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Collaborations The Book of Sand Text for Exhibition Catalog "Sand: Memory, Meaning and Metaphor" The Parrish Art Museum Southampton, New York 2008 See large image |
THE BOOK OF SAND
(for Nelly)
Turn everything into glowing gold, molten, fiery furnace, words harden like steel,
tempered in sand
There is no sand in Red Desert, only Monica Vitti’s extraordinary nose cleaving the screen, walking among gray buildings in a green coat, her small son beside her in a bright red suit.
&
We used to carry our daughter down to the beach in a zinc washtub. The granules of sand glistened like diamonds on her arms, dissolved in the seawater where she sat and played all day, tiny salty princess.
The sun rolled across the sky and a few pounds of sand got transported on the feet and backs and golden bodies of the children carried home at sunset...
Their tracks and foot prints soon to be erased, before morning if the wind blows, by noon tomorrow certainly, when a new tribe of worshippers arrive. The changing light transforms the beach at summer’s end. End of something, end of summer, the girl is beautifully tanned, a tiny brown goddess, but she has grown older, something irreplaceable has been erased. Next summer will only be similar, never the same.
&
this photograph from the beach, my hair in a Japanese topknot for no good reason except to amuse the child whose feet are coated in fine sand. She was baptized here with la belle Isabel, rolled in the sandy wave on a fine Fellini morning by a Bishop from South Jersey. He came over the dune like a vision of Rome and blessed the shiny creatures.
&
&
The sudden brutish arrival of a tsunami changes your perspective on the beauty of the beach. The water suddenly rushes out to sea, leaving acres of fish flapping on the sandy bottom, then the tide roars back in and destroys everything and everyone.
A visible change was observed in the
intertidal area of the beach; instead of the
usual gentle slope, the intertidal area was
much flatter on 27 December 2004
a day after the tsunami, there
was a distinct decrease (744 +- 14/10 cm2)
in the density of meiofauna.
Beach Blanket Bingo 1925
On the rocky beach at Cadaques, Salvador Dali, avid for dollars already, was trying to collaborate on a film with Luis Buñuel. They had gotten the money from the Comte de Noailles, and now they had to write the movie.
L’Age d’Or, the Golden Age. Golden years. Then, Eluard arrives with Gala, his wife, and their infant daughter.
Gala was provocative. Dali, the sexless beast, fell in love with the convexities of her back and legs and bottom. Luis Buñuel hated her on sight. He also had a peculiar aversion to women with a space at the top of their thighs, the gap that some men love. Bunuel, deeply warped by a strict Jesuit upbringing and in some sexual confusion over the softskinned Dali, saw that Gala possessed this strange vacuity. The sight of it ignited his Catholic rage. He leapt on Gala and tried to strangle her on the spot. Dali did not intervene. Luckily the Jesuit regained his senses before harm was done. Gala ditched Eluard and her daughter and moved in with Dali, who painted her rear for the next forty years. . .
&
Picasso loved the beach, but he could never stop working, even while reclining under that massive umbrella at Juan-les-Pins in 1930. He turned little framed canvases on their backs and collaged them for his young companion’s entertainment; a tiny glove filled with sand, fragments of beach flora, cardboard, the detritus of Juan-les-Pins, though there probably wasn’t much trash on the beach in 1930. Just beautiful children. "Since her first summer with Picasso in 1928, Marie-Thérèse had developed from an adolescent playing ball with her playmates into a languorous sun worshipper in thrall to her sun god of a lover" –Richardson.
Buñuel prefigures Marie- Thérèse in his invocation of longing for another pubescent beauty, named Ramunete.
“Concave diurnal splendor. Pure curve that leads to all beaches. Upon your forehead Ramunete, an annelid of light, and beneath your bare feet a navy blue sculpts friezes without knowing it. An assembly of waves dashes onto the gold of the sand, discophorous, the fine undulations; platyhelminthic, the green seaweed. As evening comes without shadows or sounds the sea foam keeps a white rhythm.” –1926
Duet (Nancy & Lee)
“Young woman share your fire with me
My heart is cold, my soul is free
I am a stranger in your land
A wandering man, call me sand
Nancy:
At night when stars light up the sky
Oh sir I dream my fire is high
Oh taste these lips sir if you can
Wandering man, I call thee sand
Lee:
She whispered sand
Nancy:
(Whispers) Sand
Lee:
Young woman shared her fire with me
Now warms herself with memory
I was a stranger in her land
A wandering man, she called me sand”
In Camus's book The Stranger (1941) the character Meursault (wine the color of golden sand) randomly kills an Arab on an Algerian beach. 25 years after that book was written we slept on beaches in Algeria. The locals we met along the coast road from Algiers to Oran were very friendly to Christian strangers. At Mostagenem they fed us fresh fish daily, grilled on the sand . . .
