A Soft Spot
(after Heidi Bucher, partly; pantoum-inspired, from afar)[1]
| 1. | |
| Brush latex | 2. |
| on the walls of your abandoned family home, thin layers of it, |
With familiar abandon, layer again this latex of yours. |
| an emulsion of all things, proteins and starches and sugars and oils and resins, and more, ‘usually exuded after tissue injury’[2] |
Secure the stability of the coagulating milk with the thinnest cloth, ensure every particularity of surface is tended to. |
| in order to trap the stories the place once held. |
Articulate with care the difference between trapped and held stories, |
| so that there is a bonded structure to hold on to, once dry, as you pull it away from the wooden walls. |
| 3. | |
| Milk any stability you can secure. | 4. |
| I imagine tiny splinters stuck in the latex, each indent remembered, each texture preserved. |
Imagine holding onto a splintered structure, stuck. |
| A wooden pull brings you something like a bond: |
While you listen to songs of whales long dead, |
| purge thin veneer strips, all veins on display. | a display of purging, no veneer: |
| rip! |
Figure 1: Heidi Bucher, Untitled, Wall with Window, Ahnenhaus Obermühle, Winterthur (detail), 1980 – 1981, textile, paper, latex and mother of pearl color, 250 × 380 cm. From Heidi Bucher, Mendes Wood DM, Brussels. Photo author’s own (2022).
| 5. | |
| Eventually, dead whales stopped listening.
|
6. |
| The day you learnt the name of what your immune system was doing to your brain and spine, you went to the supermarket, and bought a packet of bad kitchen roll, a brick of gazpacho, and four oranges – three naked, and one wrapped in paper. |
The day you learnt the name hiding in your immune system, your brain was wrapped in tissue paper. |
| All rest, in pieces. | Paper comes from pulping trees. The bark has to be stripped. Logs are chipped. Lignin is broken down. The resulting pulp is meshed, screened, dried, pumped, stretched, squirted, moved, spread, squeezed, heated, coated, cut, wrapped.[3] |
| The sight of the four oranges broke me a little. You had been craving them, you said, and the doctor asked you to eat plenty of fresh produce. But you only bought four, as if your craving was very little, as if four oranges would fix you. |
I produced a fresh craving to fix you, asked you – |
| why the wrapped one? |
| 7. | |
| My voice tried to screen a pulped feeling. |
8. |
| You explained you had liked the tissue, even if you could tell by touch that they were a bit mushier, a bit bruised, |
The touched one turned out bruised. |
| if wrapped. | I got a vision of care as a pliable surface, a shelter. |
| But you still got yourself one, a soft spot, tickled. |
You got yourself a soft spot, |
| held like a red summer burst, barely, not really, bright – a second of bloom allowed. |
| 9. | |
| I started to weave a plea for sheltering,
|
10. |
| for something holy.
|
Some holey thing, |
| I could barely hold your brightness, that summer. |
in a limbic room, waiting for a mark on a spectrum of disease, not healthy, not sick, foreign both here and there. |
| In a saint’s life ‘the end reiterates the beginning. . . Saints are individuals who lose nothing of what was initially given to them.’[4] |
Reiterate your given sainthood, lose nothing. |
| The English word care comes from Old Saxon and High German sorrow, a lament, in turn, a cry.[5] |
| 11. | |
| We waited for limbo to be no longer there, made room for health |
12. |
| in a magnetic field of etymological wailing. |
The magnified logic of walls, again. |
| You never cried, not once. | You glowed all the way through, like a worm or an old lightbulb or nuclear waste. |
| Care and careen are not related, other than by a sudden immersion in their gusts. |
You joked with gusto about future needs. |
| ‘Peel the skin off everything? she asked. Yes, from everything.’[6] |
| 13. | |
| The way this became a wormhole, the warning glow of it. |
14. |
| It was plenty, this mess of margins. | There was such thing as plentiful marginality. |
| Skin peeled off. | When your future self broke into many, all unpredictable, we were busy fixing up a neglected apartment in what used to be a garage. |
| We laughed and it was genuine and I still cannot explain how. |
We still laughed, explaining how we were going to tackle it all. |
| ‘The laughter came from an inside, with a commitment to share the problems of a community.’[7] |
| 15. | |
| By fixing up I mean busying up crews of men to do the actual work, while we poured over excel sheets to see if in the future we were going to be broke. |
16. |
| The first step was a thorough demolition, rubble and noise and purposeful destruction. |
Some stuff self-destructs as if to serve an illustrative purpose, a first step towards declaring that modernity was this, rubble and noise. |
| Whether this interior was laughing at us or with us, we shared the commitment to care for it, come into this community fully. |
intimacy became the confidence to invoke future ramps, and imagine all of us there while you wheeled yourself around a place originally meant for cars. |
| Closest friends, on hearing the news, would know you well enough to jest about serendipitous timing and the opportunity to design for accessibility from scratch. |
Your friends knew enough to keep close and accessible. |
| ‘An excess of layering might be the weak spot’.[8] |
Figure 2: Heidi Bucher, Closet (detail), 1979, textile (gauze), latex, bamboo and mother of pearl, 192 x 255 cm (approx.). From Heidi Bucher, Mendes Wood DM, Brussels. Photo author’s own (2022).
