To Be Unnamed

Lynn Kilpatrick and John Sproul

1. Heart Me You Bloody Bastard

You walk away. You walk away and the walking leads you in a circle that is language coming back to stare itself in the face. You are a child conceived on an improvised bed; you improvise something like a dance that reveals your spirit is an illegitimate line from head to toe. You cannot contain even yourself. Your heart contains something not real or genuine. Oh, to be you. That’s what you say. To be myself and to know myself as a mark that can be erased. Your soul moves outside your body in a smudge meant to convey meaning, passion, desire. When the turn comes, it surprises you. There are more than two of you, more than three. This sentence is not you, nor this word. Nor this.

2. To Be Unnamed

Nor this. To remain outside of language, like a shadow. When asked for the name of a number that didn’t exist, the mathematicians invented one. The way the artist creates features out of nothing. Even the words negative space. There’s no going back. That’s what I told you when you asked. And you asked me to name you, as if that would be enough. The other side is white too, gray. Which part of you is off-limits to me? Certainly not your eyes, though you cannot see me. I have drawn them closed. Not your lips. Nor your tongue.

3. One Two One Two

Nor your tongue. Made as it is of language and ink, you erase more than you say. You created me out of motion, and now what can I make of a rhythm of breathing, between language and dance? Is it a dream of one’s self? The way we compose ourselves each morning, from dreams and dirt. The remembered fragments of language and imagery, the blue knife of the sky, the blade of wind. How the petal of your fingertip unearths my hands and my feet, moving in a sideways pattern. I hear you now, shaking yourself free of sleep. Rhythm of dirt and language. You dream of movement and morning. I free you from darkness, the way I compose myself of language. Create you from the blade of my tongue. The way language rhythms you awake. I speak in a sideways pattern.

4. Hummma

I speak in a sideways pattern. I return to the not-returning. The way a storm moves away. The way a cloud is ubiquitous and invisible simultaneously. The way simultaneously wants to stay in your mouth. The word is the I of the mouth. An eye that repeats, endlessly is horizon and latitude. Is star. You can’t see me because you speak with your eyes closed. You draw me to you. Incantations of pencil and curve. Because of you there is movement in the sky. Return to this place. Where an eye is an ear is a mouth.

5. Something Something Blah

Where an eye is an ear is a mouth. Where the shape of you approximates intimacy, where you can blur this distinction. Where you cannot help but feel the way you disintegrate the minute we try to talk about it. Where where is when. Where you step forward to meet me in the absence of language. Where there is nothing but distance. Where the eye is a hook. The ear is an eye. You are the absence. The eye. The ear. Listen: silence moves in like snow. Where the silence has a form. The shape of a line.

6. The Woman That I Once Knew but Can’t Remember

The shape of a line. Let xy = the line. I can’t remember. x always equals the absence, loss, the woman I can’t remember except to know that I have forgotten her. Forget her. Forgetting is always a process, an equation, a system of substitution. Now this woman replaces that woman. x = y. You cannot remember the things you have forgotten, whole days erased like lines, like the mere accident of a pencil. As if she could be redrawn. As if she could become me. Forget me. Erase the whole cascade of days. Cards that could be redrawn, shuffled, lost.

7. Skinny Itch

Cards that could be redrawn, shuffled, lost. You are lost, the way a man gets lost in his own thoughts, gets lost and ends up at a bus station. Gets lost in the city in which he was born. I came to you like a shoe, asking. You wait, as if thinking conjures action. As if I could see your thoughts, dancing in the snow. You ponder the inevitability of closure, the other shoe. Dropping. Dropping, a body through space, gravity acting out its little drama. But who will be there to catch you? There is always distance and its embrace. Proximity and its expanse. Who will be there? To catch you.

8. The Man with Two Bellies

To catch you, I set out meat, fruit, knives. To catch you, I ensnare your hunger, which is amorphous and all-consuming. You eat with an insatiability that escapes you. You eat as if you were made of air. As if you were made of hunger. Tell me, what was the story about the man who lived in the belly of another man? What was the story of how he lived and worked and sang? I believe in the mind’s ability to unhouse itself, in the mind’s ability to create another mind to believe the story it tells. But I cannot believe this is you: two men who believe in nothing but the body. The body is a shell, the story goes. Another story goes: the body is the mind. Yet another: the mind is the body. But we know the truth. The body is just a costume for memories.

