Three Prose Poems by Robert Fuller

Art, Restructured

A new setting: the intellect, encountered in a deep dive, flirting; conceivable as native art, the artist’s first-ever exhibition in a railway station in Paris, as if on a cartoon-bright hilltop museum set, perversely proportioned by the vibrant visual culture of only one name—nudes of the human form. This was made without the path-breaking arcs of an arguably black-and-white wild-looking figure in the pose of a carnival, with a tiny head having a child, as if a herd or so of famous capybaras morphed into dwarfed sensations of stylized geometries resting on a monstrously swollen invisible kitsch situated against horizontal bands of flower and chimerical sun, brazenly subject to the open-ended blue modernism of São Paulo, as an homage to the main event, that of a lemon-yellow thinker marrying a doctor in a weird stripped-down coffeegreen boat.

But, in her late twenties, after her first red-orange-yellow marriage inspired a poet to write a conventional stock market manifesto, she was known to have synthesized some tubular, process-revealing drawings of forty-three iconic brown boulders monumentalized full-time above the eye-opening subversive cross-legged stadium art co-curated by studios in Rio de Janeiro, with her first-ever tropical sunset group, a catalogue of Eurocentric blue sky passion paintings, all intentionally introducing a projected greener picture of landscape cacti into the idea of folkloric ephemera. To close out the sun, after her decisive second death. Neither would have been significant; her cousin could be Afro-Brazilian. And a woman with more, until her most important stint: she became the daughter of her husband, Europe and Brazil, when she enrolled in Paris’s earliest crash course in Brazilian biographical painting. Look at her photo. Show the joy that is portrayed by the artists on view.

Wait: who helped shape-shift those fortunes of her volumetric home life? The painter who in recent months galvanized green ground for what it is, corrective to (and which includes) an art history that has key chapters that aren’t in his manifesto: the difference between spindly arm and sand-in-yourtoes foot. A disk that, in its day, splits the seated saguaro landscape. Installations: the body’s favela, written sublimely in ink for decades; a country that seemed—that still feels—outside, reversed, unravelled, a radical inventing, destined for privilege; a painting that now hangs, a gift graced by pattern, between influences; a bather and a hanging and art; work out on a plantation; death lived.

Perspective, Reimagined

Framed. A chimney in the vast. You wonder; the wind wanders. Winter filled with establishing motifs, hearing the whistle of misery. Music nobody’s chosen to play. Good enough: a non-narrative mind; a few lines of Frost; an old tango by Schubert; patches of music violate humanity, dissolved into the fundamental nothing, as if snow and wind; in the same bare rooms, more often than not gray, computer-animated photographs fading to black. Ravens perched on snow-thatched roofs. Hunters following their sunken tracks. Little houses in the snow. Implied but unseen movie stars: empty space where you chuckle, you think, you brood.

Fixed. An illusion outside the frame; the fictitious evidence of time; the person’s dream falling asleep. Lushly sentimental; everything was dying. Yet could the kiss happen? Too contemplative for one another. This great moment, frozen music; silence glimpsed as freeze-frame world; trees shaking: a human presence; a beach scene with birds; the episodes inside a house; cows looking for the listener; a figure sleeps, seen dozing. How much emotion of human desire, of the natural world? A full-screen smoke plume. A fresh flurry of stillness in the frigid valley below; a bird swooping from fire to a time that’s frozen.

“Life.” He had created his death. Overcast sky near the inn, snow accompanied by crackling and cawing, bare branches above. Nothing is not there: dog trots out, snow lets up; still photographs of cinematic meditation. The movieness of the animated herd, pitiless in their simplicity; a moment later, two horses. Grainy and pixelated, fast asleep. A mind of snow and wind, absurdities and impediments, the body interested in watching, projected onto a computer monitor: the essence of his great fictions. A seagull scares it away. A bird, all the world, a burrow; in the snow, another bird, quizzical and droll.

Fragments. The default term for anything. One must have winter pinetrees not to think of any. And here is the film: three men trudge toward dogs, fences, run through the scenes, though only off-screen; you behold that nothing is that: women singing music, crossed, with the sound of their guns. Process, mood, the considered work; just a single moment, dissolved, like that of an ongoing world, underscored by a blizzard; occasional unpopulated landscapes of windows. At other times, you’re pouring into a landscape, from outside. A clearing in a forest used to stand for something: moments in a mottled painting.

Fade. You contemplate their labors left, a posthumous poem, commercially viable. Skeptics died, might stretch time, to regard the dropping away. Time has stopped, you feel: To show people kissing.

Film. From behind, dogs and birds might be the photographs themselves; in some of the frames, transient cattle show up frequently; in others, let’s just say, crows sound, given how instrumental they are. The painting returns to you; the artist makes all the difference; in his nature photographs, obscured, the landscape is uninhabited.

