LAPSUS LINGUAE
There is nothing of interest
in the insolent grammar
drawing diction where the tongue
ceases to articulate
the distress and detriment.
The preterit shall become
modal in form. Pretending
this sentiment founded on
the absence of sensation.
The sensational painter
painting the present moment,
the stopped instance eternal.
The poet, exterior
to everything standing by,
beside the moment. And space,
working the frame just after,
elsewhere in another time.
Over and again I will
have told this tired story,
frustrated and turbulent.
Once again we arrive at the end of another calendar year, 2021. This was a year replete with contradictions and conflict, tension and turmoil. Two years now since the start of the pandemic with its lineage Delta, and Omicron, the Greek letters line the variants like a fraternity of the most macabre order. The supposed return to normal still eludes us.
The year starts with an insurrection at the United States Capitol. There is withdrawal of international presence from Afghanistan and the Taliban takeover. A coup occurs in Myanmar and there is unrest in the Sudan. Netanyahu is out of office in Israel. Salvini is on trial in Sicily. Brazil’s Supreme Court moves to investigate Bolsonaro’s response to the pandemic. Trump is impeached in the U.S. for a second time by the House of Representatives. Over 2 years after Jeffrey Epstein is charged, Ghislaine Maxwell is now convicted for her role in his empire. Convictions are passed down in George Floyd’s murder.
Critical Race Theory gains momentum and cryers of Cancel Culture stand by their lost cause statues with their guns, ignorant of history and afraid of science. The tech giant retreats into a meta universe presumably preparing the terrain for a kind of dark web of social networking to the known detriment of adolescent girls. The Non-Fungible Token phenomenon extends its irreverent tentacles into varying realms, making much noise, signifying little. Time Magazine Person of the Year is Elon Musk. The Word of the Year is Vaccine (Merriam-Webster), or Vax (Oxford) for short. Meanwhile The Shadow Pandemic is still very much going on all over the world, violence towards women heightened during lockdown and confinement. Civil Rights is still under attack by personal liberties. Climate Change and Mental Health became the royal couple of discussions as if some marriage of cosmic, or at least corporal, correlation.
Artpil celebrates its 4th Year Anniversary covering some landmark exhibitions including Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror at the Whitney Museum of American Art, On Hannah Arendt / Eight Proposals for Exhibition at Richard Saltoun, Post-Capital, Art & Economics of the Digital Age at Mudam Luxembourg, I’m Yours: Encounters with Art in Our Times at the ICA Institute of Contemporary Art Boston. We featured the photo series of Women of Meridione by Ornella Mazzola, The Last Humans by Michael Whelan, Bayil – Behind The Hills by Emin Mathers, and Yesterday by Sal Taylor Kydd. Our online exhibition presented Afterglow: Korebaju, While the Earth Remains by César Cuspoca as well as the 2021 selection of 30 Under 30 Women Photographers presented in conjunction with a projection and artist reception during Rome Art Week. The year comes to an end, and we persist.
with each stolen stroke until,
the placid pigments have all
faded, or have found their way
into some ethereal place.
I will have scored the same scene,
and lived concurrently twin
lives of parallel sadness.
The cause effect of cycles,
the forgotten first flutter.
I will have worn the ribbons
down on this typewriter, frayed
by the repetitive strikes.
This one tethered verse at last
let go, like a new bird drunk
on its first flight of fancy.
The spurned syntax, the enslaved
appositives reclaiming
its meaning, the same lament
playing out so many tongues
all ending in such reserve
between two parenthesis.
Indexed and made archival
the ringing of each line’s end,
unaccomplished narrative
truant in immature forms
never to be exposed and
no audience to behold.
This triumphant nothingness.
And so what of it? I had
a dream and it went like this:
Period, period. Ellipse…
–from Exoration
2021 may be remembered as a prolongation of 2020, a tensioning, at times an exasperation, but mostly, a variant. We are in need of light. A moral booster, of sorts. A sign from within. Perseverance was the Cambridge Dictionary’s crowning word of the year. So may we endure the uninteresting or even disinterested times. Welcome to 2022. May we persevere.
Happy New Year.
