Yoko Ono. Bronze Family Album, Blood Objects: Exhibit : Shirt 1993 Yoko. It was right beside the bronze you cast of your dead husband’s bloody shirt that I lost all battery life in my mobile. I found myself crouching down in the corners of the room seeing if the gallery plugs were on or disconnected. I felt as though I was genuflecting around you. Yoko. You are the queen of the death by a thousand cuts. No, you are the queen of the surviving of life’s thousand cuts. And here I am scrambling in front of you, in front of death desperately seeking communication. The security guard nearby stopped talking to the strange gentleman and offered me a plug, which I accepted. Standing around the bronzed shirt of your dead husband, we spoke of artists. It was as if a magic key had unlocked each of us from our specified roles within the space of the museum, long enough for us to speak of those of us who dedicate everything to its shadowy, steep path. I have spent so many weeks over readings where empiricists try to pin down and dissect the places that art might take each of us – the maker and the viewer. I have scrambled over words laid down by the linguists and semioticians, the art historians, the scientists and the philosophers, and yet really, I still don’t think that much terrain has been covered. The security guard tries to find some poems on her mobile, written by her niece. She mines her device for a connection to me and gives me the gift of another poet . The gentleman as it turns out is an old hippy from the area, deeply familiar with the various tribes of the Cass Corridor and the artists that inhabited this disorganized string of colonies and communes peppered throughout the neighborhood. He takes me on a rushed trip across the gallery in order to show me some of his tribe’s artifacts all hanging together in a strangely curated room. Their embalmed hearts pinned around the room for us to look at. The trip there was a strange blur of paintings and sculptures. I say strange because each one popped out of the blur for one moment, emblazoning itself onto my mind. A collection of artifacts brought back from the journey. I come back to my phone in a daze. I leave the gallery finally and head over to the Cass Corridor. I retrace my steps finally. As I do so, I remember being told of the spirit bead. It was a common practice when beading moccasins, to place in a bead in the second pattern that disrupts the patterns from matching.It was in the imperfectness of the repeated pattern that the spirits could enter and that we could remember our humility. My steps back are like those spirit beads. They are an imperfect retracing of the way I came. They are the nature of revisited terrain. They are my whispers to the spirits. **** Follow this blog