Time
Where synthesis is bland, one can always hijack it. No one ever really knows what time it is – that’s because no one belongs to it. Time. It is a rope, something that leads us…to the sand. I see a lemon, or another fruit that yearns to be buried. But then maybe, just maybe, that piece of fruit that one considers is actually an ox – or something immaterial – a piece of lightning. What do you look at each day that disappears, along with/beside the light. It can’t be the eye of god – that is something that can be tasted. My eyeball beside a portrait of my eyeball that I myself have rendered.
If time were as blank as space and could be written on, and in a way, it can. Boredom is not-writing on time, but a breath, a way of appearing dissolute, ahead of the forecast – and obsolete at once. The blab of solidarity is backwards. A leaf falling on me, and the summer of not falling in love for once. You can be cracked open, but never written upon – not really. What gives us hope is the impossibility of ever living (completely) in dream. The denial, by powers we can hardly understand, let alone access, of ever seeing ourselves separate, from a distance – at the remove that necessitates true self-understanding.
Being at a remove today. That is what “woken up” means.
Birds, the sea, and silence. All natural things that experience the same dull ache from time to time. Writing the object is the same as reading it; no difference whatsoever. But then time becomes a metal object itself, a sort of divining rod that one could plug into and empty all their dreams out bladder-like. Am I saintly enough to be seeing you now. How much time do we have left really. That is what I really want to know.
Travis Jeppesen’s novels include The Suiciders, Wolf at the Door, and Victims. He is the recipient of a 2013 Arts Writers Grant from Creative Capital/the Warhol Foundation. 16 Sculptures, his foray into object-oriented writing, was published in book format by Publication Studio, featured in the Whitney Biennial as an audio installation, and was the subject of a solo exhibition at Wilkinson Gallery in London in the summer of 2014.
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