iamme (text)

iamme by Michael Atavar It's midday, a curtain of rain falls – it's blue, turns orange as it hits the street, turns into light, into dust, into elementary particles, into colour. I walk down a city street, big blocks of colour colliding, everything is colour. It's a portable life here and everything is portable – go anywhere, do anything; portable atoms moving in the landscape like dots in front of my eyes. By the railway track, dandelions float above the wasteland colonising the lost space that we don't see, can't see. Look at your watch; it's 12 o'clock already. All the ghosts of space are alive here at this minute. I see them as they pass – Le Corbusier, Niemeyer, Walter Gropius, floating in a cloud of concrete dust, in a city above the wasteland. Every day I ride the 7 Train through warehouses, billboards, illuminated signs; everything facing away from me, towards the street, big red letters 20 feet high A.L.O.C./A.C.O.C. Yes, I am travelling backwards through an illuminated landscape, backwards in time, back to the concrete slabs, the pavement, the first journey from X to Y, a long white dust road, spots of sunlight in front of my eyes. No one knows your name here, no one knows who you are. Instructions: proceed as though you are invisible, see-though, imaginary, impermanent. 'The transparency of the place in which you are' – Wallace Stevens. Just walking down a street, one step after another – it's a miracle to be able to do it. The bubbles of Coca-Cola through a straw go into me and inwards, onwards, upwards into the wider universe. Watch them go in the blinking midday sun. See them disappear 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10. I lose count after 463. Let them float away like clear, empty balloons. P.S. Q. What are you doing here? Barnett Newman, Ellsworth Kelly, Ad Reinhardt – these painters knew about space and about your relationship to loss. Places and spaces; what it's like to walk down a road, see the sky, shadows and daylight. Light blue, dark blue like a child's game – add one object and subtract another; take one away, move everything around. Q. Can you really do that? A. Yes you can. The space you live in is the space subtracted from life. A speck of dust – I hold it in my hand; I live in it; I turn through it, I am it. It. This is your world. When you are born you bring this world into being and when you die you take it with you, every single thing – cars, houses, people, lights, days, nights, bars, motorways, trains – all of it. Surprisingly enough, it's all you have. The pavements, the sunlight, the glass of water, the coffee cup, the colour, bars at night – bright neon lights of Tokyo, LA, Paris, Taipei. I know it doesn't seem like much. But the sunlight's for free, the air is free, the day is really free and the sunlit shadows –they are free too. We cycled from La Gendronnière; four of us on bicycles along the road, and blowing towards us came pollen falling from the trees, like we were in a Virtual Reality movie, a simulation, a big blue screen in which all we had to do was click. And move forwards into the next scene. Those little things, these flower parachutes, once so invisible, now became so noticeable to me. I saw them on streets, on the wasteland, by the beach, floating past in one long line of possibility and chance. They floated without purpose towards Earth, moving on the warm air, and as dusk came we clicked forwards into the next scene, the next hour a thunderstorm, and arrived home. Walk down any avenue, take a left turn. The sky pins you to the floor, gives you helium and like a balloon you float out into the heat of midday, warm air rising, water cooler bright. And above the city you see spaces you had never seen before – holes, geometric squares, railway tracks, swimming pools. And dandelions blowing across wasteland by the railway. They keep on coming, blowing into the sunlight; each one a reflection, a refraction of the metaphor, of the mosaic, of the mirror. The day begins to dip beyond the long horizon. I throw the coins, ask it 'Where am I?' 'You are here,' it replies, 'like you always are.' (c) Michael Atavar 2003–2026