A tame sand fox lived with the fishermen, at night it howled in the dunes. . . or maybe that was a coyote. We smoked and the night looked like a Douanier Rousseau painting, there was a full moon, and wasn’t that a pride of lions, cresting the dune? No wonder I couldn’t sleep.
&
The poet Frank O’Hara, walking carefree as a Shangri-La on the sand on Fire Island, where no traffic is allowed, was hit by a beach taxi and subsequently died, July 1966. “Grace to be born and live as variously as possible.”
The Horror of Party Beach
Two Mile Hollow. Sand and boys and boys in the sand. A summer rodeo of sunwarmed bodies. Billy cuts the beauties from the herd and makes them immortal with pencil and brush. The warmth of Christian’s skin. Grace to be born and live.
&
Einstein was never on the beach
&
How many grains of sand in each red fire bucket in the hallway of every school in England?
The English seaside, worn-out donkeys walking in circles on the sand, dreaming of the darkness of the coalface.
At Skegness, the tide went far out, and the cocklers walked out on the hard flat sand, distant crouching figures looking for the tiny airholes that revealed their prey.
Oystercatchers and terns skipping like dancers along the wave’s edge.
The difference in texture of the sand at Bridlington, England, and Santa Monica, California. David Hockney moved back to the coast of Yorkshire after 40 years of golden California …now the morning light arrives from France.
&
Woman in the Dunes.
Sand and sweat. In every crevice, in every frame of the film.
Sand everywhere, “bronze colored like a grain of rice.”
After their Sisyphean labor, she soaps him up and washes him down like a swimmer.
Close-up of her toes digging into the sand when they make love.
The nightmarish instability of the house built on sand, its occupants constantly on the verge of being buried alive.
Suffocation. He falls into quicksand and is rescued by his captors to be entombed again in sand.
“Are you shoveling sand to live, or do you live to shovel sand?”
&
From Here to Eternity
Burt Lancaster’s shoulders make Deborah Kerr want to eat the beach. (Eat it down to the bone).
&
Who invented the egg timer? How many grains to boil an egg?
Try to count them but you can’t.
The outdoor shower was invented by a man who loved beaches.
“Japanese Style Zen Garden with Rocks, Sand, Wooden Tray, Tools and Meditation Booklet.”
&
Mountains, eroded away by wind and water.
Mountains and mountains, grinding slowly down in the endless rocking of time.
“The sands are numb'red that make up my life”
Purple the color of sand at twilight, the golden hour, T.E. Lawrence riding out of the haze like an avenging desert god.
&
‘Water will wear away a stone’ it said in Latin on the subway wall, there was no sand visible but we were surrounded by it, packed behind the cylindrical iron walls. Sandhogs had dug it out, tunneled through rock and schist, pummeled it into sand.
&
Sand when heated by high explosive ordnance, turns into glass.
The day’s light falls across the ridges of the dune.
&
Melvie walked down onto the beach, grains adhering to her manicured feet, a turban wrapped around her naked head. The chemo had stolen her beautiful curls, yet she retained her essential elegance, never a flicker of self pity in those blue eyes, blue as the ocean that lapped against the sandy shore where she walked, footprints erased now like names are finally erased by weather even from a gravestone, this sea air burns everything out, grinds it down like sand grinds bone to bleachy smoothness.
Melvie departed, left her beautiful boys to mourn her in the world. Her image coming up through sand, developing on the beach like a photo from the emulsion of the tide moving the pebbles and the microscopic grains. Shape shifter dear sister, hand raised in that gentle wave as you walked off the beach at twilight, summer ending behind your brave silhouette.
&
Nevada salt flats, silky hard pack sand, perfect surface for jet thrust engines, test pilots streaking across the desert floor at light speed, UFOs landing in the dark.
White Sands, Roswell, Bikini Atoll.
