IF DAFFODIL WAS AN EGG
Galerie Nicolas Robert, Toronto
Will our record misrecognize us too? I try to picture the numb strata of dust. Here and there, beds of disordered depositions, decorated with queer hominin shapes.
What could it possibly make of us? Iridescent unconformities, forever holding and eroding, always making room for more ruptures. Our petrified shells never ceased to make room.
I picture our strange bodies, floating in fields of t4t lamentations, now homes to countless critters, those who made it through ages and those who couldn't.
Will our record remember the wake that came after the last attempt, the second birth, amorphous at first, before extraneous lines appeared on our chest, to trace a love only we could love?
Is it funny to imagine us fossilized, but safe? Us that were never down to earth, us who knew nothing of stasis, now preserved, but freely trans-ing
in and with the troubled under.
What I know for certain is that, at last, our reshaped contours will be welcome, kissed by some geologic future, kept whole between fields of vision, yet diffracted into a thousand planes of immanence.
May our legacy be just this, a checklist for the half-resolved, adorned by all of Gaya's unknowable truths. I feel for you, sad loves, as I, too, often find myself catatonically morphing on the cold floor, waiting for my body to be submerged, below their gardens of curative commons.
I paint: "Let me dry out with you,
let me mineralize with you", plagued by fantasies of queer descents, unbound in edaphon escapism, again cripping dreams of biotic normalcy.
I may never know how to fully picture the stone imprints of our struggles, but I smile at the thought of millions of us, shimmering under the spell of ciliates, still beautifully not passing, but forever comforted by the cosmic haptics of transness.
•
The portrait is a myth, a false reflection. What if Daffodil was an egg?
I think of Echo, frustrated by her disability, staring at the blurred figure who, cursed by Nemesis, couldn't recognize themself, now carrying an eternity of dysphoric refractions.
She thinks: "When the rays sweat a softer kind of anger, I try to see you at your best. You, always scanning minor magics' leftovers, between flowering machines, sheen with friendly rhymes protected from within. There there, another blink, another green alibi, oppressed by twitchy eyelids. How can I touch you, offbeat, scratching at wordy membranes? "
Her aural effect bounces again and again between their skin and the leaves, then between the rocks and the dream.
Who's there?
(Who's there?)
In Echo's gaze, the figure's rebirth unfolds in a leaky silence. She notices but cannot reach, the ectopic extrusion molded in flat affects. So she dissolves in vain while the petric figure grows numb and the pool dries.
Farewell.
(Farewell.)
