TELLhyde

(   ( (•) )  )

This is about reverberations. 

I imagine her soles escaping dry hot sand, on to the firm mush before resistance from roving wash bleeds over foot. Here sand signals bottom and while you can touch your foot is cradled mercifully by seemingly infinite grains, geologic or organic, unfortunate growth in synthetic.

I wrote a song.   **Beautiful I want it all.**   She swam out.   **The barrel, the force, the release.**   Past the swell line, the current drew her further.   **Pour abundance to sink beneath.**   The sight of her was lost.   **Throw me tangled rough to keep**  Never recovered, vanished in the fade of the horizon; she was never seen again.   **Anticipating this descent and sloshing in the heat.**   This was a girl I knew. She died just south of where I grew up, no, where I grew angry.   **Settled soundly with the tide**   At this beach, the ocean took her.   **And we’ll be changed once _&_ once again**   Like many girls… the ocean rolled.

My first lesson in drowning. I was five or six in Santa Monica. I ventured to play in the surf. I remember the twisting of my body, no upside‾‾under toe. That tunnel forced me. A moment, bottom against. Breathing no longer accordingly, air evaded but not water. I scooped and the ocean swallowed back. Uncovered, I emerged. Dragging, coughing–cough > cough > cough > coughing>>> till time repositioned. (   (  I survived returning • to my parents.  )   ) I told them, they laughed. They didn’t XX sea.                                                  

                                                                  v^~~~~^V^v~~~`

[].*.

The dream stopped. My panic, in the building rolled over into waking life, did not. ▭ ▭||▭ ▭

Ten years later I am on the coast of North Carolina, close to my parents. I witness again the tension in turn. **She’s got a way of moving. She is a wave a falling, a fallin’ down.** Where the land meets the sea …_[ {~~ Rachel Carson studied this collision for years, before her infamous Silent Spring, she observed and preserved coastal ecosystems & wildlife in other books. She’d say, to understand the shoreline requires hosting one’s feet at the exchange, bare to “our dim ancestral beginnings,” magnifying the cyclical pull & thrust.

xx _//*–_ -_ -_ I am struck. .|l. We are baited where we began. 

To embody the land, we left the sea. I stand, my back to the dunes. Morning sea[side], my dog’s elated with sand between her toes and the smell of dead ocean debris. Except for the plastic, debris rots in the sun, sours in the salt. The melancholic routine, its fishy ._⌒_ I buoy out of water. I never wanted to move to the beach. You could say, I was still scared of drowning. v^~~~~^V^v~~~` Today I walk up smiling at the Edge of the Sea. Carson draws out, underlines, the unapparent violence of this ecosystem. It is, after all, unforgiving. The churning without end, over, and over, and over again. It’s power. • .I think, sounds like birth. _⌒_ [ Image ] emergence from primordial fluid. .  . ~  ~

We

All

Come

Out

       Dripping

            .

            .

            º

            •

      (    (  )    )

On arrival, I am the artist residency’s uninspired painter. I came this way. Two other [male] painters are en plein air. They are eager to wake, early to work, quick in the chill blowing over terrain bones. They are producers, producing ||fresh||. It is dead winter. All my vitality was burned. I haven’t noted the severity–yet–I immediately hate the idea of copying what I see on the island. I am cold. Not because of them. There is a history; I do not see myself in, several histories actually. For their safety I appear much younger, in angst. I am gay & I’m annoyed. I leash my dog, pretending I’m in control. I’m performing. She knows. En plein air is stuck in a tradition, a form of mimesis, indulging a landscape. It should be a devotion. When terms are cemented in meaning, even in art, it is a sign of trauma. Trauma is not purely hysterics, sometimes it is silence, frozen or moving constantly. You see it in people. >< En plein air has lost its body, to hobbyists, retirees who drive their electric car on park grass to unload their easel. Lying on grass reminds me I exist in a body, not alone. The prickle of sleek blades itches my skin. To be outside is to exist beyond an experience. Didn’t our body evolve to be outside and to blend and meld within it. Not in this heat. I’m no fish,_/* but painting outside should be a passage, a re-engagement. Seeing a painting limit the view, acting like a photo with a lens of self expression is not even an experience. It’s a sighting, a glance, an imitation, a signal of recognition, withholding the process of remembering why. Like possession it is a means to an end, the end–the reference. Without using unfamiliar muscles as your feet inconsistently level on sand, facing the wicked seduction plunging your senses where industrious gusts hang on salt, or to be urged and teased by water threatening or careening away from land, one can’|knot understand the shore fully. This threshold between water and land, reckons our being, captivates our bodies. ~>>Energy is passed here<<~ How do I capture that?

