memorandum on desire
In the early days of my artistic career, I worked part-time for the Feds. Off hours, I was preoccupied with experimental forms. At work, I wrote memorandums.
The memorandum is a solid form with a prescribed voice intended to clearly communicate objectively on a topic that has been researched or investigated. Usually, that topic is bureaucratic. But must it be?
No. I’ve written several memorandums objectively addressing my own heart. One of them has just been published in Azure, along with meeting notes from a committee on irreconcilable desire.
The memorandum on desire features what I call an “image segue:” a dead insect on an empty library shelf resembles a stone amongst gravel in a Zen garden where a novice shakes leaves from a tree and consequently, pages of fallen books in the library flutter. It’s cinematic and all connected to the interior landscape of desire.
The “Notes on Irreconcilable Desires” prominently features ideas from Yeats’ The Shadowy Waters. which likely casts Yeats as the King luring to his rare Byzantium-like kingdom a more sensuous, earth-bound Maude Gonne as queen. She doesn’t want his glittering, eternal realm. In my version, the two ships crossing in the night enable a she to tempt an unwilling king. The notes close with powerpoint slides graphing birds’ flight over the prow of her sinking ship.
This final image was lovingly illustrated by Evgenia Barsheva for the journal of literary thought, Azure. Please read my “Memorandum on Desire” and “Notes from the Committee on Irreconcilable Desire,” and see more of Evgenia’s drawings in Azure, Volume 4, Issue 4.
Azure will be publishing more of my work in upcoming issues—in fact—they will be publishing one of the seminal works of my writing life. Stay tuned!
This has been a difficult week. In one day my President suggested shooting American citizens, and a journalist was arrested during a live broadcast—two things that violate my understanding of what the United States of America is. I don’t watch much television beyond late-night monologues and I haven’t the tolerance to watch a man being murdered by the police—but other people had to witness this trauma unfolding right on the street of their hometown. They recorded it.
That is NOW. I am isolated outside New York City, which is just now emerging from wave 1 of a pandemic that killed tens of thousands. When I was still in the city, I sat in a chair listening to ambulance siren after siren while I sewed myself a mask out of an old tea towel. People are protesting NOW in Brooklyn. In Atlanta, where I lived for a decade, there are riots.
This work doesn’t speak to NOW. But if you are awake long into deepening night (it is 2:30 am, here, now, as I prepare this post) knowing the world is not all right and you can’t refresh anymore feeds or stream another flash of live footage, this work does speak your soul’s language (the soul speaks in imagery—like mythology, like dreams), quietly, intensely, at a different level of time. If that refreshes you for our world’s hard work, here it is for you. That is all my work has to offer this NOW.
For now.
with gratitude,
Laylage