&
Sand consists of things that have already existed as objects; teeth, rock, stones, shells that harbored juicy sea creatures, plucked from their hulls with needles and pointed sticks and eaten on beaches as the sun went down.
&
In the Empty Quarter, “dunes of all sizes, unsymmetrical in relation to one another, but with the exquisite roundness of a girl’s breasts, rise tier upon tier like a mighty mountain system.”
Blood and sand, Bedouin wrapped in skyblue robes, sifting the grains, reading destiny in the sand. If you come along on the wrong day, or if the camel milk curdles, they might just cut out your tongue and sew bells on your ragged clothes, let you wander among the dunes, until the next caravan comes by. Or was that just a story translated from the Moghrebi by a gullible Americano?
&
the topographical glories of Baghdad, its olive groves, and libraries, pomegranates embroidered on the priest’s robes signifying eternal life…..Blood and oil and sand. The Bush/Cheney years, the reek of them fills the nostrils, even on this glorious open stretch of sandy beach.
&
Sand painting heals the sick and helps banish negative spirits. But don’t let the image sit or bad luck might invade the sacred space. Use your bare foot to rub out the symbols you drew. Let the waves lap up your scrawled words, erasing them with a raspy, pebble-filled tongue, lolling along the beach, licking at the edge of everything.
&
September 2001, a green meteor flew over Gibson Beach in broad daylight. Things were about to come crashing down. Anita went under and Pascale saved her, James got caught in a noose, sea poose... "It was a violent time. Wheels, racks and fires/ in every writer's mouth, and not mere rant." 110 stories of offices and equipment and the humans that used them, incinerated into ash fine as sand.
&
Seven years later the wind spins the little flurries, the dog won’t walk on the beach because the sand devils sting his hide, he heads for the road, footprints disappearing in the sharp crossfire of the breeze.
Evening light beating the sand into gold. When night falls someone lights the bonfire with a town hall permit soaked in kerosene.
Fire, air, water, all the elements close about us. You breathe in, you breathe out.
I will miss this sandy reach, this beach . . . miss the twilight pouring along the length of it, solitary figures disappearing into the dark.
Up above the world, the beach gods dance on a carpet of stars.
Max Blagg, 2008.
(for Nelly)
Turn everything into glowing gold, molten, fiery furnace, words harden like steel,
tempered in sand
There is no sand in Red Desert, only Monica Vitti’s extraordinary nose cleaving the screen, walking among gray buildings in a green coat, her small son beside her in a bright red suit.
&
We used to carry our daughter down to the beach in a zinc washtub. The granules of sand glistened like diamonds on her arms, dissolved in the seawater where she sat and played all day, tiny salty princess.
The sun rolled across the sky and a few pounds of sand got transported on the feet and backs and golden bodies of the children carried home at sunset...
Their tracks and foot prints soon to be erased, before morning if the wind blows, by noon tomorrow certainly, when a new tribe of worshippers arrive. The changing light transforms the beach at summer’s end. End of something, end of summer, the girl is beautifully tanned, a tiny brown goddess, but she has grown older, something irreplaceable has been erased. Next summer will only be similar, never the same.
&
this photograph from the beach, my hair in a Japanese topknot for no good reason except to amuse the child whose feet are coated in fine sand. She was baptized here with la belle Isabel, rolled in the sandy wave on a fine Fellini morning by a Bishop from South Jersey. He came over the dune like a vision of Rome and blessed the shiny creatures.
&
Endless motion of sea on sand, delicate convolutions, like hair in water, down by the seashore.
&
The line where the water meets the sand. An endless running curve that encircles the world.
&
The sudden brutish arrival of a tsunami changes your perspective on the beauty of the beach. The water suddenly rushes out to sea, leaving acres of fish flapping on the sandy bottom, then the tide roars back in and destroys everything and everyone.
A visible change was observed in the
intertidal area of the beach; instead of the
usual gentle slope, the intertidal area was
much flatter on 27 December 2004
a day after the tsunami, there
was a distinct decrease (744 +- 14/10 cm2)
in the density of meiofauna.
Beach Blanket Bingo 1925
On the rocky beach at Cadaques, Salvador Dali, avid for dollars already, was trying to collaborate on a film with Luis Buñuel. They had gotten the money from the Comte de Noailles, and now they had to write the movie.
