of Isle

Interstice 



and Sea






by Cella














On September 23, 2023, at The Stromness Hotel, Stromness Harbour, en route to The Museum of Loss and Renewal’s Writing in Place Residency in the Orkney Islands, I wrote: I worry I'll kill them. Rootless, I've never had plants. I'm flat-sitting for my sister in Brooklyn. She's a union scenic. She paints sets for crime shows mostly. Once, she texted a photo of herself holding a rat by its tail. It looked so real, so dead. Ageing objects is her speciality.

With the Hollywood writer's strike, she's working off her bucket list, hiking in Morocco.

In our twenties, we staked out our genres to avoid competition. She sculpted in bronze and painted in oil. Photography and film were mine. Now, she posts distress-filtered images on Instagram. But I don't do social media, and I'm not taking pictures now, so we're cool.

I spot a new monograph on her coffee table. A gorgeous archive of pinhole photographs by Barbara Ess, an eighties downtown New York artist, entitled "I am not this body". I'm dazzled and moved from the first plate. She writes:

"It all started with that scratched polaroid—my sisters as teenagers sweetly regarding each other. Two girls trapped like insects in amber. Their innocence, the frailty of them, the juice will seep through to the surface. I scratch a little more, so I can see better.

Grown up, living in the city, hair all henna red. Red, red. Hey red, want to go to bed red? Trapped in the city. A female beast. So sleek. So elegant. Prancing around on asphalt. An alien on alien turf. Red, the color of anger, the color of fear and sexiness. The color of blood.

The romance of food. Sheep lined up at a trough. Behind them a blue sky sitting on the verdant curve of the earth hurling through space. I knew this guy Mud who hummed when he ate 'cause he was so happy to be eating. It's great to get really hungry and then eat. Lose something. Find something. Smoking used to be like that: longing/fulfillment/longing/fulfillment. I suppose sex is like that, want/get (or not get). They say you can get very high by not eating, by not having sex, by pouring yourself into sensory deprivation. Totally cut off, all alone, hungry, horny but high."1

And with that, Ess nails my praxis. Longing/fulfilment/longing/unfulfilled. It doesn't matter. It's all in the interim, in the longing itself. That suspended trajectory or loop, a temporal and spatial in-betweenness, neither here nor there. A prospective nostalgia, as coined by artist/ theorist Svetlana Boym. A longing for a home that never existed nor ever will beyond one's mother tongue, suggests philosopher Barbara Cassin.

I guess that yearning was there from the go. No home to return to, we pressed on.

A beau, I forget his reason, advised me to take pictures for a year without developing them. I had ideas what kind of a photographer I would become. I was wrong. From a shopping bag of negatives, I developed a collection of abandoned houses.

I kept moving. Home is out there. I'll know it when I see it. I thought of photography as detective work.

Later, I will call it research after decades of projects in many media, cities and labs. I'll learn home just isn't out there for me.

I'll keep doing it anyway, like Mud, 'cause it feels so good. I'll document campsites, found a rambling, exo-planet art school, tease out belonging via palimpsests of projections, on and in architecture, and suspend it with jetlag, vinyasa and vivid dreaming. Prolong it with shorter pitstops. Writing gets me there every time.

And then, one day, it hit me. If home is a point of orientation, where you feel safe, the place you return to, the in-between is my home.

So, I search for the sweet spot within it as it surreptitiously slips from my embrace. Equilibrium, arrival without departure, is stasis. Dry, red, dead to dirt, the cul de sac of a leaf.

That's okay. The in-between is perpetually alluring, a fathomless zone of intrigue and ecstasy—voluminous, luminous, dark, rich, drenched in potential. I could go on forever about my crush with the betwixt. And so, I do.

I dig and collect like an archaeologist, travel like an astronaut skirting stellar black holes, living in liminality for luxuriously long stretches.

At the moment, I am following a detective chasing a fuguist2 dipping in and out of time and transforming through blackout zones, looping the globe, joyriding crisscross contrails between nomadology, hauntology, and special relativity in fugue states. I encounter the eerie, the bardo, and the sublime in their pursuit. I am filing my report in an epic, lyric essay, I will call a novel.

As an antidote to this breakneck chase, I am travelling to the interstices of isle and sea, an archipelago east of Iceland, where I've heard rumours of traces of place in stasis, perpetually flourishing.




 And, upon departing September 29, 2023:
Bag packed, in eager anticipation of my Kirkwall flight on the fire engine red Britten Norman Islander, a twin-engine plane for eight, slicing through whipped cream clouds, mesmerized by smatterings of sparkly sea, lulling once more to the twin's drone, I write:

I have travelled to the interstices of isle and sea, an archipelago east of Iceland, where I've heard rumours of traces of place in stasis, perpetually flourishing.

Listening to the guest presentations the first days, the deep history the Orkadian community share and create, and the intricacies of their weavings, I affirm what I know: it is too late to belong to one, even if I never move again.

Still, I do what I always do: imagine planting my roots here, knowing full well I won't, just as I know I be me.

All week long, I watch the birds flock, skein, swarm, covey, cloud, and cluster across an enormous sky above a frothy frosting of choppy waves atop a thin slice of vivid green known as place beyond my cubby desk window.

Through the gale gusts of Storm Agnes and her echoes, I cannot tear myself away from my framed world as bird after bird flaps their way nowhere, bodies suspended in space, neither moving forward nor back, in place and yet in motion. So it can be done.

My trajectory is a more leisurely one, looping from desk to kitchen table, dipping in and out of a plethora of stories—comic, novel, poetic, spiked with jokes, yarns, quotes, recipes, and readings, by a bevy of brilliant, boisterous, boastful women, in a fugue of conversations, argued, echoed, murmured in murmurations. If place is always event, as Emily Orley suggests, I am in a place of stasis, entangled through memory and future encounters, perpetually flourishing—writing in place.






1
Essay quote: Barbara Ess: I Am Not This Body. Aperture. 2005

2
Fugue defined:
Music: a contrapuntal composition in which a short melody or phrase (the subject) is introduced by one part and successively taken up by others and developed by interweaving the parts.
Psychiatry: loss of awareness of one's identity, often coupled with flight from one's usual environment.