Words. We’re in a grand lie. You film, keep thinking, at night: the apparent motion, the setting a room, looking at a deserted beach—separated from the tenuous connection. Sometimes you feel a push-and-pull—and animals in the room. Someone now has invisible evidence, with a few notable exceptions. But in whose history? Let‘s start with the testament, capturing life’s last digital animator: Wind begins to rise, returning time, the sound of snow; the picture’s snow drifts down, just to nose around the center of a real dog? Movie time had figured out the episodes are only music. Whether sound effects can be arbitrarily decided, I wouldn’t argue. A puppy runs up, yapping. And just as improbably, all the while prowling, a cat, quasi-documentary, snatches the essence of filmmaking.

Magical. No characters except human beings; birds and animals; a moviegoer who refused to alienate anybody. The movie’s scene continues. A cold reproduction of films like boughs crusted with ice: One final second of nothing himself, next to the person this figure had been watching, who gradually jerks into motion.

Hunters. Crows, images in the snow, keeping you aware of the puppy, the departure of someone who represents him: The actor and actress slowly kiss at the end of life; winter walks through fictions, full of the same blows that land into the wind, that translate into the painting, animations deep under the skies.

The Inexplicable Symphony

How can you explain what cannot be explained? Even if you did manage an explanation, there would be no possibility that anyone else, even yourself, would be able to understand it.

Human beings are ensnared in a barbed web of words, pictures, sounds, tastes, smells, touches, fleeting slices of experience, mind-forms, fears, hopes, dreams. They are trying to peck their way, as chicks of a sort, through a shell that has no exit. The spider in that egg that has ensnared them so fully is the black widow of language, of sound tokens so venomous that they can’t be spoken. That same machine, of cosmos, the black hen that would birth them, would spin all their fables, and has already woven their strands and filaments of mind into a puzzle that can’t ever be solved, is also the one that has made the shell impenetrable. Even though it seems as though anything is possible, upon closest examination it is tacitly obvious that absolutely everything is impossible. All trajectories end. And they end before you know it. Even before then.

Everything else in the interim is a timeless clock, which can’t be wound. Located within a kind of space which can’t be found.

Any speck of time within the timeless clock, or hourglass, that you so furtively and precariously hold, and attempt to shield, within the confines of the latticework, the windings and meanderings, of your impenetrable shell, your chick of egg, the web filament of your own peculiar life and mind, is ultimately denied you, has already passed away, before you even notice it.

Have you grasped that there is nothing that you can hold onto, in the desert sands of this, your hourglass of life, so casually trickling to a vanish.

Each instant, each grain of moment that seeps through you leaves its imprint, which may or may not register within what you refer to as your memory. The nature of these imprints is that, as with anything else occurring within this conditional space-time realm, they tend to alter, and fade, and decay, like fallen leaves, over the days, months, decades, such that eventually they completely decompose into the topsoil of what you imagine to be your subconscious or unconscious self, your most, even utmost, fertile hallucination.

Everything is a simultaneous snapshot of remembering and forgetting.

What you call your thoughts are pre-woven arachnoid artifacts of tongue, sticky with archaic meanings, spinning, that span centuries, and which tend to be useful only for catching or ensnaring your various airborne insects of dubious mind-effort. Truly none of them are original, or genetic, but only briefly borrowed from other times and places, most of those being rather distant from your sparse hourglass of lifetime.

None of these utterances mean what you say they mean.

At some unspecified time, at some particular undisclosed location, there was, and still is, a shattered glass of your web of signifiers, such that all such memes were, and still are, effectively fractalized. Pulverized, beyond recognition. Nothing means what it used to. Nothing ever meant what it did.

There are now too many flavors of how to say what has to be, somehow, said. Nobody even knows what has to be, or was ever, said. Meanwhile, no one knew what it was that the others were even saying. Their tongues were different. So foreign that no translation of any such mind-effort was possible. There was no way to say what it was that they were trying to say, in whatever way such an attempt was, or would ever be, made.

Thus, an impasse came about, effectively.

That was before a family of quail, mom, dad, and four youngsters, took over some aspect of the space-time component of the backyard. They moved in initially, to my delight, as if they owned the place. And they probably did.

Their preferred refuge, whenever I moved too quickly through their territory, was directly underneath the wild blackberry chaos of thorned vines, creepers, and assorted vegetation that was undertaking to take over as much of the backyard as I, in my laziness, would allow it to do.

Strutting or scurrying about, dark feather-tuft at their crowns bobbing and wobbling about, deigning occasionally to syrinx out their soft pure fluted feather tufts of tone, they must marvel, if it even concerns them at all, at the deep violet-red human experiment that has gone so awry, so profoundly umbral in these shadow times. If it were their concern (and probably it is not), in their carefree delight (which I can only hope to unveil and embrace, as my now and forever state), how would that cloud their song?

The sweetest, most succulent wild blackberries are attached to the sharpest thorns.

I sit in my word basket and pretend to pick some.

The strutting, bobbling spheres of feathers continue their feeding frenzy, with purl and coo, croon and peep, and I silently wonder how long it will take before they capture me entirely.

Warm sun bakes plump berry cobbler right on the vine, beckoning me to empty my word basket, and simply taste.

