Saint Cards 11

This installment takes a breath, an empty space with no philosophical thickets in it. 

Today, conjure a figure by making their portrait. Make it descriptively in words, make it in drawing, make it in collage. Make it abstract or figurative. Doodle on a photograph or decorate one with gel pens. If you’ve been hesitant to actually get out the art supplies, maybe today is a good day to do it. If you are making a portrait through writing, restrict yourself to visual detail. Take a one-day narrative vow of silence. 

(This reminds me of an assignment Mac Wellman told me he gave when it was his turn in the Brooklyn College English Dept. faculty rotation to teach English 1, the gateway college writing class mostly heaped on adjuncts and teaching fellows, that all faculty were supposed to teach periodically. The essay question Mac assigned, as I remember it, was: What is a face? Well Mac wasn’t ever assigned to teach English 1again after that semester (ok citation needed this may have been relayed over whiskey, but I think it’s the case). I can’t believe I never tried to write the essay myself. But you could substitute it as a portrait prompt for today, using your figure’s face as the field of evidence from which your microessay draws.)

 

Open variables:

Presence: the thought experiment passes through a kind of story form (“imagine a scene”), but the endpoint of the prompt is toward a record not of what happened or didn’t happen, but of the presence of that figure; the thought experiment is a instrument for getting near in order to register the figure, their effects on others. What’s registered as presence? Think of this open variable as a continuum between radiance (as overwhelming outflow from one to another), reciprocity (as feedback loop between two or more), and withdrawal (of one from another). 

Short: invitation to treat this as a tiny daily exercise—limit it by minutes spent, word count, or page space. This workshop is not cumulative, so you can take up the scale and limit differently each time you choose to write.

Piece: you might write a microstory, a caption, a song, a dialogue, a commemoration, a tiny play, a choreographic score, a meditation or prayer of some kind, a list of images, notes for a character study, or any other form useful to you as a container for this presence.

Figure: is the figure real or invented; gone and remembered or still living; is the figure mapped onto the fullness of a person or does the figure appear as something different than “full” in this sense (a slip, a ghost, an allegory, a disembodied voice, a half-memory, a dream composite…)

Portrait: The portrait might be a description drawn in words, separate or integrated into the rest. It might be a drawing or a collage, or a performed photograph you take of yourself, in the style of Cindy Sherman.

Grammatical person: are you writing “I” or “we” in first-person, writing “you” in second-person, writing “she/he/they+” in third? Addressed to the past or addressed to the future?