L’Age d’Or, the Golden Age. Golden years. Then, Eluard arrives with Gala, his wife, and their infant daughter.
Gala was provocative. Dali, the sexless beast, fell in love with the convexities of her back and legs and bottom. Luis Buñuel hated her on sight. He also had a peculiar aversion to women with a space at the top of their thighs, the gap that some men love. Bunuel, deeply warped by a strict Jesuit upbringing and in some sexual confusion over the softskinned Dali, saw that Gala possessed this strange vacuity. The sight of it ignited his Catholic rage. He leapt on Gala and tried to strangle her on the spot. Dali did not intervene. Luckily the Jesuit regained his senses before harm was done. Gala ditched Eluard and her daughter and moved in with Dali, who painted her rear for the next forty years. . .
&
Picasso loved the beach, but he could never stop working, even while reclining under that massive umbrella at Juan-les-Pins in 1930. He turned little framed canvases on their backs and collaged them for his young companion’s entertainment; a tiny glove filled with sand, fragments of beach flora, cardboard, the detritus of Juan-les-Pins, though there probably wasn’t much trash on the beach in 1930. Just beautiful children. "Since her first summer with Picasso in 1928, Marie-Thérèse had developed from an adolescent playing ball with her playmates into a languorous sun worshipper in thrall to her sun god of a lover" –Richardson.
Buñuel prefigures Marie- Thérèse in his invocation of longing for another pubescent beauty, named Ramunete.
“Concave diurnal splendor. Pure curve that leads to all beaches. Upon your forehead Ramunete, an annelid of light, and beneath your bare feet a navy blue sculpts friezes without knowing it. An assembly of waves dashes onto the gold of the sand, discophorous, the fine undulations; platyhelminthic, the green seaweed. As evening comes without shadows or sounds the sea foam keeps a white rhythm.” –1926
Duet (Nancy & Lee)
“Young woman share your fire with me
My heart is cold, my soul is free
I am a stranger in your land
A wandering man, call me sand
Nancy:
At night when stars light up the sky
Oh sir I dream my fire is high
Oh taste these lips sir if you can
Wandering man, I call thee sand
Lee:
She whispered sand
Nancy:
(Whispers) Sand
Lee:
Young woman shared her fire with me
Now warms herself with memory
I was a stranger in her land
A wandering man, she called me sand”
In Camus's book The Stranger (1941) the character Meursault (wine the color of golden sand) randomly kills an Arab on an Algerian beach. 25 years after that book was written we slept on beaches in Algeria. The locals we met along the coast road from Algiers to Oran were very friendly to Christian strangers. At Mostagenem they fed us fresh fish daily, grilled on the sand . . .
A tame sand fox lived with the fishermen, at night it howled in the dunes. . . or maybe that was a coyote. We smoked and the night looked like a Douanier Rousseau painting, there was a full moon, and wasn’t that a pride of lions, cresting the dune? No wonder I couldn’t sleep.
&
The poet Frank O’Hara, walking carefree as a Shangri-La on the sand on Fire Island, where no traffic is allowed, was hit by a beach taxi and subsequently died, July 1966. “Grace to be born and live as variously as possible.”
The Horror of Party Beach
Two Mile Hollow. Sand and boys and boys in the sand. A summer rodeo of sunwarmed bodies. Billy cuts the beauties from the herd and makes them immortal with pencil and brush. The warmth of Christian’s skin. Grace to be born and live.
&
Einstein was never on the beach
&
How many grains of sand in each red fire bucket in the hallway of every school in England?
The English seaside, worn-out donkeys walking in circles on the sand, dreaming of the darkness of the coalface.
At Skegness, the tide went far out, and the cocklers walked out on the hard flat sand, distant crouching figures looking for the tiny airholes that revealed their prey.
Oystercatchers and terns skipping like dancers along the wave’s edge.
The difference in texture of the sand at Bridlington, England, and Santa Monica, California. David Hockney moved back to the coast of Yorkshire after 40 years of golden California …now the morning light arrives from France.
&
Woman in the Dunes.
Sand and sweat. In every crevice, in every frame of the film.
Sand everywhere, “bronze colored like a grain of rice.”
After their Sisyphean labor, she soaps him up and washes him down like a swimmer.
Close-up of her toes digging into the sand when they make love.
The nightmarish instability of the house built on sand, its occupants constantly on the verge of being buried alive.
