a compendium of phenomena: minor works by Daniel Southard

Often I am compelled by visions of life I do not understand, wondering about different levels of nurturing or abuse and why these life forms seem to attract this kind of treatment. Where one may see hierarchies of worthiness, I attempt to level the playing field through games of light and form. Welcome to the propaganda wing of the chordeiles party.

It’s often not easy to see when one thing ends and another begins, whether an apparent roadblock is just an exit, whether a path leads to a dead end...and all these road metaphors that suffuse the language make it apparent that we are at the end of another road. Still, I am not sure that I’ll ever know where I am until I’ve already been there for too long to understand the newness anew.

Corvid-19, Crowvid-19, 19 crows sowing death and life wherever they go.

If the premise of Kafka on the Shore is to be believed, the basis of a labyrinth is actually the intestinal contortions. The labyrinth outside and the labyrinth inside are inextricably tied together. Therefore any walk inward on the spiral of rocks, for example, has its analog inside the body: where these things are felt - in the gut, for example.

These photos seem to rely on the complexity of the accidental landscape, these pieces of gross functionality becoming swishes and swashes across the picture frame. Slow mundanity. I’m not even sure they matter to anyone but me. I write these things knowing that no one will ever read them. The few who actually see these, the even fewer who bothers to click through to these paragraphs- hastily written but often resonating after the fact.

An entrance, a portal, a void within a void within a void. Only ways in, no way out. A throbbing kernel in my gut, instinct: look for a place to hide. A tomahawk sailing on a trajectory, whistle-language communicating dark secrets. Unhouse  my writhing heart. 

The soil, in all its depth and texture, cradle of roots and symbionts, fills that vast bowl of a valley: paradise once, paradise lost, potential paradise, potential paradise lost. There are three possible outcomes: we figure it out, we fail, or we continue on that teetering edge of just barely enough to keep going another year. One is love, one is death, and the last is human.

Pools are abandoned for many reasons. Sometimes the price of maintenance is too high, the kids grow up and move away, or the house burns down: the stories spun out from that one mundane fact are almost enough to tell the story of water and why we are comforted having it so close at hand. Can we say it was because of the joy the thick green water brought, because the frogs were lonely in the dry summer woods, and the sweet sweet Yuba River was just down the hill?

Negation is the totem of the Anthropocene. Everything is in flames, anything capable of being removed, revised, excised, flattened, undone. In the pain of trying to remember everything that’s been lost, our collective amnesia begins to make more and more sense. Walking on that knife edge between caring and coping, sometimes it’s best to focus on not falling.

seeing you I feel seen

This writing will stand in for the right words, this writing will hold the place left vacant when you cut out my heart.

Exactly.

In the structure of a city nakedly devoted to commerce, imagination is often our only recourse. Migrants -- human, flora, fauna -- keep everything in capitalism running. But nature is ultimately untameable and reconstitutes herself in any pause, any interstice. Ecosystems are made and unmade previously unthinkable timeframes. All the deliberately fragmented components will eventually coalesce into a whole.

It’s not too extreme to say that words have left me completely. During this time of national silence, the words aren’t dancing around in my mind, screaming to get out. They have simply vanished. Merely describing that phenomenon in simple language was almost too much to bear, much less attempting to form a sentence consisting of language that one might call beautiful. It is with great sadness that I report that the progress I have made in expressing myself via the written word has been buried in one great, leaden regression. So, rather than try to express my love for a place called San Antonio, Bexar County, Texas and the disembodied M.C. Escher spur, let me give you this photograph.

Tiny tiny shelves of travertine: memories of wanderlust expressed, holding back memories into tiny trembling pools.

A six foot thick Eucalyptus in an otherwise scabrous suburban landscape must endure all manner of abuse. A signpost, a landmark, a structural element of such extremity is a magnet for casual crucifixions. The regard with which a people treat life that isn't obviously of utility is a marker of their own self-respect. Those that disdain a tree, their venerations ring hollow.