Looking as Discourse: [from] These Late Eclipses (Strickenfield)

Image by Angelo Maneage

Photos by Andrew Zawacki

The theme of the 2022 Cleveland Humanities Festival is “Discourse.” Zach Savich, a Cleveland Review of Books board member and associate professor at the Cleveland Institute of Art, asked a group of artists, writers, and scholars from Cleveland and beyond to address the topic, “How is looking a form of discourse? Or: how does looking become discourse?” Their responses explore some of the ways in which private and shared experiences of vision contribute to culture, conversation, identity, and collective exchange.

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Nothing to stand on, nowhere to be: the calving of an internal interval. The crepe myrtle went from 0 to 60 in under a weekend, flat. Swallowhole: I, we. My girls conked out on their trundle bed. Clear night, icy stars. The earth is powering down. Fourth month out of ordinary time.

CAITIFF

Our life hedges into subjunctive, all default settings upset, the forest stitched together by the spacing between the pines. A reek of wet fur and feral catastrophe, grisly as it gets, is ferried forth from the murk on a havering draft. Bejesus—as in, it scared the living out of me.

ECOTONE

Where exo-city intersects the supra-countryside, late in our lower infolithic age, on Saturday: my neighbor’s in post-production, tweaking his property. He sees this as a political act, wielding his pressure washer like a taser against the garage. No gradient tool for laying down a sky.

THE TURBINES

turn in their six-acre arbor, a crackling polyvinyl idyll, a finished 45. Threading the needle: saccadic through the freak flak of an early morning squall, cyclists in single file suggest a vagabond celluloid android, its carbon fiber spine, sidewinding over a cathode meadowland.

MALWARE

In my dream, which is really a memory, I’m astray among heather and gorse. The sky with its mercury cladding bares no cleft. In the Polaroidal semidark, a former lover is having a shag, or slagging the universe off. Just beyond the bedroom window: the peaceable kingdom, at war.

NOT-AND

Ode, om, ohm, hum, hymn: downlighting to clipped shadows, under the sign of no counterfeit sun, where something has bowed below the threshold of sight. A breaker crashing the schizophonic shore. Should we leave, she asks. Are they coming for us. Are they already here.