Mayhem
Mayhem is often the daily life of the homeless. And vulnerability. Sleeping rough, will I be attacked? Raped? Burgled? Drenched? Frozen? Simply wakened or disturbed in sleep? To sleep in a doorway mocks the idea of the threshold or passage from outside to inside and protection, it mocks the very notion of transition and the will required to make it possible.
The Happy Camper Homeless Man
Sleeping under the Sleeping in a shop
Stars makes me feel Doorway, in the
at one with Manchester drizzle,
Mother Nature Makes me feel that
Mother Nature should
just bugger off
(Vespers, The Office of the Virgin)
Mayhem means not only chronic insecurity but also noise as an obliteration of boundaries. The job of A Book of Ours is at once to keep the space of art work free of mayhem for meditation, exchange, and exploration and making and yet to allow it in as acknowledgment of the real history of the homeless. In A Book of Ours mayhem appears as displacement and design. Imagine, for example, a cacophony of voices and noises, of needs and desires in real time and space transposed to the separate lines of the Calendar, fifteen or sixteen per page, six words per line and myriad styles and content of writing; or imagine the arabesque-like unpredictable movement and variety of image along the borders of the text as the design-of-mayhem. Mayhem is to be sure aestheticized, and yet it retains its swarming immediacy for the reader/viewer as juxtaposition and unexpectedness. The page evinces a unity that doesn’t resolve differences but keeps them in play: co-existences in play.
From Office of the Virgin, A BOOK OF OURS.
Comments
Post a Comment