Misshapes

By Scott Hewicker

And from the bottom of the river
I looked up for the sun
Which had shattered in the water
And the pieces were raining down
Like gold rings
That passed through my hands
As I thrashed and grabbed
I started rising rising

 — Bill Callahan, Rock Bottom Riser

Before me a wall teeming with errant shapes. Misshapes, mistakes, misfits​​. Orphaned puzzle pieces creating their own distinct richly cultured islands. Hewn like mutant snowflakes, each one unique, varying in material, size, depth, texture, and color. That color steeped and stained, dripped and draped, blobs and bleeds as if living. 

Isolated in vertical lines they may read like some alien cuneiform. Grouped together on a plain, they roam out a map of a vibrant topography. They behold the secret and the spirit of making: the residual repurposed, the edits of one painting becoming another, becoming something else entirely. Perhaps even becoming the something​ on its way to the else​​. 

The eyes flits from one shape to another as a fly in flight, giddy of its own good fortune of sweet abundance. The shapes shimmer like sunlight through trees. Dappled warm rays in a cool bath, they glisten and they rumble. They speak softly in patches torn asunder through a mild delirium. I wander and speculate through this land, as moss drips from webs, or the wild murmurations of birds shift forms like leaves taken by the wind and given to the water. Back through time and creeping forward to new life like a river.

As I drift downstream, my feet grip the rocks, slip over stones, entangle and rebound, I get stuck, get cut, get forced forward and pushed down, churned up and abraded, the rough and the smooth, the stick and the spoon, jettisoned and sucked-under, thrust forth into a pool of stillness and bright sun.

From the bottom I float, charting pockets of space that emerge from the enjambment. Passages unfold and sparkle, tumble playfully or soak in the murk. The scraps around me rebuild like homes for winter animals, which a storm will soon unsettle, and time migrates forward.  Directions being relative, this could mean upwards or inwards, away from a center. 

We cannot pick up the same spot in a river. What is beheld is held for an instant. Once captured in mind it cannot be regained in the same way, weight or measure. It is for us alone that we see what we see when we see it. 

These shapes marking time are like lost letters we can only read internally. One shape informs another by the mark, by the color, by the size, by the gesture, but mostly by each being humble vessels of soft humanity. Together, a warp and weft of first-thought-best-thoughts, summoned from some deep place, mysterious and gentle, but unrefined and fertile. Not necessarily adorned but through a guidance unknown they are allowed to prosper as possibilities and leapt from one become stained with light and movement as if by angels. 

We can only chart our own course through their creation and meaning. This is a language that begs for fluidity, to take hold of meaning and steep it into serum, a tincture of shifting life, queering forms. Comprehension is capital in its ugliest way, these shapes instead tell us to revel in the ambiguities, the margins, the eggcorns​, and the mondegreen​. 

Look out at the world through the glass reflections of our eyes; the movements inside movements become part of our picture. Surfing the flotsam amid photogenic moments, and indescribable emotion, where are our eyes rushing towards? We are but a shape juxtaposed upon other shapes, made more forward or hidden, beautiful or ravaged by our adjacency to other life.   

As I scuttle along the bottom floor, the sky shining down upon the silt. I in all my crabby ways know this: The abstract is simply the real from an unconsidered angle.

With props to Sylvia Wright, Mary Oliver, and Pulp