The girl and the half crown.

Jane Wallace.

Tell me again about the place where the boundary is marked by latticed concrete blocks crawling with acerbic yellow lichen, and the mountain of the distance is a structure of corrugated iron. In there, I suppose past the horizon, the rope knots around and around the ceiling struts, and here, we shed our skins— made to shed our skins? On the wooden grate, they lie, thick and papery and our bodies between them. The sky comes in through that crack where the starlings wring their necks and this is the place where I come to know you, when our costumes fall off, dead weights, and we try to put ourselves back into them.

Here are the clowns wearing the collars not of their own. Brooke Georgia puts the collar on the body that is not its own. When I say collar, I mean that it might be made of leather and gathered into concertina-ed pleats and fastened firmly around the neck so that we do not run too far, or maybe, being that this is disguise, that we can hide in plain sight— a neckpiece swathed around like a plume of armour. On that figure, though, the armour will drag across concrete. The sound will wake someone, and she must cut off her arm and leave the raw limb outside in order to be able to close this door for the night. Five fingers reach for a glove, deflated from old fight.

There is a repetition in the work of things that rest at bodily margins— to hang around one’s shoulders, to pin oneself to the wall, a jester costume for a sad fool, a pair of stockings stuffed with the anger carcass of an every day. To gather these objects of Georgia’s is to collect traces that are gaunt and weft around the throat and heart. This mode of object- making inverts itself. We go inward from the work, toward an anxious performance for the internal self as a way to break with the already brumal temperature of inhabiting such a bag of flesh and weird bones. But to perform is for a stage! This is a party where the room is concave. I sing a hymnal to something glaring and unloved inside me, and myself, that’s the audience, and that strung-up orchestra strings it back to me.

The work that Brooke Georgia makes inhabits this liminal space, of the falsehood between the cloak and the cold stones beneath it, winching an ever-bigger gap between how we feel and how we behave. Keep me safe from the ritual. In the story “Master of the Eclipse,” Etel Adnan describes an angel who appeared in a monoprint by Paul Klee, Angelus Novelus. In this work, the angel can perceive all passage of human time as one singular and catastrophic episode, displacing the notion of history as a processual chain. Angelus Novelus dispels time as a fabric that keeps unfolding, and instead, the entire cloth can be conceived as a whole and expansive space. Adnan writes “but angels are information... All kinds of realities may inhabit a place together.”1  Again, on a basalt outcrop, the pendants around the neck of a pink-faced girl crash and cry. The moment of that sound stretches a single second into more than that, and it always spreads boundlessly. At the outcrop, everything beyond it becomes visible. The chain, as it breaks, disperses hard, reddened rosary beads onto the floor. The beads clatter and recoil, and the half-crown dropped into the alms box clangs again, and the metal and the wood spill past the threshold, wide and wide open.

Are the angels around? Does the rosary clatter?

Maggie Nelson writes that the creation of space destroys the vertical logic of ascension, which insists on an above/ below dichotomy, into a horizontal spreading that proposes an expansion into realms which no one yet thoroughly understands.2  Georgia produces this space in the work by evacuating the symbols of ascension of their unknown potency. The language of sacrifice is a familiar beast, of a bowed head in the aftermath of being shorn in the night, when it really is dark and nothing illuminates the cradle. It is here, where the holy and you and I and the angel, collapse together into renewal that doesn’t have to be circuitous. And shut up, put on the lambskin and limp along for a bit.

The systems of profane and holy are not opposing at all. They are both marbles that roll around on the same plane. The work, then, is produced in those occasions where the rage and memory stops the rolling from happening any more today. At the interstices where it stops, we spin through a cycle of aggression and destruction and guilt and reparation, till a tiny kernel of something better forces its way out of the snare.

On a Sunday, the girl on the cliff is turning and turning. With each turn her body become less and less, until a long plait of hair frays from the head and binds itself between the heavy air and the horizon-cage, that for today, could be more distant.

At 1.28am, I blow out the candle.

Hold that tongue /
In place
So the wafer won’t dissolve
Will not become part of that body /

My body served
A metal plate around the neck /

Empty but for me
And a fuse lit silently

1 Etel Adnan, “Master of the Eclipse,” (Northampton, MA: Interlink Books, 2009), 46.

2 Maggie Nelson, The Art of Cruelty (New York: WW Norton & Co, 2012), 107.