9. I’m Not Sure She

The body is just a costume for memories. Dancers know that, their legs rejecting the earth in favor of what comes after. Also musicians, trying to escape this now for the next, the next, the next, the next. Perhaps the body understands that, too, always trying to shake off stasis. The heart pumping blood as if it matters. I am leaving behind this theory of the body in favor of the mechanics of pronouns. You are the engine forcing speech forward, though it tries to retrieve memories better left unsaid. It unspeaks you, just as she masks an apparatus more sinister, more prone to cruelty and crime. Unsay me, just as she remakes I into a partner of he. There is more to it. The way when a language dies it is not only unbreathed, but unthought. She destroys me. A river erodes its bed. This is progress.

10. One Man Out

This is progress. Things move in the right direction. People begin to understand. One thing represents one other thing. Black equals one idea. White another. The line demonstrates the thingness of the universe. One thing can represent another thing. Not always the thing we seek to represent. What if the eye I speak does not blink? What if the ear does not receive? Will you know the hand with its four fingers? Say you will understand the symbol I set out for you. Say you will enter with me into the ratio of one to one.

11. Elminello

We enter the ratio of one to one. So what of this excess? Gestures will be set aside; repetition will circle around to become ingenuity. You say that you understand the language of invisibility, but I see you groping for a referent. What comes next. One letter comes after another, but you mistake arrangement for logic. If I give you this eye, will you not say it is a circle? If you are given myself, reduced to lines and intimations, will you recognize me for the word I am? Say you will. Say you understand what I mean even when I mean nothing. When I mean this white space is an equation you cannot solve. When I mean this labyrinth represents thoughts. Logic breaks down. Representation fails to demonstrate meaning.

12. Was There Tongue?

Representation fails to demonstrate meaning. When the palimpsest obscures the image beneath, invisibility becomes an idea. When we fall in love, we say we blur the line between me and you. We say that your mouth is my mouth, that we speak with the same tongue. Love palimpsests us all. I am just an image laid over the idea you had of me before we met. You are an afterimage, burned on my lips, of a love that preceded you. You never fail to erase yourself, replacing what was with what will be. You are an eye, blinking in the future. Silently, your mouth draws the line of my lips. The line stretches between silence and darkness. Forget me, you seem to say. Do not speak my name. The tongue wants what it wants.

13. Where Do I Go Hear?

The tongue wants what it wants. Tell me again what it wants. Words to be interchangeable. Mouths to be ears. I say, explain to me again the fine connections between the hand and the eye. Tell me how you perceive every word I think, how you see what I speak. Tell me again the word for luck. If the world is to be a realm of representation, tell me what I know a hand to be. Tell me that the apparatus by which I perceive the world is nothing more than a faulty mirror. Tell me. I want so much to hear your voice drawing the image of a man who could be more than he is. The man who could illustrate the world with one gesture. Can you hear yourself? This is the sound of one hand speaking.

14. Factors Irreducible to Their Sum

This is the sound of one hand speaking. Where an eye is an ear is a mouth. The shape of a line. Representation fails to demonstrate meaning. Cards that could be redrawn, shuffled, lost. This sentence is not you, nor this word. Nor your tongue. Nor this. The body is just a costume for memories. The tongue wants what it wants. I speak in a sideways pattern. To catch you. Say you will enter with me into the ratio of one to one. This is progress. You walk away.

Images by John Sproul

1. Heart Me You Bloody Bastard, 2010, graphite on paper, 60 x 120 inches.

2. To Be Unnamed, 2010, graphite on paper, 20 x 17 inches.

3. Skinn, 2011, graphite on paper, 23 x 20 inches.

4. Hummma, 2011, graphite on paper, 24 x 20 inches.

5. Something Something Blah, 2010, graphite on paper, 24 x 24 inches.

6. That Woman That I Once Knew but Can’t Remember, 2010, graphite on paper, 84 x 60 inches.

7. Skinny Itch, 2010, graphite on paper, 24 x 20 inches.

8. The Man with Two Bellies, 2010, graphite on paper, 18 x 14 inches.

9. I’m Not Sure She, 2010, graphite on paper, 24 x 18 inches.

10. One Man Out, 2010, graphite on paper, 54 x 48 inches.

11. Elminello, 2010, graphite on paper, 24 x 20 inches.

12. Was There Tongue?, 2010, graphite on paper, 13 x 9 inches.

13. Where Do I Go Hear?, 2010, graphite on paper, 13.5 x 9 inches.