60646 procession.

On a late summer morning, we leave the heat of the Chéngdū streets behind, and wander into the cool garden of the Wénshū Yuàn Temple and Monastery, one of the most important Zen Buddhist centers in China. We observe as a procession of chanting adherents passes through.

60638 reversal (crows).

Find any city that has winter and, just at that part of year when the analēmma rounds its lower arc, wait until the sun begins to go down; thence hie you to the outskirts of the settled quarters to seek a more vacant, derelict area, and there find a lonely cluster of trees. You will bear witness to the restive sounds of assembling crows, gathering thither to discuss the matters of the day.

60615 tell it to the water.

“Water has listened to many dreams. It is a custom in [our] culture: If you have a bad dream, you tell it to the water so that the current takes it away and the nightmare doesn't come true. I imagine how my dream flows into the river and is taken somewhere far away. And then the dream will return again as rain, showering down in front of my house. Or in winter, it will fall as snow and cover the yard and the stairs.”

60593 tashkent bazaar.

In the twenty years since my first visit to Tashkent, the

60584 the poison cup.

„It seems not that I was dreaming of something, but rather that I was dreaming of remembering something that had happened previously in the dream, and in the dream time, rather than in waking life. And so, I thought, each dream brings along with it its own complete world.“   Darosvali Rorosuret

60511 mortal coil.

In which we devise a circumstance wherein the tortional energy stored in a long rusty helical doorspring (inter alia) becomes a physical, as well as aural, metaphor for the tumult and turmoil referred to in the erstwhile, more classical, sense of the word ‘coil.’

60484 highway.

A highway is but a single thread in the open fabric of the landscape; its path and form constrained by the contours of the earth. The present work is a composed drone that has been cast and worked from material that was selectively mined from recordings of highways and other forms of travel. It withholds any impression of where and when, emphasizing the featurelessness of the source material as a way of probing its power and uncovering its mesmeric potential.

60477 bar bard.

Our guide takes us to a bar in the evening; already from the street it sounds like a good time. We go in, I take the only unoccupied chair, which is at the back of the room. Smiling people are all around listening to a local minstrel bowing a one-string instrument and happily singing. We listen as the clever worder strums his instrument and improvises bons mots, causing much mirth, (I am later told) on a wide variety of topics, such as local gossip, as well as more serious subjects like politics. He makes the rounds, collecting the encouragement of small banknotes. He comes around to me and sings several pointed strophes, but I do not understand his tongue. What am I to do? I smile and clap along with the rest. I am later told that he sang this to me: ‘I would be happy if the foreigner gave me a dollar.’

60366 it is almost what it seems to be.

I do not wish to go out on a limb and tell you what I think this means. In the first place, I do not really know. I feel myself merely the conduit, the source is somewhere beyond me, untraceable. Secondly, such explanations are superfluous, and anyway, prone to frequent and futile revisions. Why speak? Why, indeed.

60359 mirror.

We wander the forest of a dead volcano, whose peak still exhales a warm breath from the insides of the earth. As the mountain sighs above us, the woodpeckers hammer and the crows caw. We come across this limpid pool, and gaze as if  “… through a glass darkly.”