The unwritten words, the ones I have dumped out, forlorn, roll out on the ground, where very quickly they are eaten by the warbling wobbles of bird.

Eventually my ears open fully to hear and understand. But I can only manage to paraphrase the underlying communication.

Death, they say, and killing, is endemic to all of conditional existence. What is the life of one being is sought as food by another. One being’s conscious enjoyment is suddenly devoured and ended in the culinary delight and sustenance of some other.

We are free of that, and simply strut about, they sing. You in your knot of fear, the darkness between your knit brows fully worded with your presumptive purl of cleverness, are deeply veiled in the moan of your selftorment, having tasted the shadow venom of your own homespun word pastries.

If it concerns us, why is that?

We, shell-born, have hatched. You, in your endless mind labyrinth, have not. You persist in your unearthly subterranean wanderings, perpetually bewildered, yet with a self-congratulatory pomp.

You extract and rearrange elements in your lab of experiment, which is just a schoolboy’s chemistry kit full to bursting. You take only, and take more, and more, until terra tires of you, and finally spits you out.

You are the neediest of all earth-dwellers. You need and need and need, more and more, and yet at every turn you deny your dependency on kith and kin, earth, sun, and moon. Hardly any of you could survive for long in the wild without the enormous support structures you have devised, deviously, over the centuries. Essentially, almost all of you, with very few exceptions, depend on the efforts of many others like you in order to survive, yet some of your monarchs of commerce act as if they themselves did all the work. And they freely take for themselves, everything, what is not rightfully theirs.

We, all of us other non-human creatures, live every day with the tacit knowledge of how to fend for ourselves. We do so, unlike you, without casting the terrible shadow of, what for you, are your arrogance and destructive tendencies, which will inevitably and unfortunately end up descending upon most of the other life forms here in this world.

You have no humility; your wings are clipped.

We, for our part, in our language of pure tones, have no way to say “exploit,” or “hate.” By us, this is not seen as a lack. There is nothing of value missing in our culture because we have no such concepts.

When, in some particular culture, there is no referent for a thing, idea, or concept, when there is nothing within that realm that corresponds to the would-be referent, then there is no real way to signify that referent linguistically. We do not exploit; we have no way to hate. We have no means of intoning those messages; for us they do not exist.

The lives you live are exceedingly complicated, overly filled with unnecessary dross. It is possible to live rich lives, as we do, and yet simply. We luxuriously preen our feathers, cluck and bobble about, live freely off the excess of our rooted friends, peck the manna that has been dropped for us. Occasionally we brave the thorns for the sweet, plump seeds of our wild berry, right off the vine. We teach our young what is proper and delicious to eat. When the time has come, we scamper and flit away toward our next escapade. Sometimes you don’t notice.

Our language, tied as it is to our own peculiar breed of experience, has tokens that have no equivalent in your tired, prosaic larynx. You might figure out some of the percepts and concepts that we dwell by if your pharynx weren’t so bloated with your own swell of self, of delusional sugar-coated memes. You’d have to be attentive to understand.

Open up, swallow it all down the long gullet, crap it all out, and then listen, observe, and attune yourself to what and how we are. You will then find the words that are missing from your language. Paradoxically this is a way to unclip your wings.

Now that we have left your eyeports, you wonder where it is we have gone to. But it is not we that have gone; it is you. You are no longer here.

Truffes, par Robert Fuller

Au matin, le soleil poussiéreux de l'hiver, des sols noirs les plus fins, avait disparu des jeunes chênes pleins d'espoir à la périphérie de plusieurs marchés ruraux de forêts sauvages ; les chiens de chasse s'élançaient tranquillement vers les colonnes d'obscurité dans des trous peu profonds, leur creusement imprudent entamant la carrière. Les fermiers cherchaient de la nourriture et s'inquiétaient de la nécessité et de l'importance des bijoux volés disparus dans les chênaies de l'hiver noir où les rues étroites allaient nourrir le passage d'un hiver incohérent au clair de lune doré.

Il chasse et traîne à travers les guerres mondiales matérialisant le tournant du XXe siècle, revenant à l'incertitude du voyage : routes de campagne, terre brûlée, sols crayeux, dans des taches d'obscurité, de rose enfouie.

Jours verts et blancs de soleil crépusculaire, d'éclat de lune au loin, ciel spectaculaire envahi de chênes jaunes en lisière, chiens creusant avec la légèreté des renards de campagne pour les voleurs, cicatrices du matin passé, dans une tombe éphémère, isolée, de secrets, de magie, de religion, de danger. Le mystère peut inspirer la fouille des vignobles de tel ballet, question de solennité, de conviction passagère, de marches à travers les chênes endormis, d'errance nocturne.

Les subtilités de la pègre, de l'ombre, les interrogations des voleurs : ce genre de récit policier reflète notre sensibilité aveugle, un goût de secret, une arnaque épique, une histoire vendue, un fantasme plus sombre.

24 février 2024 [22:01-23:55]

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NOTE : Ce texte a été publié à l'origine dans la section "Flash Fiction".