ALONG THE BRINY BEACH
2011
Along the briny beach a garden grows. With silver bells and cockleshells, cockles and mussels, alive, alive oh. A coral orchard puts forth raucous pink blossoms. A bouquet of sea anemones tosses in the shallows. A crop of cliffs hedges a sand-sown lawn mown twice daily by long green-thumbed waves rowing in rolling rows. The shifting terrain where land and water meet is always neither land nor water and is always both. The sea garden’s paths are fraught with comings and goings. Sea birds in ones and twos. Scissor-beak, Kingfisher, Parrot, and Scissor-tail. Changes in the Zoology. Causes of Extinction. From the ship the sea garden seems to glisten and drip with steam. Along a blue sea whose glitter is blurred by a creeping mist, the Walrus and the Carpenter are walking close at hand. A pleasant walk, a pleasant talk along the briny storied waiting in-between space. Wind blooms in the marram dunes. The tide far out, the ocean shrunken. On the bluff a shingled beach house sprouts, the colour of artichoke. On the horizon lines of tankers hang, like Chinese lanterns. Ocean currents collect crazy lawn ornaments. Shoes and shipwrecks, cabbages and kings. Water bottle caps and thick white snarls of string. At dawn an ancient tractor crawls along the briny beach, harvesting the tide’s leaves. The world’s plastic, the sea’s weeds.
http://luckysoap.com/alongthebrinybeach
FISHES & FLYING THINGS
1995
“If you loved me at all you would wear my feet like fish and go to the baths without me.” What on earth – or in water – does that sentence mean? That bit of nonsense made sense within the circular logic of a story I was toying with at the time. The time was 1995. Netscape 1.1 had just come out. I had just graduated from art school. I had amassed a vast collection of paper slippers collected from various vaguely medical waiting rooms. Flattened, these foot forms looked like fishes to me. I wanted to make a book of them. A book of waiting, longing, and frustrated desire. Despite their paper thinness, the slippers wouldn’t fit through the photocopier. I did not go to the baths without them; I did not know of any. Instead I applied for a thematic residency at The Banff Centre for the Arts, as it was known back then. The theme was Telling Stories, Telling Tales. The first story I wrote was a fictional artist statement. The first tale I told was that I was a writer. They let me in. And they let me use their computers. I’d never had a computer before. I tried to convince the computer to make me a book of waiting, longing, and frustrated desire. It willingly did so. But the problem with books is, when they get to the end they end. Circular logic never ends. A book was no way to tell this story. The guy in the studio next to mine was making a web site. He said: If you make this in HTML you can link the last page to the first page and the story can go round and round. That guy changed my life. That explains the Fishes part. The Flying Things came a few weeks later, a few weeks longer at the computer. My back hurt, my wrists hurt. In the morning my arms were sore, as though I had been trying to fly. I uploaded Fishes & Flying Things to the Internet direct from the command line of The Banff Centre server. When I got home from Telling Stories, Telling Tales, more than a few people told me these web-based works were elitist. No one had access to computers. And the Internet would never catch on. Well. Sixteen years later. I am delighted to see these Fishes & Flying Things whirring and flopping their way back on to The Banff Centre server.
http://luckysoap.com/butterflies/parasite.html
