I have memories of volcanoes from my holidays in southern Italy. Vesuvius near Naples, Etna in Sicily or Stromboli in the Aeolian Islands. I didn't go up there to look down on the craters, but I saw them erupt at night and felt the tremors from the depths.
The Mediterranean in the background. Lava mingling with ice cream.
Then there's Pompeii with its blue sky.
The topographical remains of the apocalypse, where the ashes have preserved frescoes. In the buildings, uncluttered corners and niches. The emptiness of shops, alleys, houses and amphitheatres. Walls and low walls where my thoughts travel unhindered. My body explores, lurks, sits, passes through zones of light and shadow.
I stay on the edges and don't dig too deep.
Rik Peeters told me about
Gelitin, The Dig Cunt, 2007
Coney Island, New York, USA
Seven days, day after day, Gelitin commuted in the morning from a small hotel at Times Square to Coney Island bringing shovels and spades to dig. Sometimes people joined. Every evening the hole was filled up again and we caught the Q or the B home to Manhattan.
Make a hole or stand on the edge of a hole. Purposeless but deep enough. Gelitin dug holes as a group, but sometimes alone.
***
My throat is tightening.
Emotions for the one who turn into volcanoes to expel their fears and suffering from the depths of their insides. Eruptions of the overflow that shake and exhaust the body, leaving cracks and burned landscapes.
The column of Vesuvius reached over 30 km high before burying Pompeii.
I think of Edvard Munch's scream but, looking at the image, the howling is not an explosive eruption. The silent cry seems both to burst out of and into the dilated mouth. The lungs tap and regurgitate nightmares that are everywhere in the surrounding air.
No liberating eruption
Inside in outside, outside in inside
I float on my back. My shoulder blades are my tactile eyes. The shapes are warm in the crater, like my feet, which I wrap in my duvet.
No filling
No emptying
Alternating reflux that hollows out the walls.
***
I’m not sure about the tone of my texts. I would prefer something less dramatic but when goddesses are involved my body, rooted in Southern Italy and in the Alps, connects to the cosmos.
Now I’m thinking about how the Mediterranean evaporates. An invisible lukewarm eruption that rises high into the sky and collides with cold, descending masses.
Cumulonimbus. Huge, cracking shapes.
Spain where the torrential rain broke up on asphalt and exhausted dry soil. Floods rushing in the trap formed by underground car parks.
Earth and water separated by walls.
Goddesses in cages.
Are they the ones who kill, or are we?
Excavate so that my breathing becomes fuller. Let the air expand, irrigate my cells and the hairs of mypaintbrush.
Make room.
Shitao. Sayings on Painting from Monk Bitter Gourd (Qing Dinasty)
The Sea possesses the immense surge, the Mountain the latent concealment. The Sea swallows and vomits, the Mountain prostrates and bows. The Sea can manifest a soul, the Mountain can convey a rhythm.
Multiple temporalities. The evermoving crest of waves seem frozen into the mountain stones. But mountains dance. Not only when they explode.
Why do you rush to occupy the ground when the shapes contract?
Make room.
***
Thank you for the sweetness of the rabbits and the little mountain flowers.
Tragedy, Greek choruses and a bit of flora and fauna
Hugging a shape when the nightmares persist. It's pathetic. But it's better if that plump little thing remains invisible or if it melts under my tongue like cotton candy.
Moist evaporation
The heat leaves my armpits
How can I resist giving ground when the grass is cut under my feet. How can get out of the shade to drink from the river?
Safely
Digging up to show what's been taken away. Like those open-air mines that expose their wounds to satellites. Like listening with my acoustic fat the lips that won't loosen.
Vibrations, turbulence, humming, buzzes, pulses, airflows, scents, echoes, waves, frequencies, energy fields
Discreet signals to talk to rabbits, flowers and wounded mountains.
Resting my eyes and my ears. It’s weekend.
***
You bring me down there.
I'm not sure about this descent followed by a renewal.
At the same time, I follow you in the ecstatic drum beating. The sinking crescendo that goes with the exhaustion of the dancing body, when nothing matters anymore and when unexpected things appear including demonic ones. I like that we welcome the evil with a warm soup. It’s not an alien, it’s in us and around us.
Back to Edvard Munch's scream, where everything is simultaneously inside and outside, down and up.
The ebb and flow of tides and eruptions
Evaporation and rain
Nothing is subtracted, nothing is added
Infinitely small and infinitely large
Cosmos in the nucleus of the earth
Polina and Cyriaque told me yesterday about naked mole rats. Rodents that live 2 metres underground in Eastern Africa without ever seeing the sun. Nearly blind, deaf and hairless, they have a long-lifeexpectancy without being subjected to degenerative diseases or cancer. They live in communities each with its own dialect. Like ants and bees, they have a queen who gives birth to their young. But this queen, who is bigger than the others, maintains an undivided reign by constantly harassing her daughters and sons. The resulting stress levels make these animals sterile. Only the queen can ensure the survival of the species.
Community, power and cruelty. No respite, even when hidden in the bowels of the earth.
In the cavity of my heart the silence of my harmless, gentle forms.
***
I was happy to read about the existence of dispersers in the naked mole rats’ community. I could imagine them, with their portable reserves of fat, escaping through underground tunnels. It makes me wonder – could this be why women have curves? Perhaps fat serves as a kind of safety jacket.
But no. Dispersers are males.
Big, fat, lazy and sexually-charged, these rare individuals seem built for dispersal.
They avoid collective work and follow their impulses.
In abusive relationships, it's often when a woman tries to escape that she faces the greatest risk of dying.
Excavation, an invisible desertion. Not attracting attention, not exposing yourself. Digging quietly under the arch of your feets - no piles, no clutter. Making space in places no one would expect. Traveling by caressing the roughness of a surface with your finger. Drawing to add emptiness to a day as full as a basket of laundry.
I think of Ana Mendieta
I'm no longer certain of my earlier thought:
Nothing is substracted, nothing is added
It seems to hold true, for tectonic plates and the compost bin
But humans produce things that do not disappear.
Like Ana Mendieta's works
but also tons of waste that cannot be assimilated
Things are adding up and I’m suffocating