Mudlark

Written after mudlarking in a sandy crook of the Thames - this poem recounts the creation of the installation, that piece creating the performance, and me running around doing the bidding of both.

For Daisy Wang, curator, Subterranean Organ. April, 2023, London

It’s not how I pictured it, collecting bits of you.

…the morning stretching out endlessly,

Jeans rolled, cuffed at the calf, toes turning white in the prickly, broken-bottled sand, sun on my shoulders

Squatting down

The rough rolling away under the tips of my fingers

Revealing a small, white bowl on a broken stem

A piece of something, you see

I wanted to find pieces of me

And maybe pieces of you

I watch a lot of detective stories

I save my television up so that when my body dissolves around me

And I reconstitute in my confused and sweaty sheets

And there is no escape

And we’ve traveled beyond drugs, drawing, noticing, and breathing

To a place were the only escape is complete surrender to the balm of the puzzle

Something that can, and will be made clear: motive, means, opportunity.

I live on a diet of scandi noir true crime reenactment, supplemented with stapels of the diet: Killing Eve, Slow Horses, Mind Hunter, Happy Valley.

“Have you gone to see anything interesting,” people ask me through the zoom, mentioning names of galleries I’ll never remember, and names of artists and friends I love and long to see.

Yes. I have seen something interesting lately.  

I have seen all of Ozark in one week. I have seen the inside of my body light up like a reactor warning of imminent core melt down. I have seen through the thick glass of Instagram all that I want to rest my eyeballs on.

“What are you reading?” she asks me. In this particular pocket of the world, she is important, and so, therefore is my answer. She is someone who will care what I am reading, this may inform her decision to help me keep my studio open.

Well.

Sitting next to my bed is Passion by Annie Arneaux. And “The story of art without men” by Katy Hessell. Which I want and intend to read. I’m a fan. But this kind of reading requires a clarity of mind – a desire to stretch and grow. And while I want to be plastic and elastic and fantastic at all hours of the day, sometimes (here’s a little secret) I don’t have the capacity to grow.

In fact, in those moments, I am actively trying to collapse in on myself, to disappear into a world where complex problems have answers, eventually. Where there is someone out there who cares enough to sink their teeth in and really search. Bosch says “everyone counts or nobody does” but American television says all kinds of things that aren’t true. It warned us we might Make America Great Again and we were lucky enough to leave before that happened.

I heard they are still working on that, over there, in the land before time, in Gillead, in the schools where my children no longer have to practice Active Shooter Drills.

So what have I read?  Well, Killing Eve and the Handmaid’s Tale and the Vestments all of the Slow Horses novels because I’ve finished all of the Bosch novels. That’s what I’ve read.

And Love me Tender by Constance Debre, but that’s a secret, so I can’t write about it yet. I can’t write about the fact that I’m unsure if my desire to shave my head comes from a desire to finally reject the male gaze or if its just because my hair is heavy and sometimes, it makes my neck hurt or if its because I’m a they or a Kate because I’m tired of all that comes with being a woman. And I’m not really sure why I have all this hair in the first place. I don’t know what its function is. I’ve deployed it in several ways, but none of them seem fit for purpose.

It does keep the top of my head warm. 

So when it becomes clear that we will make a performance in this space, I decide it will be raw, like me. I ready, fire, aim. I say yes, and then I say, what are we doing? But its only me who can answer that, so on we go. Where can I find pieces of us?

In the Thames, that’s what my minor from Arizona State University in Forensic Anthropology tells me, and somewhere that actual, scientific knowledge has blended with scenes from Taboo and Carnival Row and Peaky Blinders, and so I check the tide tables. 4:20 is the low tide the day of the performance.

I am late, the water is coming back up. It won’t do to find store bought stones, not for me, not for you. I pretend I have the luxury of a black cab. I ask him to drive, quickly, toward the river and then along it toward the Millenium bridge, so I can see how high the water is. If the water is high, we will continue on to Euston. If I can see sand, he must take me to it.

He does this without question. Am I, indeed, inside one of my stories? The water is high, and then I see the corner where the sand has heaped: I know there’s a cachment of treasure there, I know pieces of me and you and her and all the lost and forgottens are there, churned and dumped.

We make a plan, my cabbie and me, and across the waterloo bridge he goes, turning in a hundred circles to get me back to the base of the steps at Southbank, the very steps I sprinted up an hour and a half ago on my way to find the cushions, the candles, the tealights.

