resolvable: 3
gigantic: 1
complex: 5
feminine: 10
young: 6
sticky: 4
public: 6
proprietary: 9
[apoptosis: falling away the human mind is born with a finite amount of neurons. structure emerges from it as a reduction. the mind can be thought of as a work of living sculpture] she grew up in large, barren cold spaces marked with the passage of fast metal and dust-pounding sunlight traces of her moisture puffed out of her mouth in billowing curls as she walked to school every morning down a quiet Vermont road evanescing scripts of presence she thought no one would read the neighbors remember a slender girl with a backpack as large as she was determined pace a flash of white athletic socks [after apoptosis, within the areas of the brain dedicated to memory, new connections are still formed up to advanced age.] years later, she spent a summer dancing in the gridded canyon of glass and cement every day, broken and tired, she’d go home and look at her prize duvet and think: never again she’d put on sunglasses to hide the residual glare in her eyes and later, that winter as her forgetting drained out of her we’d laugh about silly things like militance politics religion scions of wealthy families who revoke their birthrights and become gurus and say to each other: now those were the days [we forget in order to learn] i woke her up at four the next afternoon she complained that the white walls made a kind of anechoic slap against her eyes so i turned off the lights and took a picture of her she said, in twenty years, this will all seem very funny. then we’ll hate each other or something, but in our pictures we’ll still be together. [there is a girl’s face in the interstice of the grid the edges have been cropped to fit the container and it will outlive her] i left the next day. the sun was shining and the animals were staring blankly out from the barn as i ran. i simply set my feet on the good dirt road and stared into the distance and thought: i am still here. i never looked back. [the girl in the grid does not remember] [the grid does not forget]
Joohn Choe
resolvable: 1
gigantic: 4
complex: 7
feminine: 6
young: 3
sticky: 4
public: 5
proprietary: 2
she was a soldier’s daughter, and she was forced to be strong all her life. we pushed her hard because we loved her. she grew up fine and strong and she was like a letter and
in the address line: you
[the return of the prosaic: an elegiac script; coded graphemes of a loss that has already happened.
the imminent completion of finished plans signifies the project of an unfinished life.
in this, work transcends intention: it is shot through with amnestic maudlinity produced by the anamnestic frankness of archival. it is an unintentional emotion — ours, and not hers]
we were a nation of forgivers. our promises spelled out love in the long sentence of the stations of the godhead of our childhood, erasure chasing the hand that wrote it as quickly as it was written, like thin, faint pencil lines on the apartment wall that marked our king’s becoming
[she set her paper sacrifices to the wind
miles away, her poems wrapped themselves around telephone poles and clotheslines
the puzzled townspeople say to themselves: this writing from the sky must be god’s writing]
[and we swallowed the bitterness long before it happened but now]
at her marriage to the sea, mile-wide shafts of light swept across the darkened brine like the apotheosis of water, like spikes of sadness in the blanket of our polite joy and in the salt smell and sneezingly bright sunlight her veil lifted and her bouquet was lost to the surf
[her architecture of experience dances out across the grid/silence
the songs of her pain in
silent machine lines that bespeak the plans of her caring
a nation of forgiveness wears her face]
her voice was lost before we heard it, and elegant, small writing attests the eloquence of her designs upon us
wind/agony/light/ocean/machine
speech/up until now/her plan:
you
[with apologies to derrida and oxford literary review]
Joohn Choe
photographic space codes avoidance. our convenience of view diminishes our desire to converge, pushes us back into our reasons for looking. without wall labels we shall surely be lost. plans forestall the chaotic event. pure events precede plans. the manipulation of mute femininity: in the coy expectation of gaze, or the prosaic inevitability of life ending, we practice our modes of relation that map us into a field of activity it is no mistake that in a competitive society men call each other “girls” as insults domination of women gave them the practice in meeting others’ bodies as receptive surfaces between two points in space, a line creates a plane a curve creates a calculus equation and in differentiation, there is no cartesian logic underlying the solution spaces that is the way that it should be. in opacity, there is still wonder.