Nothing makes sense until it makes sense in the body, till the the body is present at the making-sense. They throw these things in the air. I approach one, asking what they are. Lanza, he says. A toy for kids. For demonstration, he throws one, catching it back. Have you seen them too? That he could have been that. That Venice, that canal, that light seen from the oriental windows. Where you from? The people selling the small things greet me like this when my eyes meet theirs. Buy a bracelet to support me, pour me soutenir.
We bond through the French language. We move around in the wide world, forced into fluidity. He gives me an additional one for free.
Pour les enfants. The painting becomes a joke on the viewer. A door to a chamber is shown without any key whatsoever to access it. Without any witness writing, inscriptions, books, legends tying that time to the present, all the stories have to be inventedβ reinvented.
There are rings made of diamonds and rubies with miniature heads of turbaned Moors in sculpted ebony. For Veronese, this painting was all about invention, and for it, he took huge license with theological doctrine. One wonders what kind of a character he is, this red-turbaned African man present at the banquet of a Renaissance prince.
The fat dude looks into the distance distractedly. Disappointing to say the least. But with ambiguity, I find myself stepping into a different history of representation. Ambiguity is a fucking revolution. Buy the book. His non-fiction book, Scanning the Bush , will be published by Hutchinson Heinemann in He lives in Leeds. A collection of his poetry readings can be found on Writers Mosaic.
