A Conversation with a Conversation
Artist Statement: A Conversation with a Conversation is a collaboration between Thomas Helm and Jamie Macleod Bryden. It is, first and foremost, the document of an afternoon well spent in Jardins Laribal, Barcelona. Images of the park - a statue of a women, a font where the water spurts out of a god’s head, pools of water dribbling into other pools of water - somehow found their way into the text.
The ominous pen made its way for me.
Which world will you dive into this time?
Everything already feels like it’s here.
This window of nature and time that
Lies before you.
Opening onto a green horizon,
The mischievous River God’s palace
Is home to every kind of flow:
The young, the old, and the nearly born.
All are bound by the Mother,
Who tends to her flock. We hope that she is loving,
Tender, and not severe or worse...
Indifferent.
What we do with time is our concern,
Or so the materialists say.
The dreamists, with their float-away parasols,
And their afternoon liqueurs,
Are too busy dreaming to respond.
It’s all here for you to judge/determine.
All time laid flat and carved in stone.
The mind can ponder it at any point.
The mind will see the past. The future
Is there too, we just can’t see it yet.
We lack the tools.
They say we have a double face;
One face for the past,
And one more for the present.
But how we carry on
With so many visions bearing down on us
Remains a mystery.
Does this face that knows the past see the light of day?
Enjoy conversation with its counterpart?
Or is it locked away because of horrors known?
Not its fault. The two must converse
For the journey to bear fruit.
Do other faces creep into the conversation?
The face of social pressures, of discerning
Right from wrong
From the cities cluttered with experience.
The face of the Mother Goddess, who,
Indifferent or no, ensures
The nature of the conversation can only change.
All of this we cannot know. Yet still we
Wield the pen, attaching reason to a Nature
Who never asked us to in the first place.
We seek to tidy because we must,
A momentary closing
Of the infinite box, only for it to be opened
Again
And again
And again.
