Here. Tabula rasa. Before this nothing. Before. This. Nothing. Blank. Nineteen twenty five. Material saviour. Before. Before disaster. Masking the delight of colour. Watch out for the dog ma. The black pouch of despair. Crash. The fall of earthly delights. First man. Naked. Or suited. Flying through the air. Wings collapsed from the weight of gold. The old world. A prophet. Adam, or was it Abraham, throws himself from a 29th story window. No one will get to hear his tale now. He fashions a new language, tailor made, as he flies through the air. Listen. Black. The sacred colour. Something. Susurrations that could rupture all that you know. Something that will not be heard again. He smashes against the sidewalk. Concrete stills his tongue. Flesh made matter. There’s no escaping the materiality of fact. Tears. Don’t wipe them away, Eve. Evening emerges out of the darkness. Before the darkness. Closer. Stand closer. Find your place. Place yourself. Stand beneath the lime tree. Smell the colour. Colour yourself in. Zim Zum. Move over. God, don’t you see how it is? Where do I get the nerve? Terror. A human being. Being ravaged by space. Lead me on Joshua. Away. Totally. To totality. All of me. Take all of me. Place me before the four horizons and let me see. A new beginning. Who needs water when you can sing? Cry me a river. Trickling through the luminescence of colour. A trail zipping along, flowing up, rising down. Right to left. Left to – no. Watch out for the dog ma! Left to right. Titian sits on a well-made toilet. Artifact This is me. Stripped. Striped. Bleeding. Beyond being contained some sense of others. Communion. Zim Zum. God, move over, there’s no room for you at the table. Matter physically speaking…
Zim Zum, a term from the Kabbalah for the process of god contracting so he could make space for the world, and the name of Barnett Newman’s 1969 Cor Ten steel sculpture