Reading question

Meanwhile this Cherry is more Nyquil than Cherry now Frances Laurent 2017

1

Meanwhile is the only word in English I can think of right now that does what a lot of interesting words in other languages do; that interesting thing is to define a meaning that has a capacity to span into a longer visual description of foreground/middleground/background/past/past- present/future/future-past …tenses, I need more tenses. More continuances of action in relation to a time of utterance. Some words of places that stick with me; komorebi / 木漏れ日: a Japanese word for the way light (particularly sun) looks and forms coming through trees. I imagine this word came about not just to reference the shadows and lines of this visual experience but because looking at or being in komorebi can be a profoundly luminous experience and therefore emotional and therefore worth a word. Or like waldeinsamkeit, a German word for the feeling of being engulfed by nature or lost in the forest and the feeling that lostness overwhelms, I am concerned this may have a religious or godly connotation, but it still stretches from outside, in. Or like kumatage, which may or may not be English but I think it’s a nautical term for the gleaming and glistening and reflection of sunlight on waters, and the way it is hard to look at or the way it is hard to see or the way it is a blinking blindness, an asynchronistic light show making music, good thing there’s a word for that. I mean, we have sad and we have lonely but not so many emotional words that come in from the out- many of our words are about what is within coming outward and being spread over and on what we see; ordering and shaping rather than being influenced-we have a history of this The determination to make the outside look like our insides could be, collectively, the single source of human decline. And also some of the most beautiful.

I think toska / Тоска is a Russian word well-known for its untranslatability but defined by Nabokov, “At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody or something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui and boredom.”

Low level toska sounds like an American Experience/Problem but not one of my own

i have meanwhile if we would pay attention to it Meanwhile has both a sense of time: past, present, future and also of place: right here, not here, there, not there. It is all those places and all those tenses so the reality of meanwhile multiplies its own directions by its own places in time. It grows reality in a way English doesn’t often satisfy, touching location and duration and experience simultaneously.

Meanwhile this Cherry is more Nyquil than Cherry now Frances Laurent 2017

2

When I think on meanwhile I start with the position of my body and then think of understanding the time of now in every direction-of course not possible but probably why I will photograph the chair for the rest of my life.; A prop so recurring it connects me everywhere even when there isn’t one even where I am not Recently, I was at a party. There were collections of geometrical art, masks, trinkets. Everything was dusted, there was artichoke dip and finger foods with people’s fingers all over them. A fellow guest, self-identified musician from New York was talking in length about his fantasies of living in Iceland becoming a feasible reality. Finally, the relief could wash over him. The kind of relief you get when you realize you can, after years of strife, afford to buy your first new Audi or BMW. I didn’t care about his life plans and I really didn’t want to know anything more about him that he hadn’t already told me but I was tempted, “why Iceland?” He began to explain that it was the place he felt the safest, that the security of being there was unparalleled anywhere else. He spoke of this safety as a privileged indulgence he could no longer toil through life without. Silks, spices, gems and safety. I was of course helpless not to think, who the fuck do you think you are to think you deserve to feel safe anywhere-everyone can’t fucking move to Iceland. It just felt like a small part of a really big problem. Escapism is becoming trendy, I’m pretty sure. I think there’s even a magazine all about it called how to be rich and live well and give back nothing in a beautiful locale with a few solar panels, a back-up generator and only 20 minutes to Whole Foods. as turns out most people who do this do it more than once. House here, house there—nothing in between I’m from a place that has become this—a poor place, rural, and being re-presented as somewhere beautiful to spend the money you worked so hard for and live nicely and without meaning. After all, the meaning of things is so tiring. famous words We worked really hard for everything we have Then there is-we worked really hard for everything we don’t have So-we all worked really hard and some of us have something to live on and some of us don’t. I can see I am somewhat cultureless. But then---meanwhile. Meanwhile is always expanding If we receive culture from family and culture from land and from tradition and from language and from food and from knowledge I received something very strong that was only invisible because it was a sight to so few. That is the, the Culture of war stress; culture of knowing that your nation will not represent you or care for you, culture of the American war in Vietnam. Culture of the shame of participation. Culture of regret for serving a dumb evil. These are the family heirlooms, guilt for having, guilt for living.

Meanwhile this Cherry is more Nyquil than Cherry now Frances Laurent 2017

3

People are doing now with money and escapism what my father did with a welding degree and an anxiety disorder 40 years ago but I wonder if it’s different even. After all, the meaning of things is so tiring and that’s the trigger for both these inspirations, but also they are different and also they are not My father owns land. 20 acres and that is where he has been since 1982. If he didn’t have that he would be dead. He can’t survive within masses, really he cannot. He doesn’t have any curtains and he doesn’t have any chairs and he has a dirt floor and he’ll tell me how hard he worked for it and I’ll tell him it doesn’t matter, everyone worked hard and some people got lucky, and some people just didn’t. Nobody we knew ever thought we were lucky-but we were/are I’m guessing this matters to me because I want objects to have more language than they tend to. I want beds to be boats and chairs to be bodies and blankets to be fences. More choices; thanks to Jan Vanwoert I can understand some of my years of frustration; if we are choosing from a set of already predefined and available options how are we really choosing? I’m just going with no, we haven’t been. Meanwhile lets go of me, so a pillow can be a head, a folding chair an anchor, an electrical cord a rode to steady a room, a doorway to a hallway can be a turret to look from. And not because they can be imagined this way, but because they are these things. Living in a physical definition by the way we use the things we live with, the way we don’t use them. The things we do not have are itemized in voids, voids that take up space and time in labor, labor that disappears, labor that there can be nothing to show for. My political narrative is not on the outside; it is in the refrigerator, it is inside the cabinets and in bed. It hangs around the doors and windows. My political narrative happens in-doors or stretches in-doors because that is where, inside rooms, there could be safety and we are told and we learn to seek safety-our bodies are born with the instinct and the fearful grow it into us. So then, we’ve gone inside and closed doors and windows and curtains and arranged our chairs just the way we like them, or swept our dirt floor left to right just the way we like to and so too when we’ve done this we cannot see and so too we use safety as an excuse for blindness. Because it’s said, it’s quite dangerous out there (and tiring with all those meanings), and so it is There is some shelter in the world but safety is a mood of an era and will inevitably leave, safety was something we watched or performed but did no action to achieve. This of course is not true everywhere but very true here where we are reading this. Someone looked at some of my photographs and said this then was that, so I learned something: Always, just as we start to give shape—then proceed elsewhere because meanwhile is still happening even if you are very safe in Iceland.