Monday, September 12, 2011

Mask, Moving

A One Minute Videopoem: 'Mask'



Brenda Clews made this, riffing on a blog post of mine. Amazing.



It's one of the deepest pleasures, having someone take your work and make something new with it. Art to me is nothing more nor less than conversation. I have no interest in making objects, per se: I only want to talk to people: to them and through them and with them and by them.

Elves began it, of course, waking trees up and teaching them to speak and learn their tree-talk. They always wished to talk to everything, the old Elves did.

5 comments:

marly youmans said...

It is so lovely when people out there in the world take some mouthful of air, as Yeats would say, and give it an "outward and visible" body.

Brenda Clews said...

We all inspire each other. I love the word, resonate, and that's what it is. Bachelard, in The Poetics of Space, says the poetic image enters us, our consciousness, our psyches, and resonates in all the depths, and I've always felt that was it, that's what happens. A pebble dropped in a deep well. A tuning fork reverberating. That's how your images in that piece of writing were for me.

The body under your healing fingers, or the feline curl of your cat, or your pulse against her pulse just under her ear, or Ahab, or the slant of light. And then the mask, a face threaded with light, that reverberated deeply. In the videopoem the mask of echoes, reflections, multiples, resonated into Burkas, and bandages, and even how shy I am in rooms of people and how I want to cover myself. Then how our forms themselves are moments, chrysalises, weavings of electricity and earth as the elements move through us, masks for our spirits. The tree that I open and close with and have underneath the room throughout the video, shudders with lightning.

Kathleen said...

Wow! Also, I was scared!

Dale said...

It *is* a little creepy, will all the flickery masked figures!

Jayne said...

Fabulous! A pebble dropped in a deep well for sure.

All the world conspires, Dale. ;)