yoko Ono drinks the juice, while this tribe of narrow humans chooses to eat dried tongues and step on hollow stones:
HOW TO PROPERLY EAT A GRAPEFRUIT PIECE Trust
2015 summer
__________________________ 1 Louise Bourgeois and Gary Indiana, To Whom It May Concern (London: Violette Editions, 2011). 2 Amaia Zurbano, “El arte como mediador entre el artista y el trauma. Acercamientos al arte desde el psicoanálisis y la escultura de Louise Bourgeois” (PhD diss., Universidad del País Vasco, 2007), 321. 3 María Panero, L. “Orfebre. Paradise Lost: El ritual del neurótico obsesivo,” in Poesía Completa (1970-2000), ed. Túa Blesa (Madrid: Colección Visor de Poesía, 2013), 470. 4 Op. Cit., Louise Bourgeois and Gary Indiana. 5 Cernuda, L. “Los Placeres Prohibidos: En medio de la multitud,” in Poesía Completa Volumen I (Madrid: Ediciones Siruela, 2005), 176-177. 6 Luis Cernuda, “Los Placeres Prohibidos: Pasión por pasión,” in Poesía Completa Volumen I (Madrid: Ediciones Siruela, 2005), 185. * Episode (3): Author’s poems written in Kerala, India (summer 2015). * Episode (5): Author’s conceptual piece inspired by Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit. Bibliography García Lorca, F. “Crucifixión.” Poemas del Alma: Federico García Lorca. Poeta en Nueva York (1929-1930). Accessed August 4, 2015, http://www.poemas-del- alma.com/crucifixion.htm. Nixon, M. Fantastic Reality. Louise Bourgeois and a Story of Modern Art. London: An October Book, 2005. Ono, Y. A book of Instructions and Drawings by Yoko Ono. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000.