Suffocation. He falls into quicksand and is rescued by his captors to be entombed again in sand.
“Are you shoveling sand to live, or do you live to shovel sand?”
&
From Here to Eternity
Burt Lancaster’s shoulders make Deborah Kerr want to eat the beach. (Eat it down to the bone).
&
Who invented the egg timer? How many grains to boil an egg?
Try to count them but you can’t.
The outdoor shower was invented by a man who loved beaches.
“Japanese Style Zen Garden with Rocks, Sand, Wooden Tray, Tools and Meditation Booklet.”
&
Mountains, eroded away by wind and water.
Mountains and mountains, grinding slowly down in the endless rocking of time.
“The sands are numb'red that make up my life”
Purple the color of sand at twilight, the golden hour, T.E. Lawrence riding out of the haze like an avenging desert god.
&
‘Water will wear away a stone’ it said in Latin on the subway wall, there was no sand visible but we were surrounded by it, packed behind the cylindrical iron walls. Sandhogs had dug it out, tunneled through rock and schist, pummeled it into sand.
&
Sand when heated by high explosive ordnance, turns into glass.
The day’s light falls across the ridges of the dune.
&
Melvie walked down onto the beach, grains adhering to her manicured feet, a turban wrapped around her naked head. The chemo had stolen her beautiful curls, yet she retained her essential elegance, never a flicker of self pity in those blue eyes, blue as the ocean that lapped against the sandy shore where she walked, footprints erased now like names are finally erased by weather even from a gravestone, this sea air burns everything out, grinds it down like sand grinds bone to bleachy smoothness.
Melvie departed, left her beautiful boys to mourn her in the world. Her image coming up through sand, developing on the beach like a photo from the emulsion of the tide moving the pebbles and the microscopic grains. Shape shifter dear sister, hand raised in that gentle wave as you walked off the beach at twilight, summer ending behind your brave silhouette.
&
Nevada salt flats, silky hard pack sand, perfect surface for jet thrust engines, test pilots streaking across the desert floor at light speed, UFOs landing in the dark.
White Sands, Roswell, Bikini Atoll.
&
Sand consists of things that have already existed as objects; teeth, rock, stones, shells that harbored juicy sea creatures, plucked from their hulls with needles and pointed sticks and eaten on beaches as the sun went down.
&
In the Empty Quarter, “dunes of all sizes, unsymmetrical in relation to one another, but with the exquisite roundness of a girl’s breasts, rise tier upon tier like a mighty mountain system.”
Blood and sand, Bedouin wrapped in skyblue robes, sifting the grains, reading destiny in the sand. If you come along on the wrong day, or if the camel milk curdles, they might just cut out your tongue and sew bells on your ragged clothes, let you wander among the dunes, until the next caravan comes by. Or was that just a story translated from the Moghrebi by a gullible Americano?
&
the topographical glories of Baghdad, its olive groves, and libraries, pomegranates embroidered on the priest’s robes signifying eternal life…..Blood and oil and sand. The Bush/Cheney years, the reek of them fills the nostrils, even on this glorious open stretch of sandy beach.
&
Sand painting heals the sick and helps banish negative spirits. But don’t let the image sit or bad luck might invade the sacred space. Use your bare foot to rub out the symbols you drew. Let the waves lap up your scrawled words, erasing them with a raspy, pebble-filled tongue, lolling along the beach, licking at the edge of everything.
&
September 2001, a green meteor flew over Gibson Beach in broad daylight. Things were about to come crashing down. Anita went under and Pascale saved her, James got caught in a noose, sea poose... "It was a violent time. Wheels, racks and fires/ in every writer's mouth, and not mere rant." 110 stories of offices and equipment and the humans that used them, incinerated into ash fine as sand.
&
Seven years later the wind spins the little flurries, the dog won’t walk on the beach because the sand devils sting his hide, he heads for the road, footprints disappearing in the sharp crossfire of the breeze.
Evening light beating the sand into gold. When night falls someone lights the bonfire with a town hall permit soaked in kerosene.
Fire, air, water, all the elements close about us. You breathe in, you breathe out.
I will miss this sandy reach, this beach . . . miss the twilight pouring along the length of it, solitary figures disappearing into the dark.
Up above the world, the beach gods dance on a carpet of stars.
Max Blagg, 2008.