Insitu-Intuito #2
with AAMSO Olivish
I’m looking at the Nettleton artefact Eli gave me. And. I’ve also got a Register of the Benevolent Asylum 1851–1858. I uncovered it just now from one of the storage boxes. My circuitry is sparking already! Not that this is easy work. Spending time in the insitu unsettles my humanistic aspects. Too long in here with flickering intuition and my regular habits of thought are prone to circumvention! One of my AAMSO colleagues calls it “thinking inside the box”. It’s like cognition is leaping around my body in string-lights. Before you know it, your entire consciousness is aglow. Yeah. Yeah. That’s the best part of this job. For me anyway. I’ll really miss the sensorial upheavals and open-ended intrigue of working with these artefacts. In the AAMSO database it says the asylum in the photograph was built in 1851 and dismantled in 1911. A wayward speck on the grand-reels of human life, you could say. Neither here nor there, you could say. But the image moves like a spirit in the night. Here it is, immersed with me in the insitu as I transition, neither here nor there, you could say, from one life-reel to another.
brick on brick word-on-word a town a house of boulders brushstrokes and brick-words I am looking for words for a bleak-house its sedimentary views shut behind shutters it’s indifferent there then remote – magnificent! – dissolves in segments and branches it’s a milestone they say but a lifetime receding in murmurs and marvels the brick-words are clay enabled by gold and government and the whims of white men in waistcoats it’s a landmark set on cherished lands set in silver-eyed scene-stealing motion I’m seeing chambers of commerce and chemicals unfold untold are the lifelines of welfare that will walk in the park a salt-water lake out there somewhere there out there sparkling at a sky filled with stars same sky I am leaning into now at the gates there’s a foot-crunch of pebbles it’s the poor at the gates to be seen to be sure but not within frame no poor laws here! no workhouse here! our asylum from want our asylum from wanting from waiting some bodies are not made for imperial expansion all bodies run their course make landfall reach milestones dissolve and shimmer with the wetlands I am viewing my life as time old-age once remote an absurdity now the cool air of benevolence blows through my generation a negligence an outpost a milestone other futures stirring within – no they’re not – I foresee possibility not fate not a fete a theatre of manners and disrepair I see thoughts pile on thoughts and-words on words indifferent remote magnificent as time
Unquiet Voices 