Wings: A Rosary for Saint David Wojnarowicz
(excerpts from a forthcoming essay)
(Fragments from a larger essay, which I will be releasing as a zine in the Spring/Summer).
There is this place I come from I guess you could call it a topographical plane I’ve only studied it from above and I don’t remember how to get into its recesses it is a maze, made up of dark dark red squared spirals and I can get back there by pressing hard on my eyelids in my memories of this place I’m scanning atop it maybe flying but bodiless more or less and we are all there but no one is there either and it’s a shared plane but it’s temporary (insofar as time applies there, which it does not) and I am not able to bring someone with me, but if I could I might fly over it with Saint David’s hand in mine.
On Wojnarowicz
For nearly a decade, I have kept a notebook.
If I was not so poetic in my theses, I might have titled this essay On Reading the Notebooks of David Wojnarowicz. I am learning, though, to follow my poetic impulses, and to avoid didacticism. If a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose, then a prayer is a prayer is a prayer, or a wing is a wing is a wing. If one is able to loosen one’s didacticism, the light enters with greater ease.
Let this be a love letter to wings, to Saint David, and to the richness of flight, sky-and-land-rushing, the nuance of this shaded plane, its grey areas.
Note: silver photographic negatives, like those left by Saint David, are made of only this - grey areas. You cannot produce an analogue image without a devotion to visually expressed nuance. This gradation of silver halides, I posit, has something akin to a Godliness.
I have thought of wings, increasingly so, and have not given up the hope that I might one day grow them.
I am trying to collect these wing thoughts, to gather some meaningful poetic treatise on ascension.
Saint David on a wing, ascended and is seated at the right hand of nobody.
Saint David not buried, rather a handful of ash upon government lawns, as salt circle, as everlasting spell.
Surely the people is grass.
Gorgeous Wings and Ill-Fated Flights
There is a 1979 live recording of Joni Mitchell singing The Last Time I Saw Richard, where, before playing her final arpeggio on the piano, she says here come my gorgeous wings now!
Before I moved to London, I thought about these words often, thought of how it might feel to fly away from home, to see the land expand and breathe, open itself on its curvature beneath:
I’ll be jovial again soon, like getting wings back. Wings of grass this time. They’ll serve their purpose, get me over there, and then I can shed them. Maybe I’ll shed them mid-flight over geometric lands, away from the thicket, ready to be catapulted to the sun.
I dream in thickets, and bramble bushes, and clearings. Safe from the angry villagers, but not without dangers. The task of untangling is thorny, fraught, but you’ve got to do it if you want your wings. Torn hem of robe. Battered foot of saint.
(2022)
Mitchell often sings of wings, of flight and its consequences, of ascension. Inside my copy of her 1971 album Blue – bought second hand – there is a folded photograph of Mitchell, in grainy black and white, wearing a feathered headdress and wings, flying through a night sky. The picture is by Norman Seeff. She looks as if soaring. I do not know how this poster got into my record sleeve, and I have never found another like it.
Mitchell mentions flight again in Amelia, on Hejira (1976).
Like Icarus ascending
On beautiful foolish arms
In Amelia, Mitchell is cataloguing doomed flights. The 1937 flight of its namesake, Amelia Earhart: doomed. Icarus’ flight: famously doomed. Mitchell’s own retreat from public life: fraught, not doomed. (Hejira, an Arabic word, means, roughly, to escape hostility with your honour intact).
I have, blessedly, been rewarded thus far when choosing flight.
I like to believe that my honour, too, has remained more or less intact.
And looking down on everything
I crashed into his arms.
Ten Catalogued Flights: A Devotion
I.
In a large, labyrinthine barn near Penzance, the various detritus of my friend’s grandfather’s life rests. There are rare tractors from the thirties, piles of moth-eaten curtains, old theatre sets from pantomimes. I was most struck by a large, delicate pair of wings. Made of twisted cane and crepe paper, drained of colour, they are a faint, faded blue. The shellac crepe of them turns to dust when touched. A relic from some fair, or operetta.
In the sunny paved square outside the barn, I held the wings, their span larger than me, like an antique kite. They smelt of mice and damp. One bright morning, when this life is over.
II.
Before I boarded my first flight, I was so frightened of being separated from my Mother that I recorded a video of her reading an affirming, soothing message, to ward off homesickness. On the short flight – less than an hour – I watched this video on repeat. I did not look out the plane’s window once. When zoomed in, the digital noise of my 2007-model Panasonic camcorder made her skin look like it was made of something powdery or melting. I zoomed in until the little screen was a melted mess of pixels.
III.
I offended a swooping bird in my yard in the graveyard with the grass blades switch blades as a soft dusty angel sang.
I found this passage in an old notebook of mine: written a week after my seventeenth birthday. Remember Rimbaud’s warning, nobody of seventeen is all that serious. He wrote that when he, too, was seventeen).
IV.
Saint David, I have seen your wings on fire.
V.
There is atop my bedside table a small porcelain swan, made by a friend of mine who works in ceramics. It is small and white and somehow soft to the touch, soft as porcelain can be.
VI .
Late last night, riding bikes through Hyde Park, I said let’s stop and look at the swans! and the man I love said no, I do not like swans. The Hyde Park swans, along with the St James Park Pelicans, were what most impressed me about London when I first visited, as a boy of eighteen.
VII.
With her apron throwed over her, he mistook her for a swan,
And he shot her and killed her by the setting of the sun.
VIII.
I have seen a white dove in battle with a corvid. The dove did not win.
IX .
His wings were struggling. They tore against each other on his shoulders
like the little mindless red animals they were.
X.
Sorry, I thought I heard you speak. It was only your wings rustling.