Odyssey to the Origin of Our Reader
Unknown pleasures release green mist into my dreams, a reflection of the beginning in which a mermaid, tattooed bather of youth, swims to the west of the west, the landscape with mother and child beyond the illumination of the garden with a cosmic vase, where I stalk night at five o’clock to reach the mirage of heaven and earth, gone till the november snowfall of a poet’s world in the river at dusk, so the long way home becomes a sanctuary, banishment from the garden where we searchers contemplate the iceberg, the desert and the human cloud, while at a distance the wish solitaire and the children of the primordial land bathe in the emperor’s garden, the landscape of longing where they ask repeatedly, where did the time go, when we know that youth, a landscape that darkens the illumination of the kingdom’s old town, compels me to odyssey to the origin of our reader, the white wave to the west that sees the watcher upon whom so much depends… In the valley for Picabia, the winding path of the river hauls night to cover my tracks through the blue forest, transporting me from the blue room, where the cat’s tail curls between night and day to separate the coming of age landscape from the realm of appearances, where once upon a time in the west, somewhere in the blue rain, I swam the river at night along the ragged edge of the morning mist, through the landscape towards the new moon, within the dark reverie forging a path to the sea, where an endless walk greens again into unknown pleasures. I’ll see you on the other side.
Written in response to the titles of paintings by Matthew Wong featured in the Dallas Museum of Art’s 2023 exhibition catalogue
Return to Room Three: Myth-Making