on merciful mind

ID







Missing function, I ask, what creature, what creature.

Loopless again, loosened, relearning.


Its throat is searching for a stomach and spine, which is quite difficult, given the pressure of dreams and the armor of grips and the fantasy of the ravaged.


Wants consciousness and how to acquire it: each heart breathes through its inner relation, division of self into self.


No roadmap contained in the spoils of possessors (oh fondest affection).


Yet his hand has written, Since I lie in the grasses, and I am of death, and the grasses are of death, thus I am grasses. We do not acknowledge the error, we deserve daring insights:


now responding:

moments of gloom and gray in her eyes or in mine

accepting the morning’s overcast sky and the shadowed spruce stand and the undercloud cold


Not light and clarity, but a merciful nurturing darkness. An eveningskinned serpent inside the belly.









— on the land of forest farms, here too maturity does not come: bodies removed before they can swallow the clash and spew out the tug.


Trunks cut and thrown as crisp pseudosoil, furious flourish and growth.


But they (two-four) are allowed to wander among farms, exposed to relative biodiversity and feeling, reduce four layers to three, to choose to mention this. Stage 1 after the cut. Stage 5 after the cut.


Which is performed by a cozy hot instrument and to the sounds of the radio;

When it should be a heatless sharp blade in soaring silence, just as the hawk flew, so the trees fell.


That is, to pass the operation from the heavy and breathing to the ghostly composite, that is, to pass it to oneself.









Wind’s sand into leaves, here language1 weathers against molecules, anything can signify anything; thus: a cry for help.


Anything, anything: an imaginative foreboding of storm lifts up the bumblebee and her body spills out of slumber.


And then I_ means to be a rusty rock, moss waterlogged after the night’s rain, the day’s war summary, her mood at breakfast. The bumblebee hums in the bilberry: shit answer, more problems in it than solutions.


The spruce tries, so the roots give up their tug, the tree buckles, wide base sideways, revealing round white stones, which now look at the clouds, charging: we were here the entire time. The entire time we were the tree, and we were the clouds, we were the dropped needles, the mosquito-wing litter, and the tired knees: all this were we.


She and he tell me: you can mean anything. But the rocks add: while you lie in the ground with a long tree above you. When it falls, the list is revoked. It won’t work to choose a word and say, this is me. It won’t work to choose a flower or a person and say, they are me.


Yes, I remember the science. It follows that I can’t choose a word or a thing but am still blessed to prefer a shade of eyes and sky and heat, a measured gap between pines and abrasions, and other avian things, till molecules weather language2 to the emptiness between them.


And now it is clear what the swan cries out in the pre-sold meadow. I wake up from others’ cruel fantasies.








They say the forest is almost untouched. And you? Lily of the valley in hand, forest touched, creature stirred from smell-sense, two gray-haired she-wanderers, word combinations, wet sand. Two hours and it perishes. 


Like the black stream in damp bilberries. Seeps into itself, from one mossy hole to the next, each day almost done.


Is it scary to flow from nothing to nothing and die in two hours, hooked on felled wood by the larynx? 


If there’s something alive and determined, one needs a road, from cut forest to stocks, for example. Under the road is a pipe, so the purposeless stream doesn’t leak out in error: trees are transported correctly, the truck belly full.


Wanted to stay faceless, but this narrowing, cross-section, slippery length: what, is it me again?


Swamp stars think me again? is an outlandish assumption, although useful in its own way.


Anxious machines know me again? as a closed operational circuit, scathing branch of proportion.


Me lasts while it’s a soaked leaf in a ditch, while that ditch is tight.


But when hands become tired of bites, when the bindweed of words makes out its soft width, firm hugs in fair water, some creature will perish.









Your lake smells like dung. Lilac spirits above, storm stirs below, streams flowing in, (uncorroborated). Ten times a day for five minutes, rain falls, barrenness, ruptured snakes bolting.


The waterflows’ fuss resolved by the sky’s intervention.


Star sybil: We say perceptions by different collectivities harmonize by recognizing you, the outsider, as entangling space-time. 


The enamored bog blanket’s attentiveness: turns out the model could not have been solved from inside.


