SCAFFOLDING Jeroen Nieuwland

SCAFFOLDING

Jeroen Nieuwland

2013

Covert art - Jasper Spoelstra

A try at wiring house Wires crazy, a web, by spider of some monster measure; wires that run & have been run, through & throughout the structure of the house; house, architecture, scaffolding of cables, walls, & junk, interwoven with pneumonic memories, illness of mnemonic tic, pathway that exists from counting, structure of the hyper-ordered mind; her mind is mirrored in the layers of her ledgers, squared journals noting the shapes & places of all her boxes, remedies & pharmakon; & every pill she takes that deviates her into whatever slight new difference; she pulls some string out of her monad head, extends it into cablepaths of corrugated machinations spreading nomadic distribution through her house; the mess of cables, wires, tubes holds up her house, spiderweb of scaffolding, pushes outward into buttress of inside her skull; she is organised amidst a mess of stuff that occupies the structure of the house, the place her body moves in, around; she counts tunnels, configures pathways amidst the slowly growing grime of unwashed objects; her dates are simple three letter combinations, hung from complex computations; her mind punctures compulsively, itself, “thoughts of the world can never envelop the world”, like Pi, the number which goes on; infinity traverses the thought that thinks it; her order increases in focus & travel, her thoughts cut through layers of stuff, threading dust, thrust of ideas, heavy objects with corners, broken washing machine, language stuck onto paper, language stuck in her screen;

A try at super stage Sings solid, more hard than ever, nearing slightest whisper; she will have started & when begun will find no cause to stop, until she will have found herself collapsed, her voice collapsed, body, epileptic seizure; members of her band & members of her crowd, disintegrate. Voices a bubble of the darkest or the brightest void, intensity of zoom, assembled mesh of bodies & the room pulled tight as metal woven cable, walking wire; she sings despair, subtracts her person from despair, creates & constitutes a block of opaque pulse; congealing with guitar, drums, bass, sweat, instruments of sunken affect; her voice pulls taught the potential particles of impersonal ordeal, present in the crowd of people there, & in her self of crisp & frequency; her fractal frequencies of voice feed back on to her surface, the surface of her body becomes her fractal frequency of voice; her body, surface, will have convulsed, regurgitated with precision, plank of chaos, mercury veins in a nomadic distribution, injected with contrast, silver wires of certain shifting setting; her sacrifice is not intentional, of any kind of supposition; multi-directional collapse; the folding of her surface outward; her figure, apparatus of shivers; disintegrating notions of beginnings; the body endless inward bending; her crowd of bobbing audience, she sacrifices, for her body & stretches her frame toward her outside voice; the sacrificial crowd receives their sacrificial voice; in frenzied movement, frozen moment, tautness of a kind of silence, tectonic shifting of some plates of friction; colliding blocks of bodies, song, & fracture,

A try at soul jar Disappears, almost before she falls, into Niagara. C sits on ledge erect & safe, full of fun & camera. She disappears before she falls. But she vanishes long, & she falls with different speeds; fast & slow & still & silent, & full of interruptions, with the roars, of massive, rushing water. A. does not know why she takes a photo, takes a photo of her falling friend. The falling girl becomes a part of, falls into, inside the imaged frame. (In another story, there is a girl stuck in a painting, slowly fading out of sight). C disappears almost before she falls, speedy, straight down, does not linger for a look around; the frame of the picture of C falling into Niagara falling, becomes the soul jar, for her soul. Her friend does regular fidgets, left pinkie, neck of tendon, left rear shoulder side, perform their minimal repetitions, with wild differences, twitch, jerk, pull, tear shift, growl. She starts to growl so hardly not at all, so full. She has not gathered in her mind the ease with which C fell, her body understands still, C as still sitting on her ledge, light as a feather falls from bird, light as a bird alights from perch, falls upward, humming, helicopter leaf. C does not flip flop, fudge or falsify; minces no words; does not make bones, does not wind up, spins no unnecessary yarns, she falls down, & does so properly, direct without delay; as one would tend to do. A., all flustered twitch & pull, all violent frozen blubber in the sun, all pudding nailed to wall, goes over to the famous ledge, stares down & snaps repeatedly the photo photo photo, picture frame of water, where C. fell, where it is not quite raging yet, yet flowing, on its way to raging tumble, over its own edge. A. snaps her pictures, pulls her image trigger, C. disappears before she falls, A. stands & trapped, compulsive her repulsive trigger finger clicks the snaps, snaps shots, shoots frames, pictures Kodachrome, reproduces its own movement, stammers stammer, stutters different shades of soul jar microtone,

