Jonni Subtlety Nuance Pepper-GoLions

Agnes said that painting is not about ideas or personal emotion, that the object is freedom. The 6 thicker lines seem to dominate, but it's the 12 thin lines between them that I can't stop looking at, because of their silence, their near disappearance. Yesterday, when I looked out the front window, I thought I saw a thick rope at the end of the driveway. When I looked again later, it was gone. Once something is written, it disappears. Before anything is written, it is completely possible. Once the line is drawn, the light narrows to a pinhole. What is art but trying to make something resemble what it was before it was made, when it was still unknown and free? The desire to draw a line is to ask a rhetorical question. All future lines are an attempt to answer that question. This year, I scribbled things down that I could read, that made sense to me, but no one else could understand. I wrote for an entire year and when I looked up, the ocean was dry, some men were signing more treaties, and the moon had been sold at auction.

I counted 44 lines and while I counted, 44 Asian women were touched. People confused the 44 Asian women with each other. How did Agnes know this is the color of desire? To be an Asian woman is to be seen as night. To be able to hear a child growing but being unable to help myself. To be able to have ideas but being unable to lift them over the wall on my own. It's August finally and no one knows that August isn't really a month. It is one long day. Some people assume Asian women are made of flowers, but some of us are made up of lines. It's hard to say when these lines were no longer just themselves. The minute Agnes put the brush to the canvas, they became indescribable. The sayable, by nature, is an elegy. The unsayable, outside of time. What we say, here, now, is only the part of flesh that is known.

Grieving starts long before we're born. Which is why we're born with 35 buds of sadness. The buds begin to fade at our birth. I only have three buds left because I sold most of my grief already. I have been holding my breath for years and when I finally breathe out, there are people at my door waiting to collect my breathing in jars to sell. When I tell them I don't want to sell what's left, they bring jars of moonlight for my poems for $12 each. I buy one because the people look like Girl Scouts and are pulling a wagon. When they turn, I can see that they have tails. When I put the moon in a poem, it quivers like a strobe light nearly out of batteries. Once a dying woman said goodbye on Twitter right before she died. Sometimes I go onto the accounts of dead people and read their final posts. I listen to music while scrolling. The people singing in my ears are also dead. It is getting harder to be born and to vanish at once. Isn't this what we all wanted anyway?

This year I turned my back to the world. I let language face

the front. The parting felt like a death. The first person ran away like a horse. When the first person left, there was no

second or third person as I had originally thought. All that remained was repetition. And blue things. This year I stopped shaking the rain off of umbrellas and nothing bad happened.

The terror of this year was emptiness. But I learned that it's

possible for a sentence to have no words. That the meaning of a word can exist without the word. That life can still occur

without a mind. That emptiness still swarms without the world. That it can be disconnected from the wall and still

light up. The best thing about emptiness is if you close your eyes in a field, you'll open your eyes in a field.

Jia Zhangke / Zhao Tao tribute AMV

Song is Husbands by Geese

Footage from Mountains May Depart

Unknown Pleasures

Caught By The Tides

The World

Ash Is Purest White