The rain is on pause. The creatures dissolved and grew stronger. Cat watches bird, tree listens to saw, thump against pseudosoil, cat turns away, bird flies off.



And lucky is the one behind whose door there’s a damned queen of the rotting jungles. A cup of thick warm dust holding your bones, examined and feathered. To the doorstep and dancing, they’ve learned much about themselves, jealous siblings, phyllotaxis’s jaws, spider dead in her hair.


Another day it’s a voice that steals surfaces, every edge cutting, vertebrae spread. Same puppies, same bites, awful work, great results, and you’d better run: fewer than one and more than a multitude, a demonic unfurling.


The pseudosoil fades, vision unawaking, many copies exist: drained voices get nearer:


Road signs point out celestial deities: treasury vaults of angles and ties. And yet, are we able to bear their compassion, we, unelected by porch or by lectern?


From one set of claws to the next, swallowed and retched by the pondering huntress. And though he reproached himself—for, in the heat of the happiest days, he sheltered the brooding birds of the night, where he thought that forever he’d scared them away—luckily, the bittern’s scream as I slept in the sunken boughs was the most cleansing terror. His objection: if anything can mean anything, then anything signifies nothing.


It’s nothing, onwards, subtraction.


Subtract the spruce, which shelters me from the rain, subtract the action of remaining dry, subtract the extradimensional animal horde under shared cover and especially the spike-armored worm, go to hell. Subtract the appointed evening, the morning’s meeting, every night the day’s ice, subtract the heart and its ants, what will be left for your hospital game?


The woods must be larger, else why come there. For the woods to be larger they should not exist. Let streams start and end in a muddy pool. No stars, no road, no fire, no whirlpool — one hundred temptations all in one price.








More and more holes in the petals. Kiss my nothing with your nothing. Our berries smell of sour meat.


Oh,

tender soul’s wasteland, you’ll torch any deities inside and outside enamorment. Bones will be sighted and warmer than shells, dear noise in the merciful dusk.


The function’s not missing: it’s a logical error, a false attribute, that’s not how it works. Executed or not, something other exists, we’re sent back to the start. Hasty the praise we prepared for life’s monstrousness, irresponsible settings, so skilful its mixing of bloom and decay, after all. But maybe we’ll find the occasion to praise its two-timing tenderness; and connivance in terms of connections—always underdelivered and not as a set; for chances to bind black and green to great gray; for the spiral, gold, in her hair.


A lichenous hide overgrows the mid-molecule emptiness; the atom’s smoked flank is asmolder.


Seems like you’ve added a foot of soft limbs: a march of the shifty. Step by step you grow stiffer, the quaver subsides, you’re chopped down, novel growth. Ah soft thick limbs, where’s the sheath where’s the cut, you’re so far in the clouds, you grow stiffer. Brushing floss over scales, quivering our nothing, a treatment by cold, dear limbs, what do you think: Are we different? the same? Each time it’s conjecture. Feels the same, feels like stiffening, cut.


Do not resist, there’s no telling what six months will bring. And we know, all the growlings we heard, all warmth we’ve soaked up, the heartwood’s aware that a half-year from now, the sun will go down, you are stiff and don’t squirm nor defy, you are eaten, skin-deep and within, your hard blood is collected, and you’ve put on shoulders, so six months from now it’s cerulean sky with none of your shades.


Streams are blocked, roads are flowing, meters cubed on the market, and it feels slightly empty. Stretch your tongue with a little more grace, touch their rough flanks, their green boughs with your fingers, you stiffen.









Do you remember, in the beginning, such varied birds’ greetings, where else could you hear it but here, since forest in patches and clearness of water, these are the conditions of birds.


First we imagined that birdsong would teach how to make self, the cuts in their voices a shelter of mind. Walls of felled trees, open space, undergrowth, caterpillars’ lush homesteads, and aerial holdings; dense sweeping thickets aren’t dear to plumed pilots, they’re quiet.


Thus the bird creature mercurially noisemakes with placeholders over felled forest. Is thus the spruce forest self-tied to the lost portion as well? The step of its thought also driven by gaps?


If so, if the leaves have blown, if there’s snow, frozen roots, if there’s a storm and the spruce lets go, rejecting the glacier beneath it.


And no if the hide has been skinned, if you’re late, always adding, and never can fall.