The back of my mind says I could just grab a handful of pebbles at a garden center. But Richard Sera is pulling on me, and the heavy, smooth Basalt stones from the Roaring Fork River in the Colorado Rocky Mountains where I used to live demand to be respected. There’s no basalt in the Thames. The roaring fork holds raw ingredients, as old as the earth and maybe only touched by a few.

The stone and pipe and clay and brick body of the Thames is built of memories, lost, forgotten, put through the rinse cycle of time, beaten, reshaped, collected, rejected, lost, found, recycled, and dumped again into the uncaring wash of this ancient and unforgiving river as it rises and falls, carrying industry out to the world, insisting progress looks like technology, encrusting us in progress.

I make it, sweaty, to the Embankment pier on the Southbank side. And it’s padlocked. Fuck it. Over the fence I go, in one smooth and confident movement, as though I could call forth my body, sleek and fast and sure of five years ago to deploy in moments of need. I walk with what I hope is a mixture of suretiy, knowingness and hope that should I be questioned, my clumsy American accent will out me as a clueless tourist, though I know I’ve lived here long enough that this is becoming increasingly unlikely. Besides. It’s not like I didn’t notice the padlock.

There is a woman on the floating pier, dressed in black, watching me. I can hear the static on the radio. The only problem with being held up is that it would have, probably, some consequences on the performance.

But I know you are lying there, in the sand. I know I will find a bit of the dinner plate you ate off of, and maybe a bone or two, but surely some pieces of you, worn smooth, cut sharp, unsure, too full of darkness, to clear, to green, to bricklike.

I walk with speedy purpose under the pier to the concrete protuberance, the body connecting the ramp to the shore. Behind here, I know I will find what I’m looking for. When the water is high, as it rushes inland, all the silent treasures of the Thames, bottle caps and broken plates and Roman coins and lost iPhones, they all get caught in here, cycled recycled, trapped and shaped by the cage of their relentless and helpless position, until something changes.

Today, I am that change. I plunge my hands into the pile, I’ve hurried here to have twenty minutes of silence and careful noticing, switching gears from running errands to choosing that which might resonate for you who I have yet to meet in the time it took to leap the fence. I look at the guard in black. I hear her radio squawk. I don’t have time to take my shoes off and cut my feet on the mixed in broken beer bottles from this morning and those that haven’t quite turned to sea-glass yet.

But I do have time to search for you. To feel you, one by one, slide into the crook of my palm, to find the unique shape, to see your body, your fear, your desire, your ambition, to free you from the corner of daily tumult and transport you.

Jonathan said that all artists are liars

And that I am intensification machine

So I pour you into a hammered brass bowl and know that all I can do is hover in the potentiality. The sound of fingers sifting through the stones in the crypt is the same as the sound of my own fingers at the pier. But I see G. hesitate, her hand over a dark black stone. She chooses an amber-coloured one, a pretty stone. She says her impulse was to reach for the black one, but she skipped it because she feels she is not supposed to be full of darkness.

“Do you have darkness in you?” I ask

She looks at me, her eyes a pool of nothing but black, dialated open in the darkness of the silent and secret organ.

“Yes” she whispers.

“Then reach for what is truly you, all of you, darkness included.”

I don’t think we can see our power until we are willing to see all of ourselves.

There is darkness there

There is no should there

There is how it is, inescapably

And if we want it to be different, I think we need people to stop hurrying us down the corridor of healing, “This way to forgivness!”

Yes, it’s terribly important, I’m not arguing that with you. We need to get to forgiveness. But we don’t get there by skipping over what is.  

Time doesn’t work that way, and neither do I. And neither do you. G. Reaches back into the bowl. She takes her stone, black as the shadow I pulled it from, and holds it in her palm away from her body as though to bring it closer would mean absorbing it wholy into her self, or it absorbing her.

Neither happens. She curls her fingers around the stone, she looks at me. “I feel it” she whispers in the dark as the cello, warming up down the hall begins to search for its haunting voice.

“It’s you.” I say back. “Don’t let anyone take your darkenss from you.”

I want to say stand in the power of your fear, but I don’t know if she will know what I mean.

Stand.

In

The

Power

Of

Your

FEAR

STAND

In the POWER OF YOUR FEAR!

Stand in the power of your fear, and know you are complete.