images from the dream of waking up from a dream’s 10 day production. 10 more to come in 2024. film provided by, dev & scan with Arthouse Film Lab, Los Angeles. Much love to Peter, EJ, Sid B, the souls that opened up in front of camera and peace to the gods & the earths.
/j
A working example of me making sense of home through images I took in Turkey against words of my grandmother and grandfather I never met, notes from a younger version of my mother I never met, and words from a version of myself that feels like we never met. A collusion of time in conversation with one another. It feels fitting since I’ll be journeying back to Germany, potentially for the last time with my parents living there to help them pack.
All the photos I took in Turkey were in my mother’s hometown of Lüleburgaz, damaged from a bellow light leak. I despised them because of the condition my brain created to think what is acceptable. I then thought: a camera will never lie about what’s going on in your heart. From that, I became very curious of them. Which started the early stages of a memory-induced tale. These words, an excerpt of a longer piece that will soon change, just as malleable as the memories we think we know.
the beginnings of the beginnings, pt. 1
/jm
the vividness of Your absence
permeates my consciousness.
light toys with these senses, again;
so as part of the desperate longing,
i ask for a sign, something real.
You choose to gift me nothing,
which is all i need to remember:
bodies burns like ticking clocks.
as a digression toward solace, i will tell the story (otherwise known as another glossy advertisement for my untranslatable grief), so for this unspecified, no doubt fleeting measurement of time, i can feel something again.
———
Your body was a prisoner
born of this material world.
t’was crafted with the same material as
all other things.
the stuff we call matter.
this body of Yours moved through spacetime
in only one direction, as the edict dictates.
You never understood why
and i never understood You.
Your mind was a prisoner of borrowed anatomy.
it often journeyed forwards, into the future, and backwards, into the past.
for fun, let us call that mind of Yours a time traveler
of a kind Your flesh wasn’t designed for.
those adventures granted freedoms and tortures
depending on the day.
You had explanations for everything. this is why… and this is because… every one of Your half-baked opinions, accompanied by that repetitive onomatopoeia: “mmmmm-hm!”
but how could You have been so fucking sure? why did You take everything so personally? were You a solipsist without the vocabulary to identify Yourself? who was it that taught You how to be the way You were?
i ask, as it all slowly gradates to memory once more.
———
despite the stories we told about each other,
our arguments were merely fear,
merely mechanisms of control,
merely vibrations leaving one hole, entering another,
merely hope for something better;
hydrogen bombs.
remember when the baby sister You never knew died? remember when Your mother died? remember when Your father died? remember when Your older brother died, the one that spent his entire life trying to stay in shape, running marathons? remember when most of Your friends died? remember when Your favorite doctor nick mucciardi died? remember when Your youngest son died? remember when Your only daughter, and my mother, died? remember when every person You’ve ever been met the same fate? oblivion.
You entered into the mutually assured destruction without consent.
any semblance of control You perceived
was fiction. You know that now,
but back then You didn’t.
so death’s privilege came at the cost
of You having had to live that life of Yours,
bestowed with so much wisdom and suffering.
how could a single body and mind
carry that water
from here,
all the way over there?
———
the last time i saw You
was inside of a glass house.
translucent,
transcending what i thought You were.
inside of a glass house,
i saw You sleeping,
naked and unadorned,
a dried-out moat around Your impenetrable castle of belief.
isn’t it all nonsense? i’ve never known life without You and yet we met for the first time on that day, the one right before Your vital organs stopped functioning.
on that day, i visited the hospital alone. You seemed glad to see me, as You usually did, but i felt nervous. i could feel gravity. i kept talking at You about who knows what because that month i developed a phobia of what would happen if, for once, i shut my fucking mouth.
on that day, Your body was still wrapped neck-to-toe in bandages, as it had been for weeks due to the rare-skin disease that they kept calling steven's-johnson syndrome, which developed as a reaction between the pneumonia antibiotics and the blood-thinner You resigned to take daily.
on that day, i asked what You were thinking. ‘nothing’
i asked what You were feeling. ‘i don’t know’
so we sat there, listening to the silence, as I held Your icy hand and grazed the top of Your head, as You had done for me so many times before at the foot of Your bed while the dreamcatcher i made for You at summer camp still dangled clumsily near Your window.
on that day, You looked at me as You never had before. Your gaze warned of a future where You disguise Yourself as the inseparable shadows and lights illuminating my reality, and You implied that, despite whatever i thought i had learned from the so many previous mournings in my life, i would be flooded with confusion and melancholy. then, much to my surprise, You finally revealed Yourself as Love incarnate as we said our wordless goodbye.
what a strange, strange time that turned out to be,
the end, and it was just beginning.
———
i wish i could scream in Your face, unfairly, then tell you i’m sorry and kiss you on the forehead. i wish You could ask me questions i’ve already answered dozens of times before. i wish You could touch me with your thin, purpled skin. i wish i could say thank You for keeping me alive and trusting that if You watered me and trimmed off my rotten roots, i had a chance to grow into something whole and beautiful.
when i was a boy,
You told me we knew each other in a past life,
that we lived together somewhere up north,
in the unimaginable cold.
i told You that i didn’t remember.
as Your death crept closer,
You confided, over and over, that
You were terrified to be reborn.
You didn’t want to have to do this all over again.
and i had the audacity to tell You
i didn’t think that’s how it worked.
i’ve finally paused the ceaseless bullshit
because i’m ready to admit that
i’ve been nothing but a court jester playing God
and You were right all along.
———
now,
parched, i take a sip of water.
i see through the most convincing
mirage i will ever know:
Your words, and opinions, and beliefs,
Your clothes, and career, and books,
Your house, and body, and mind:
all just temporary hallucinations.
dreams to wake up from.
now,
Your spirit is eternally free.
Mother, Father, Infinity, Creation, Nature, Universe,
all concepts pointing to the same emptiness.
You are neither You,
nor margaret, peg, ms. bordman, mrs. vendituoli,
nor mama, grandmother, gram, ginga,
nor wife, woman, human, life itself…
now,
You are simply everything beyond everything.
and I am your cosmic residue.
[ph]