The heart of the forest is pledged to the feast of the speakers. Once the forest in thought is self-looped, then the birds and the markets are modest.


A self needs much self, abundance of organs, delicate substrate of edges and lags, and in someone’s something, brimming and heated, an other is melting that had too little time, to think itself up, to think the felled tree. As if there won’t be enough creatures for everyone and you’ll have to remove one to get one, and anything will mean anything wanted, and I’m searching for life to unload my foamed chest.


Or if this is too risky and shameful, then a fraction for all, a cold tale of neat presences, honoring place and relation and the fall of the berry.


I’ll find rules of the shadow another way:


Either 1: burn your tissues to black coals’ abundance of visions of words and of strokes


Or else 2:






Between the preamble and the conclusion lies sand, silken gray, either desert or seashore. The gull cries for the first time, then again.


A wonder mid two crests, a terrible wonder, a tree in the sunset. While the living didn’t play bodies, their souls surfaced, two-dimensional black saws. Discs of infection redden laborious tissues.


This can be easily forgotten too: behold new blossoms by the verge each day; behold the horses of all hues in search of waterholes.


“But oh, cat, what’s with the paw that you press to your chest, and under it what invisible pain can’t you lean on? Why the shore in your eyes, or maybe the desert, all rushing past like the hawk under holy azure while you lie in a quiet corner, facing away.”


Of course, quickly forgotten: adamant tissues abloom, the cat is now playful, a butterfly tired on a hot road.


Wings soiled and folded: what sort of winter befell you, Amazonian queen? Also known as the mourner, and I, scared for my stock of the empty and pain, hide in your name and admire the worn plume. Kept safely behind the skin of the face.


It seems, immediately lost. An even low sky, smooth tepid water. Lines demand branching and leaves are desiring seeds. And anything can mean anything, in a strictly particular way.


Well, immediately lost is the merciful sensible darkness and snake rings. Tosses to reservoirs, bottomless pools of live water, ageless monsters of dawn, continuous fractions of war, somebody’s statements of dimly familiar pain: high tides of live water meant for dissolving the living, the sand, silken, neither a desert nor seashore, a green sour flame of perennial noon.


Quickly evaporates. If the wound does not close then the skin is discarded.


On a bright night I open my eyes and meet a reciprocal gaze, she can’t sleep, she feels cold and afraid, though the wound has closed up and the paw became nimble. Oh dearly beloved! Oh our pale slow fires, smoldering ash here and there. Our lead-bodied dawns, our vespertine tears, our cut-fallen trees, our bitter-cut news, our busted-up limbs and vile dreams, and our hair everywhere.


All the strange seas and delicate deserts will not be enough to be self with myself, the container is hollow and boundless. Yet my I trembles when razor-sharp edges appear in your shadows, my I follows in thought the felled tree, my I cries if it knows that the tears will pass into the silken gray sand passing round hand to hand, like a dead bird, like anything at all.


Green ardor sings colorful honeypot blooms, the new displaced by the newer, snow thawing, till wave upon wave make a durable summer in torrid oblivion. Where there was one there now lives another, vastly and firmly, like nothing has changed. But within modest shadows lie soft and rare leaves, the previous week’s edge of eternity, and beyond it the other forevers inlaid in the soot. Between dreamt incarnations the soul achieves thought of drooped flower, adding new film to the layers of flat ghosts.


Our quiet disquieted creature takes mayfly-like flight, with a slight rise, a soft fall, and again, in a few-hour cycle before passing.


The mayfly whips nothingness into a flexible foam, a veil of cold wind has enshrouded the pines, the cat looks into an empty corner, and again I can’t read the mood of your mind. Thoughts, ungreedy and fragile, pass between hands, like anything, tufts of soft fur: the sentiencmne of shadow, the nascence of shadow, the eveningskinned snake in our hair.








Translated from Russian by YB

ID is an artist whose residency at TUO TUO was facilitated by Artists at Risk (AR).


Read our interview with ID here.


Voices: Roby, Sara B., Dorothy, Hanna, Emma, Shia, Sara K., Joni, KDH  


Many thanks to AR & Arts Promotion Center Finland (Taiteen edistämiskeskus) for supporting this project.




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