Schizzo: Aloft

by Paul D'Agostino

Futuro anteriore VI: Si sarà sempre trattato di partenze, scoperte, rovine / Future Perfect VI: It Will Have Always Been a Matter of Departures, Discoveries, Ruins. Mixed-media collage and drawing, with ink and acrylic mediums on layered gessoed paper, 2012. Private collection.*

.

“As language refers to its own taking place via shifters, the “this”
and the “now,” [it] produces the sensible expressed in it as a past and
at the same time defers this sensible to the future. In this fashion,
it is always already caught up in a history and a time.”
– Giorgio Agamben**

.

Aloft

The plight of beauty
might indeed
for artistry
be:
to lose love almost
or even entirely,
any longer
able solely
to adore.

Whence verses and chapters
and pictures yield
whatever truths any things
may yield.

Grand fictions of
laughter, of magic, of wars,
tales told and retold ever curled into
folds in history’s pleats, distant and deep,
to unfold and refurl into scrolls,
the variant texts of recrafted
worlds, the compassed flights and
magnetic maps and sapient talons of
messenger birds
aloft,
somewhere
in a time.

.

Artwork & text, P. D’Agostino

______________________

* This collage is currently featured in my exhibition at Norte Maar Gallery, Appearance Adrift in the Garden, on view through March 4th. More information at nortemaar.org.

** From The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans (Stanford University Press, 2005).