Growing up at the beach, as I did, you become overly familiar with its hit _&_ run. Carson knew it was inadequate to translate a habitat through cataloging species separate from both each other and apart from their ecosystem. She wrote to give a sense of the connectivity and resilience demanded from the life. Connectivity is easily ignored. At the shore, we think it simply: sand, water, sky. Donna Haraway echoes–Carson’s aim–with the term sympoiesis, defined as “making-with;” because “nothing makes itself.” Sight can obscure our sense to acknowledge sympoiesis at play. Media abuses this fact everyday. It’s rather easy to flatten meaning–that way→makes me restless. I want to consider each granular of sand, color can mark the unique voyage it took to get here. I want to contextualize the details, to break the constructed reality. I’m probably projecting, but plein air painters don’t sell place. l___l 

They crop. 

<>\__/<> Say I’m a snob. I find it boring and I am angry again being so close to home. I am learning to express, not suppress my emotions as they happen. I map the island’s topography, day and night. The winter off-season roads are mostly empty except the occasional golf cart, no cars allowed. The night gleams; I forgot stars twinkle. How rare. The light pollution is low enough, I can see that billionaire's satellites littering the sky. What trash. So much we miss in town. I’m disgruntled by the breathing stars. I want the starlight to be stable, consistent, to be on or off. The fluctuation in light makes my eyes twitch. Am I suppose to think they are alive? Every crescendo sparks dizzying worry–stars combust, swallowing their systems.))) I think about never-ending death. What I am now, might be inconsequential, might be finite. I see mortality before my lashes lift. Stars are a promise, not a gift. <>\__/<>    

   º

((((•))))

 º

Here though, we walk through the bird sanctuary, grappling with the island’s connection to fracking and that placement of a speech’s casually offset colonial narrative. We joke about being eaten by alligators, with vigilance, I obsessively check for ticks panning in _&_ out. I recount the cafe’s painting, the indigenous collision with settlers on the shore, the unapparent violence of the image; the unapparent violence in arrival. 

    º

((((•))))

 º

In front of the country club are sand bags whale-sized lined outside their wall. Regardless, the boundary is being eaten by the ocean. Its temporality, sinks behind the bags. The wail|bags should extend the beach, but the water claims where I stand. Witness the artificial protection, a strand of illusion. The water here is queer. It triangulates. It appears to be competing, like when we feel we do not have enough space, enough value, enough of our needs met. }[][][] I hear the undertow is swift and deadly. Imagine the bermuda triangle /*\_this tip will take you forever. Two currents don’t merge }]they conflict[{ staying separate. The third, below this rift, drags you under quickly to sea•unseen. see) unseen)) Could you recognize the danger?  Seagulls float above the choppy water. They are kingpins, crop||ping. They are scarecrows, dummies to lure you in. Yet another illusion, of safety.

                                                                                          v^~~~~^V^v~~~`~~~v^

     :*o<<-*:     .