| 17. | |
| Invoke intimacy by ramping up the future, imagine it all, a wheel of fortune in a spinning frenzy. |
18. |
| After all, artists who work with latex care more about the sensuous than the permanent. |
Artists who work with latex sense that there is more than permanence. |
| Mighty but weak layers, a spot of excess. | Apparently, ‘extensive research has been carried out into the . . . ethical options for conserving these often seriously compromised sculptures.’[9] |
| Consequently, museum conservators worry about repairing something intended for decay, about whether it is ethical to change an artwork’s natural inclination towards mild disaster. |
These works conserve a worry about metamorphosis, about distinctly changing the surface of one’s physical being, maybe in hope of changing, too, the mild disaster of one’s essence. |
| Latex, like memory, is organic: it looks like skin, it flakes like skin, it tans like skin, it cracks like skin. Its fight against time is futile. |
| 19. | |
| As compromised as they may be, it feels like these structures are still capable of carrying much serious meaning. |
20. |
| You could say that, for the artist, softness is a form of freedom; an alternative to the prevalent rigidity, made by herself and taken by herself, violently. |
Softness forms freedom, but it takes an alternative violence to do so. Not that you’d ever say that. |
| She skins memory as if it was a fight, | Meanwhile, we can reject that ‘had the care been good enough (from the artist, the curator, the museum, the university teacher, etc.), we would not have been exposed to the bad thing and would not now be suffering.’[10] |
| the white laundry of snake shedding. | A snake biting its own laundered tail after shedding, tissue too tender to slither on dirt. |
| Hear the warning against a reductive definition of care, proposing instead that it is ‘a negotiation of needs that involves assuming strength in the other.’[11] |
| 21. | |
| For now, you were not suffering, and that was good enough, given that you are not an artist, nor a teacher. |
22. |
| Skinning is never a gentle matter.
|
Skin is never a gentle matter. |
| You warned me your strength was non- negotiable, you did not want to be reduced to an other that needed involved care. |
We discuss the love with which we have not had children, the choice to spare them the burning world and our respective bodily faults. |
| ‘Our relatings have consequences.[12] | ‘Not only do relations involve care, care is itself relational,’ and one must be consequent.[13] |
| After the diagnosis I wondered, selfishly, if I’d regret not having a distant future where a grown-up son’s shoulders might look just like yours. |
| 23. | |
| We discuss the choice of love, how to indulge our respective burning bodies and their faults. |
24. |
| You said it was good, the impossibility of leaving me alone with babies. I asked you if you were planning to die soon. You didn’t. It was just that imaginary children do not grow up. |
You said it was all good. You wanted to be left alone. You did not want to imagine not having a plan for growing up. |
| The diagnosis was only threatening in such a distant future, that I hoped I’d have time to grow wonderfully unselfish shoulders, |
‘The alternative between care and wound, as well as that between love and violence, is . . . a predisposition to respond.’[14] |
| make ‘with’ a practice. | So, we widened our practice, |
| leant on the conjugation of being. |
| 25. | |
| There was never an alternative to the wound, |
26. |
| its faithfulness full of skin. | We had skin in this faith. |
| Being as conjugal as a leaning, | ‘Peeling off the skin is detachment from the past, . . . I am freed from the sins that surrounded me.’[15] |
| we drafted a ‘geometry of responsibility.’[16] |
We were a draft, responding to the geometry of the events. |
| We kickstarted the early days of all this, entered their tunnel with a prayer. |
| 27. | |
| Feeling skin freed us from the sin of detachment. |
28. |
| What I wanted for you was precisely a metamorphosis. A chance to moult. For you to emerge soft and big and bare and raw and whole. |
At the moment of bare, raw emergence, the brand-new ‘room skins are transparent, soft, and light.’[17]Then, eventually, they morph. |
| Oh please, started the prayer, let all days be like this from here on. Let all days be the early type. |
They tapped your spine in a room I later asked you to describe for me. |
| You were calm even in those videos where your brain appeared slice by slice. |
You were calm even as its appearance seared in your brain, |
| the fluorescent light above the bed where they ordered you to rest. |
| 29. | |
| They tapped you, like a rubber tree. | 30. |
| But what really struck you was the liquid they obtained. You asked them to show it to you. It was just like water, you said, |
You asked them to show it to you, this thing that struck you liquid. |
| not even fluorescent. | And then, a possible evaluation: not quite a best-case scenario, but contained, manageable. |
| They watched you and watched you and watched you. |
I watched you and watched you and watched you. |
| A forecast of mildness, a release of controlled normalcy. |
| 31. | |
| In this impossible scenario, you were the best. |
32. |
| Wear the latex skins on your shoulders like a lion pelt. Parade them down the corridors, a procession without lights. Unroll it down a balcony, make them a flag to celebrate the triumph of the passing of time. |
Wear your own skin at the procession, light up with triumph. Celebrate having time to pass. Drag along, the world proudly on your shoulders. |
| Some release, the normal control granted by mild things. |
The artist mixed in mother of pearl particles, hinting at a higher calling for all this violence. |
| We took the provisional gift with both hands, not daring to breathe. Caring turned into a performance of stillness. |
Take the gift now, however this thing dares to perform. Take the gift, and take its guilty provision. Remember to breathe. |
| Iridescent nacre meant as defence for the softer, fleshier tissues. |
| 33. | |
| Call your mother: only some violence mixed in these particles. |
|
| After exuding the tissue injury, | |
| soft, iridescent. | |
| Brush the latex on. |
Figure 3: Heidi Bucher, Closet (detail), 1979, textile (gauze), latex, bamboo and mother of pearl, 192 x 255 cm (approx.). From Heidi Bucher, Mendes Wood DM, Brussels. Photo author’s own (2022).