Battlegrounds at borders, clashing signs, // have me wondering this morning, are we artworks or alive? And the conflicts between us, what they say. That living (bodies) fight as bodies, over territory and resource, and cannot overlap. While artworks are hypothesis, from their inception, and somewhat placeless. So artworks violate embodied borders. Like airborne virus, impossible to contain.
Community of action, community of speech. The latter demands unison, sameness, in what is said. While the former works from difference. Different parts do different things, for the sake of accomplishing some one thing, impossible alone. One cooks, one cleans, one repairs the house, one goes to market. One economizes, one prioritizes. Actions for the sake of all, though each might have something (very) different to say.
Is it person? Or is it hypothesis? Here, behind these signs. Hypothesis is lawless. Bodies have no immunity against it. (Contrary to the myth of liberal arts, this was the function of education. Not “freedom”. But immunity, protection, fortification, against this.) That there could have been a body, a citizen, a living human being, subject to certain laws and customs. But poetry renounced that limit. Escaped sidedness. So poets make (if at all) mediocre (at best) neighbors. And,
A life of beauty is (almost always) a life of crime.