When your visual memory is shit, you discover it outwardly, like when I paint. The longer you look at something you improvised, the more decisions you have to make of what to bring out. l___l Two weeks in context. I try again to explain. ( (•) )||( (•) ) I stand at the cusp. I follow the telluric hydro line. I look out at the horizon and my breath shallows naturally. It’s gravitational. Orbs pull at each other, another forcing. ˚º•I look at you _&_ think how I am thirsty. I look up, at the night sky attentively & my shoulders relax for the moon. This place where I am and also cannot be, is not a gentle rhythm. When I imagine the trance of the beach, my ears fill:full saturated senses. As it does not mirror me, I cannot mirror it. Or does it? I mirror | ɿiɿɿom I|||. Blood is fluid. My body is mostly water. And I keep returning to this shore. In tandem I am lost in awe and zoned into that hint of color that caught my eye this morning. A wet seashell, the brilliance lost when it dries; the trouble with taking. I ramble. Mediating, we are passive  ]  [  It is active. I forge into a realm of ambiguity to make sense of this gesture, scooping. You might be confused. I am trying to tell you what it is like to be here. When I move through these offerings, glimpses; I am humbled when letting go. I released a translation of a place. My landscape is not referential, it is experiential. I don’t try to be linear, I interpret my space, or also my relationships. Can you tell I am overwhelmed? I want dialogue off the tongue. ‾U‾

                                                                               ’‘

                                                                        I will remove the lens of confusion.(   (e–v-e-n-t—u-a-l-l–y)   )

|

synthesize

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Charles and I speak about our old work. He stacks. I obfuscate. We are both unsettled here. 

We walk. Dredging ruins the night peace, eyes follow spotlights. The stage, a regurgitation. They tell tourists the sand was displaced. Preservation not conservation is required to keep a shoreline from moving. I anticipate shadows of the coyotes I hear, but we only ever see birds and deer, a couple of dead jellies. I learned last year predators are stealthy. They don’t hide in the wild, but in your house. I unleash simple painting strategies, like I unleash my dog; For her sense of freedom. ~  *  ~ We go where we shouldn’t, accessing open roads: more mother swamp trees, more dead ends, more ticks in reeds, more defiantly tacky fences, the kind the rich love. Everyone wants to feel they are a king protecting their domain. [] [] Charles who could have been a Clyde, like my Conwell. He tells me one can’t exist without the other, you need to be perceived to exist. I think about painting as an act of reflec|tion.noit|.  I think about losing yourself to someone else’s words. I think about my name becoming a means (to an end).• ____

___[] ºThen, I think ▭.▭ about not being limited to seeing singularly. I thin|< about the instability of a symbol. I think about not cropping, but expanding– - beyond the experience. 

I reach essence. Sung by Lucinda Williams, essence is desire, a feeling left from what has gone. She laments, draw’in out the waiting. Before I was told of her drug consort, in naivety I heard her seeking a tactile body and physical love; what elated her senses. I want essence to recollect more than a moment of seeing. I sought essence to engage sympoiesis. I think I have been scared to lose myself again. The landscape in textures, sounds, the changing weight of air, feeling (on skin, inside, after) creates a bridge; when I watch _&_ notice, I stop separating myself from where I am. Lucinda taught me a way to navigate my suffering, to describe it. I am teaching myself to observe, to understand and face it. I want to share and exchange myself more fully, sustainably, with my relationships and environments. How else can we not abandon ourselves? 

I drift. We walk, find a dead bird, seagull then another, another, and further yet another, but a pelican. We exhale out loud, muffled by another machine churning sand. This one is not on land, but on the water. Less mesmerizing in the day lit affect of death. What would Carson’s eye retell now? We descent. \\. \\.

Out of the fifty postcards I work. I take fourteen. Each is 4 x 6” or 6 x 4”, all oil on paper. The paintings were exhibited in the NBIAR 2023 group show at the Wilma W. Daniels Gallery in Wilmington, NC. This writing is just a selection of a book; here it is another imprint. The paintings embody the collective entanglement of the island to me. They are the essence of the landscape. 

                                                                                                                                              ‘•.((/)).•’