Front Matter
image description: Multiple views of an unskillfully handwoven basket, having just taken form on a pinkish-purplish woven rug. Coupon pages and old maps are spread underneath the cluttered container, and assorted art supplies are strewn about. The basket is made of flat and wide reeds bound with narrower strips, dyed yellow and quite irregular in their spacing. It has a reflective rectangular base and two teal runners along the bottom so it can stand up on its own. Two wide yellow ribbons have been affixed as straps with an old belt, woven of natural fibers with green leather details, so the basket could be worn like a backpack.
unsettling
image description: Scraps of brown paper lie strewn on a wooden table, like a brook cascading into a reddish, striated rock on the righthand side of the scene. Faint gold handwriting scrawls a message, jumbled across the scrap rapids: it will / not be / perfect, and / in its / imperfections it / will be alive. Between the poem and the table peek a page of an essay and a card from Nomy Lamm and Taya Mâ Shere’s Omer Oracle Deck (“the world to come – 4,” the card reads). A laptop, a stack of books, and an open notebook skirt the edge of the frame.
The Dissertation as a Genre of Knowledge
image description: the page from the 5782 Dreaming the World to Come yearly planner for Shabbat HaGadol. A poem is scribbled in blue sharpie that reads, “Change happens in the moment before / I close my eyes / and notice / how light appears to me / in shades of red / sensations of temperature / infinitely nameable experiences of difference / When I make gentle movements with my head to relax my jaw, neck, shoulders”
PRESENCE - Conditions of Arrival
image description: a fleshy pink hand, cast in shadow, holding a pencil with "IMAGINE y.o." in brilliant blue letters hovers over a page of a notebook, scrawling handwriting underneath suggests a poem in the works
Meanwhile (an interruption)
image description: the word “MEANWHILE” runs across the bottom of a Value Village bag in letters cut out from potato chip bags. Bits of other words are visible, including “SENSUOUSNESS,” which is scrunched in the middle of a sort of mandala shaped by two overlaying squares created by the words “SPACE TIME BODY RELATION” written on the flaps of a takeout container, interlocking with small cardboard rectangles reading, “NOTICE APPRECIATE QUESTIONS RESONANCE.”