After the End of the End of the World
In 2020 Rachel Epp Buller and I conducted a year-long collaborative project. Each month we plucked passages from whatever books we were reading and sent those words to each other, incorporating them into our own individual projects. These works were later exhibited in a two-person show curated by Rachel at the Regier Art Gallery at Bethel College. You can see the full results of this collaboration and read about the show here. (At the end of this article there’s a listing of the different authors whose words we reappropriated.)Among my contributions to this project were a series of small “chapbooks” of poetry using vintage make-up cases and an old scrapbook, sometimes referred to at the time as a “gluebook”. Four of these “books” are below.
“Top Ten Beauty Secrets”
your hands will grasp the nearest things
you are sort of floating up
murmur to any real angel
to sing its thin and pungent song
you'll create an emptiness
that none can own
this is part of your ghost
your steps an unknown language
those voices outside yourself
disrupting all your procedures
your left hand trembles a little these days
grief will never be finished with you
you will walk through puddles of ink
you will disappear for seven years
you are but a momentary blip
with a taste for wayward hobbies
you do not require an audience
you are fossilized in amber
you'll have been gone a long time
you won't live long enough to forget
“The Ephemeral Materiality of the In-Between”
veils of negative existence
will kill you in your dreams
this strange malaise
a moment of no turning back
the bird's erotic life
flames that catch and grow
roads washed out of existence
graveyards of the ancient kind
we're heading toward the storm
to bite some people that we know
another earth shatters
good-bye to the owl
something marvelous happening underground
made by badgers
a slush of vague intention
as inhuman as the human itself
a beauty of startling queerness
woven into spider webs
every cell bone and organ
the faint blind stirrings
our ghostly company
cares nothing for the fashions
every bird fish and mammal
erodes to stardust
the darkness takes us
dislodging the eggs
“Six Duets”
wallpaper
goblins
*
fungi
liberation
*
luxurious
rabbits
*
mercurial
stardust
*
ridiculous
murderer
*
ephemeral
wolves
“A Bee-Morality!
Chapter 1
And so here's what happened.
We listened carefully with all our bodies.
Our steps an unknown language.
There were voices outside, waiting to be heard.
We became more and more removed from that awful journey.
Ours an emptiness which none could own.
We engaged the dead.
We were sort of floating up, as if lifted by waves.
We murmured to any real angel.
The blur was over.
The moment of no turning back.
Time rustled like tissue paper.
Chapter 2
Great trees were uprooted, houses blown to fragments.
Roads washed out of existence.
We went to sleep unawares.
Inside a fairy-ring!
Everything with a beauty of startling queerness.
Our shadows were not of this time.
A world forgotten, that never knew magnetism.
Life continued, but time had somehow stopped.
It sure didn't feel like the future.
A vast empty space through which we wandered without agenda.
Evoking a deep source of wakefulness.
The nineteenth-century part of us!
Chapter 3
Those were worrying times.
We were heading toward the storm.
Committing ourselves to the same struggles.
Every cell and bone alive and listening.
We became curious about the notion of movement.
The exchange between listening and receiving and expressing and responding.
We discovered that the underworld spirits are plural!
It turned out none of us had experienced death.
So we said good-bye to the owls.
The creatures that lived where my mother had gone.
Oh, whoever awaits our news at the edge of time will get an earful!
One day, perhaps, we will learn to control our appetites.
Chapter 4
But then we saw evidence of creatures taking refuge in the soil!
Mason bees, wasps, rabbits.
They loved the way we listened as though our lives depended on it.
They spoke to one another of the land and its secrets.
Until something implausible swept in.
The words of the wordless.
The rootless, the lost alliance.
An incantation, a virtual leap.
Drowsy passengers at the start of a new voyage.
An inverted map of its world.
A particular dreamtime.
A bee-morality!
Chapter 5
It's true that they will come and kill us in our dreams.
We will certainly be afraid for a moment.
But we will pierce through the veils of negative existence.
Dislodging the eggs.
And everything that appears will appear to be.
All that the universe holds of us.
We will rethink what we think.
Choose the rock or the hard place.
Distinguish between the red and the black.
Descend into the chthonic.
Absorb every single sentence uttered.
Our sleeves wet with tears.
Chapter 6
We will come upon a fine old forest.
Lanes of wild crocuses, irises, evening primrose.
The sunlight struggling to break through.
And us, popping up like a bad penny.
A turmoil in the "divine nature."
We'll hear the subways rumbling beneath our feet.
Explore networks of burrows through the gorsy undergrowth.
Discover the best places to find good honey.
Tell me, what is there to know about being dead?
Never walking alone or unarmed for fear of wolves or bears?
That seems to be the way of things.
The darkness takes us whenever it likes.
Chapter 7
Behold the common ancestors of every bird, fish, and mammal.
Attempting to rearrange themselves into something new.
The imagination of things in their correlate formlessness.
Slipping in and out of this world.
Barely more than a single century of human existence.
Seems ridiculous to suppose the dead miss anything.
(The answer to the question is "no time at all.")
Understand this is not about austerity!
Or looking into the womb!
We have at least two strands of fiction.
We have ears sending and receiving signals.
Believe it or not most of us remain.
Chapter 8
Let’s end with the beginning of the world, shall we?