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I wish the world fell into silence

And darkness drunk up all the strangers. 

We sat on the floor

Smiles tangled

Elbows on knees

With all the left bottles of champagne 

Glasses around us

Queuing to enter our circle of joy

We talked through the night

Melting words

The words of life

 

Magic smoked us until the dawn

Two piles of ash.

 

Smoke twisted around the morning breeze

And took us away over a loch

Still talking 

Words dropping through the mist 

Pebbles dissolving in water.

 

We?

Dispersed with the breeze.

07 Oct 2022

Colours

His death coincided with the first day of my period. I was holding his hand and was sliding my eyes from his frowning forehead to his half open eyes, to his half open mouth, to the grubby collar of his light blue hospital shirt. Then back to the forehead, to the eyes, to the mouth, to the neck. 

The bedsheet under my hip was warm and discoloured by a growing stain of blood.

Then Comes Death

And you realised why I collected pins in the empty jar
The plastic lids in the paper box 
The fragments of the broken mirror in the left pocket of my khaki raincoat.
- It’s cold and wet and grey and you are beautiful.
- Hold my hand in my left pocket. 
  Fingers laced. 
  Tight
  Tighter

Interior Designer

The red roses on the curtains in the living room, match the red roses on the cushions on the sofa. The green sofa in the living room matches the leaves on the towel in the bathroom. The grey tiles of the bathroom match the grey scarf hung on the hanger by the entrance door. The golden handle of the entrance door matches the legs of the table in the living room. The purple flowers on the carpet in the living room match the flowers on the armchair in my bedroom. The blue lines on my pillowcase match the fishes on the sugar can in the kitchen. The yellow squares on the kitchen towel match the bedclothes in my daughter’s room. My daughter is masturbating in her room so I have to eat the dinner by myself. But the dark blue circle on her empty plate, accidentally, matches the tablecloth in the kitchen, and this is beautiful.
 
06 July 2018

Trout

To have the best barbequed trout you should flip it every two minutes for approximately eight minutes.

I fell in love with Julian, when he flipped the trout after the first two minutes on the barbeque in the north west corner of their garden in Dubrovnik, on a late August Saturday afternoon. When his wrist turned, I followed his blue vein disappearing under the folded sleeve of his grey shirt. His wife’s dark brown hair was moving in the breeze while she was enthusiastically describing a character of her last novel that had become the bestseller of 2016. 
 
I was still married to Ivor then, and it was time to flip the trout once more, before it was ready to be served.
 

14 January 2018

A Story On Ink and its Transdisciplinary Application

 Drunken spiders have brilliant ideas about how to walk. They combine writing and walking; they write as they walk or they walk as they write. Some would call it drawing, others dance, and some would consider the movements trivial and inconsequential. However, I suggest that drunken spiders are the best examples of practitioners of non-discipline, or what the academics would call transdisciplinary practitioners. They could also be considered artists, whose practice is addressed by artistic researchers as the art of living. There might be serious critique about the drunken spiders as their method might suggest frequent alcohol consumption as a tool for going places in their practice; obviously, this might conclude with a bad habit. But one should remember that vast, in-depth investigations and days of scientific studies in laboratories have proven that there is no alcohol in ink. Scientists have also proven that there are no other addictive substances in ink as such that might plausibly lead to a bad habit. Yet the question has remained unresolved. What is it that inebriates the spiders? Or in other words: why on earth do they step into the ink jar – is it by accident, or is there some purpose behind it?
 
The humanist scientists, who believe in the unique intelligence of human beings, insist on the accidental nature of this event. They believe that when the spiders happen to fall into a jar of ink, the fuzz on their bodies absorbs ink, and as a result they become heavier. As their body structure is built to bear only the normal weight of an average spider’s body, their legs receive a shock from the sudden burden when they absorb ink. This is basically why they can’t walk as nimbly and lightly as before. “Spiders have no intelligence”, the scientists insist on stating, and continue: “they would not be able to understand what would happen to them if they stepped into the ink jar. So their drunken-like movements are the result of an accident and a simple fact of not being able to cope with this sudden burden”.[1]
 
Beside this very logicaland scientific argument, there is another line of reasoning that might help us understand such an event in a better way. Most spiders like ink, and this has been proven by the frequency with which spiders are found in inkwells. One reason for their interest is that they consider ink to be a material that can wear, something they can use to express themselves just by moving around and living their daily lives. Despite scientists’ belief that spiders have no intelligence, they distinguish the ink from similar liquids such as soya sauce, red vinegar and black oil. Their lust for ink arises from the fantasy of wearing it and playing with their liquid dress. This thrill gives them a sense of drunkenness.
 
The experiments with 250 spiders and two jars of soya sauce and ink showed that 248 of spiders chose ink over soya sauce. The two jars were of the same size and colour. Ironically, the only two spiders that chose the different jar were diagnosed with a very rare lung disorder.[2]Of the 248 who fell into the ink, only one never made its way out – the reasons for this are not yet clear. The other 247 spiders made (creative) works of various forms. In 4 cases, immediately upon stepping out of ink, they avoided walking on the experiment tableand cast their web onto the neighbouring wall and ascended from the table.What they left on the paper could be counted as minimal art, if one wishes to adhere to established art history terms. These 4 works consist of some dots spread over an area of no more than two centimetres. The other 243 spiders made various forms of writingthat are currently under study in various departments of the University, e.g. the Department of Literature, the Department of Dance and Choreography, the Department of Music, the Department of Fine Arts, and the Department of Architecture and Urban Planning.
 
After all, which of these two approaches would be more helpful for our understanding of the phenomenon of drunken spiders? Maybe looking into a spider’s eyeswould give us an answer.

---

[1]Emlightener, A. (2014). “The Illusion of Animal Intelligence”. Journal of Spiderology. 12 (23). pp. 233-245. p. 237
[2]These two cases were sent to the Centre for Curative Liquid for further investigation.

Punctuality

 

I have always been either too late or too early. On the 8^thof August 1998, I arrived too late. The house was burnt down and the firemen were taking the burnt bodies of my husband and my two daughters into a white car in black zipped bags. Neighbours were looking at me as if I was on time.

Two years later, I arrived too early at my boyfriend’s place. In a silver blue Fiat Uno, parked by the door, I saw a woman who had put her tongue inside my boyfriend’s mouth. I knocked on the window and she took her tongue out. 

  

 

29 Dec 2017