'Still Life with Supernova' by Brian Clements

 
   

Direct your attention beneath the winged fruits of the tree on the left, where King David dances with all his might before the Ark of the Covenant. On the branch above, the Kirov Ballet is established. Call this kind of development an improvisation and you begin to see how the trees turn red, the flesh turns blue, and the frequency of their shift remains constant. Each time an electron goes into orbit, you begin to sense the movement of the triangle. The human figure is necessary only as an object of composition.

Position is where you find it. Do you, for example, know of a word that refers to all people yet discriminates among them? There is no need to introduce mystification. These bits of nature remind us that the fact of the newspaper hides a total dead silence that you can see there in the face of the burdened Madonna. Just beyond the bananas, you can detect with sensitive equipment more fairy tale narrative material coming on. 

It’s hard to tell with all of this starstuff scattered about who is ahead. The golden light on the foreground of the foliage suggests allegory, while the rose prints and décolleté necklines argue that there really is an objective reality out there. Half the time it goes one way, half the time the other. What you need is a view to the inside of something that is as invisible as Autolycus. 

It is no common thing to develop faith in the fluid moment. It is more perfect not to exist. Standing in the rain, you are an aleatory experiment in the duration of breath. This is an example of the technique of remaining attached until spring, then bursting. Just so, the foxtrot developed from the two-step. And just so, the figures in the upper left corner are producing abstract forms and concrete sounds from industrial materials. Are they aware of what has already happened in the lower right corner, where--billion of years before--spasms of math spun out hydrogen and theorems into the folds of every thing? 

Not to worry--they have plenty of time, which is a finite surface with no beginning or end. But how long will it be before they come up with a nice theory of how ESP might work, fix their old pickups, spin a few discs, make a little something to remember them by? Soon enough, changes in the weather will be less noticeable than the changes in the orange background. Their artists will start to seek clarity and to order the principles of human motion against the backdrop of bebop and 24-ton calendars. The steel lattice of their bridges will become like wafers on the tongue of the earth. The atonal winds will encourage fractal accounts of the struggle to live outside the canvas. And the nature of their real estate will remain speculative, like the forgotten emblems under their doorsteps, where a mountain and a river unroll their two dimensions across a sunless map.

(from his book Jargon, Quale Press, 2010)