A try at poet clinic Mad, not quite, when brought in, ago, the world ajar, a jar. The people call her poet, with a big P. She does not paper pen, sits mostly frozen on her bed. Her father wails, laments; tries to forgive a kind of sin; each time he visits he cries out. This day the poet’s father comes around, the men in white coats grab him by his arms. They are tall and lanky, he is round & short. Strange propositions bubble from his mouth; they sound potentially like fact or fabrication. “Blessed are those who sit?” “Why do you refer to them as idiots when you talk about this place? They are children who refuse to speak.” The centogenerian is sat in a crib. His style is baby. His skin is smeared with ashes, sometimes he salutes straight & evil forward. C thinks of molecules. C does not speak, hardly at all, but thoughts slam into & out of her head, on overlapping moments. “If the molecules were particles and not individual people, your revolution might have a chance of happening.” The man who had come in father, screaming mad man, now preaches mad with twisted arms. “Wednesdays here are more boring than Sundays it’s the Master’s fault. Wednesday is the Day of the Master’s seminar.” The Poet sits dumb on her bed because, when she speaks, he can only any more make sense. The Father stands & exclamates, gesticulates, because, for one, she has important things to say; & two, they are not coming out, he sounds like some absurd cartoon. The centogenerian sits put & playful, pouts, & darkens sometimes a passing brow or causes belly vertigo, when an irregular visitor for some other patient, in passing down a hall, recognizes his wasted frame from long ago,

A try at growling mad She slides against her wall, slides with her back into between a duvet & a white bed sheet; he growls at her, a slow continuous growl, almost a humming, coming from nearly everywhere, a plane of threat & squeeze into her face, a pretty pleasing gargling of the throat strings, love song on the disc of wind that cuts the air at latitude of neck & face. She stares, ahead, at him, through him, middle distance, into a spot of air behind the man, imagining the parallax, the shift, between her present middle-distance stare from tucked between the sheets & her stare at that same point were, in this same moment, she hangs, around his neck, with arms around his neck, head resting on his shoulder or on her forearms on his shoulder. He moves forward, throwing his body somehow right onto the bed, scorpion tail, snake head; she winces & she does not flinch a thing; his body ruminates, moves left to right & back and forth, slow as turtle pace & silent but with the pressure of a pushing draft & always facing her. His feet tell patterns, & when they stop his words take up a scribbling, that, meant perhaps as words or thoughts express a dog in heat, a dog that plays at terrified, is terrified of play. He walks away from, after hours, her room, basic four cornered deal, a simple wooden bed. She waits for him to enter his own house; she has already helped herself inside, sits on a bench that holds her well, around her piles of broken household objects. Extended arm, extended arm, flat face, erased from affect, she holds his head against her chest; he hangs the full weight of his head into her hands, he sobs with tearless heaves, he turns to right & fall his hands & fingers into themselves, into their lap, head hung down, with baldness pointing into his pile of broken mirrors. She walks upright, she trails herself behind, she wanders in a straight line, into outside his door. The bald head screams into its potted hands, practices words, hollers hands; the body slump heaves hiccups all directions, all at once, faces face forward, widening his smiling face until it cracks,

