i fly up , up , up

2023

digital video , analog theremin & voice , 01:00 minute

published by metatron press: https://metatron.press/glyphoria/the-spirit-is-a-bone/joseph-hinds-i-fly-up-up-up/

The Spirit is a Bone : A Diagramatic Curatorial Brochure

Curator Ali Pinkney

Riveted by bones: Hegelian bones. Here, twenty-one poetic voices are seventeen such femurs, coccyges, incudes, ulnas which allow for the spirit’s intelligibility via “hot glittering data” (Banzhaf). Each piece glistens with at least one moment of nineteenth-century German idealist Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s three-moment dialectical method. The (fluttering) precarity of definition; the (sore) inward turn of self-sublation—divisive through to the stretchy satisfaction of self-supersession; and determined negation (vanishing acts) wherein negation presences as content intermingled forth from its oppositional progenitors—hermaphroditic leopard slugs to their halogen violet rose—they slough off, as divided phoenixes with their other’s gametes newly enclosed—the lingering suspense of union remembered in singular forms, socially bent forth into the vast perpetuity of continuation. Spirit is slugs’ coitus rose; David Herbert Lawrence’s plasmatic, running flame ‘the perfect rose’ minimally sustained. Such is the ‘reserved power’ of Verdugo Lash’s speaker: a master-subject self-enslaves, baring bone as bated breath to presence spirit’s “feast.”

The maraschino stem I tongue-tied to stimulate interpretive poetic making a year ago derives from Hegel’s 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit §343. Hegel, orbiting questions regarding the new science of phrenology’s capacity to make the spirit tangible by palpating the topography of a skull, comes to assert: “the being of Spirit is a bone” (Miller/Pinkard). Hegel’s idealist Spirit (‘Geist’) is not a diaphanous entity acting on the astral plane, not a gossamer chattel of the metaphysical domain, but rather, a “self-conscious force of life” and “a fundamental relation among persons” (Pinkard). Such is the interpretive heart motorizing this issue. These bones are chain links of flickering translucence suspended from time (Hammond). Ah, evanescence. To see the bare presence of ‘essence’ despite the tripping clock’s eraser. The founder of Forensic Architecture, Eyal Weizman, riffs on Hegel to describe how the “forever elusive” nature of spirit necessitates that it must “be captured in the inertia of a rigid, dead, debased kind of object” (Broomberg). Enter the poem. Poem-song, poem-essay, poem-bronze. Poetry’s necromantic affiliations are weathered. Glyphöric ‘wither’d-leaves’ (Shelley) are magical urns from which the dead return with a breath. The momentary reification of spirit from bone is an emergent occurrence in declension like the definition of a form’s ‘being’ which provisionally depends on entertaining its oppositions. So, we cast a series of orphic bridges that go “forth and back” in the void’s unendurable calm (Dime). Death and literal death. A faded red baseball cap outside the Greyhound station. A Henry Kissinger whose mouth lags historical on the offbeat of the raw matter of pure poetry (Brunning). If Geist is the inter-nös—the space between—if inert bone is its messenger-container, we float in the shipping crate-cum-housing units of Frank and Hammoud’s T’karonto on tracks with unceasing stations. Cicada-husked civilization’s metastasis spreads through bubble-wrapped Amazonian mastectomies (‘slithering down torsos’ sploshing ‘foamywhite cornea’ [Colquhoun]); milk-laden (Black; Mohammadi).

I > II

Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Define day defines night defines day. Hydrogen + oxygen = wetness. Internal to external. Upon the first X-Ray, December 1895, Mrs. Roentgen, inventor wife, left hand, her wedding band, “partial epidermis” (Lee), said: “I have seen my death!” (Nitske). Pourtant, qui n’a serré dans ses bras un squellete?(Baudelaire). Deathlife visible. Water to wine to blood. Upside down/right-side up; identically doubled in sapphic cups (Clarahan). The initial is-ness of these poems is rarely stable. Speakers assume external eyes within hermetic systems; they are aerial pyro-bats who flap against the vaulted ceiling of a self-sealed mind until those alienating barriers melt towards metaphorical communion, and the fragrant condensation of spirit joins the plane of omniscience (Lafleur). Gypsum shards in the obliterative space of forgetting, yet “fucking daffodils” haunt the poetic anti-dwelling (Mohammadi); their seeds always invoking the “hinterland” (Frank and Hammoud), flowers that are “half-belonging to everywhere at once” (Lee). Split as a body-base “glued in concrete to the floor, the top of me replaced with rubber” (Fatima). Concretism met by mallet (Flemmer) cracks open the aperture of staged progression:

II > III

In the aperture, after the gates we dance at with Banzhaf, lies a flow-state of identifiers. Hologram rainbow. Between moments two and three, the multivalent aufhebengapes: to abolish, cancel, keep, lift, preserve, transcend, relever [Derrida], suspend, sublate. Unguent pistil oeuvre ouvrir. The third skyward “up” after descension and torn volcanic rock (Hinds). Liquidity of *gestures outward* the famous sea/C (Dime; Banzhaf); intermingling “wave and serf” (Frank and Hammoud) under the zenith of an emblematic kiss (Bradford; Woodhead), its synthesizing colour wheel beyond the glyph. Keats’ nightingale wine on the lips. Drenched red. Rose with two roots proprioceptively sensed as a balladeer submits to one determined river the threaded crow’s way (Forman) to the crow’s nest (Dime). Abyssal rest.

I present you with an excess borne of commingling nonentity. In the words of Hegel: “[J]ust as well as one can imagine the flying cow, that first was caressed by the crab, that was riding on the donkey, etc. etc.” (§335).