Vanishing Portals
The Garden of Earthly Delights, By Hieronymus Bosch
“…buried in the nameless black of a name.” Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves
I have begun to realize (I couldn’t possibly have known this before) that my work is centered around the idea of the imagined, uncanny, and impossible realities that are no less real than the unimagined. They mirror the books within books, manuscripts within manuscripts of Borges’ The Garden of Forking Paths and the pseudo-academic manuscripts with fractured narratives spiraling down the impossibly horrific labyrinth of corridors (pages) of Danielewski’s House of Leaves. They are inspired by the multilayered narratives of One Thousand and One Nights and the unfathomable two suns above the impossibly unattainable yet un-hyperbolically perfect love mystery in Casares’ The Invention of Morel. These realities confound and confuse yet make perfect sense.
In Vanishing Portals these realities are turning inward, spiraling into the labyrinth of being, traversing the discontinuities of consciousness and identity, “buried in the nameless black of a name.” The piece travels through the corridors of the mind, becomes suspended in the ephemeral space of memories, forever seeking the portals in space and time that lead to the misweaves, the places where things break down, the outliers, the discarded data. It is a labyrinth of musical memory, simultaneously musical and idiosyncratic.