Desire garden, garden of pain
slowly to open up doors in that long corridor
dark and humid this season
solemn hours
and always with the old loves tender in the heart
the never lost shining silently
homages, many homages
named and unnamed
the whole of the earth is the promised garden
even for us, and nothing less, and how
if not to possess but jewel like glow
in this small intimate garden-hand
secret and decisive
Speak, ancient elegiac land in all your vast blood
and miniscule houses quietly suffering their dailyness
an epic hunger masking all forms
this adult skyward growth
this sodden subaltern garden even
as grass grows dazzling chrome green
colour excessive and cruel
blazes a hole through the sky
festive and brief
joyously brilliant minutes
fragile minutes, incandescent as hearts
violently phosphorous
all love all obsession
as revealed as image
filling the heart of that big monkey
now, in a garden
garden of big speech
language garden of wood and clay
sweet work and its sweet pain and terrors
from the pit of the flaneur-eye
cunning philosopher, lover, wanderer
thousands of miles of road and sea
on the transparent qualities of light and heat
mother, science
you are a fine one to dust away
this ancient melancholia
disease of our creatures
in the twilight of the marginalised villages
when night is about to descend
sit firm and good like our moo-moo kitty
burn steadily even as the sad yellow naked bulb
give us your worked dogged sweat and laze
bless us with books and with dreams
not without the old vanishing divine taste of jackfruit pickle
fill with these other strange unknown gardens
provinces constantly invaded defended
to intangle centuries, faces, pictures
and through your luminous golden yellow desire
vindicate the longings
of the dark dead souls
Your tragic passion for this very garden
dear boy haunts
its largeness is not mine
only its damp smell, beautiful
swelling to near madness
I know, while you
Eaten by want and much needed peace
And the daily insults, gifts of the poor
Sunk into a sad greed speeding for redress.
Orphans we are
and with the same creed
standing in this garden now in silent speech
much is lost and much inherited
among these our many brothers
and teachers, and here
the good the brave and the sad can still laugh
and walk, always walk
with steps that sound with a quiet dignity
October 1991
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A few notes
At the junctions and crossings, in our town and cities, wherever two, three or four roads meet there arises a still moment and its zone. A very restless zone, a marvellous zone, so sharp in its counterpoint to the ceaseless movement on the road, and this is the potential site for the new sculptures we want to make. This is a site waiting to be overwhelmed, to become luminous. From here sculptures will sit and call up the itinerant gaze of longing, already sown and prepared in pain and undiminished wonder, travelling opaque, resigned, tired, silent, on the roads. In the moment of sculpture, a moment will become free as moment of enrapture, of joy, of recognition. Sculpture can create the encounter to light up the eye. It can sit patiently and become heavier with the weight of disparate desires, wishes, curses, correspondences.
29.5.92
Exaggeration, flourish, a certain kitsch extravagance within language, any language, is something specific to the ‘sense’ of living in an underdeveloped society under strain. It comes from dark continents of pain, and is more than an anti-alienation technique, on which the human substance feeds and yields to dreams. In it life is closely interlocked with death. One sees this everywhere, human passions which briefly alter the scale of things, animate the inanimate, create giants and dwarfs, to pose an alternative to eurocentric views. The pain of subaltern perceptions and tragedies can free and deepen the humanist tradition. How well the writers in Latin America understand this!
15.12.91
From the pit of a single wounded eye well up feelings like the waves of the sea, and subjects as vast and as hungry as this pain that seeps in through the hands, a sculptors hands, and in which the wounds of many of a land can be bathed. Only connect, and remember the voices in the night, and the feet covered with dust, sharpened to a shrill pitch. Thieves in the night terrorising sleep, with dreams of tears, sitting, walking, sleeping tears.
18.9.92