A try at river stream With dress soaked quite, thru, C has sometimes, been coming home. Nearby, the river has been streaming over banks, onto a steaming land of crust, dry dust. & from above aridity pulls droplets out of sky, turning the air into fast moving clouds of fog. You can try to be proper soaked, person soaked with water, instead of fish on dry land. Full time apneist. Lungs spunged, laryngospasm, gasp burble, breath drench. Thoughts stop short, flat; thoughts spike frenzy, warbled singularity. Water does not give for soak for gasp for graceful drop. A truly drowny person does not shout or struggle, is not troubled or distressed. Cs mouth opens onto the horizontal sky above, eyes tough milky glassy. The rushing water, but, pushes massively Cs body, sideways, downways, slightly frontward, in her back, so that the chest protrudes, the arms fall backways, the head the neck snap backhow, superstar struck pose, mega superhero pose, king of the world Titanic pose. Death by drown drown, people say the pleasantries, mellow, dark glow, slow fade, ago. Death by drown drown, people wake the screamzies, nightmare horror. Until it is turned off, her head is music. The music is not turned off, her head, her head. The force of water swirls her hand around, stirs a whirlpool into the streaming water; Cs feet hit some top layer of river bed, her body rests soon, as if comfortable, reclining finely, a person soaked, become the movements of the waters. No longer C affecting to be watery, but water flowing in the shape of fleshy bone. The sky right where the river hits its banks, is a wall of fog, inland the desert of an emptiness with cacti soaking up vicarious, the river’s flow, the river bowing forward, self-effacing sprezzatura! The river flows in local forms of cactus flowers, saturated skin, soggy bones, and desert wind,

A try at cracking raven skull Whether, if, might; whether it might. She is trying for a certain noise. The bones of the thing were already cracked; to the dust of the bones of the thing. She is testing, for one, a certain sound and, too, a grind of dust; a strip & slide of what does happen. It means, she cracks the skull against a root, she smacks the skull against a cement pavement. she does not do it for discomfort; this comfort; she rattles wracks & rats the skull; runs rats right thru, flit fast than said; the crow it twitches tenses; all she only did at first, is only look at. She cracks bones, shuffles dust, breaks her big bird test stuff. She cracks more bones, she shuffles dust, she mucks up big her bird test stuff; patches, smudges of big bird, flatter into a muck of shuffled dust; desists, interlaced with quiet panic, she tries to calm the goddamn open sky, it only widens vertigo, as if the sky at same time, zooms in, & steps mega back. She wishes at this juncture, near this root & concrete patch, a murder of crows, like feathers of a bird, was spread, in such an epileptic style, so she could try, in many times, the many ways a crow’s skull cracks, the dust grinds bones, the sun gets caught in beads, or twitch, or flitted feathers. Fatigued with bore, she gets; lands belly first, nose, forehead, flat on a patch of grassy root. Spreads arms flattens arms, outwards, flat into the dirt. Stretches legs, pushes toenails, into topsoil. Forgets her mind of mess of mucky feathers; becomes instead all twitcher, feeble flap, turtle flipping on its back; vacillations out of whack,

A try at raising raven She grips the death of the bird lying bent out of shape, on a patch of grassy root; she has the bird by the wing; it has her by the fingertips; the wing folds back out as if one half lazarus; she calls it crow but does not know its proper name. An air, full with vacuum, from taut brightness of all sun. The feeling like her deep-inside shrill goddamn Descartes-man. The cloudless sky, tired, languid; the open sky, the openness around of field, and space for endless traveling sound that comes in flits & streaks of crisp, broken, horizontal sheets. She hangs herself. She climbs a partway tree; rests the broken raven onto a gnarling branch; two wings out for balance; expedited take-off. She hangs her front half / back half, over the branch; angles from drapery to stiff upper body, knees tucked slightly inward, rudders; stretches flaps & wings her arms. For learn to fly, for learn the bird, for fly within the sky,

A try at tracing alphabet Found, when dead, with pen in hand trailing off into an untraceable line. C, slid slightly, from her heavy chair, head back tilted into the air, mouth a small gap, pen on paper, in light grasp, as if both release & certain hold. Surrounding with, in death, her absence, the letters, in hundreds that surround her; the letters that verge, in piles, into where she be, as she has seeped into their ink or parts of paper where they cannot reach. Pointless traces of entanglement. C had sent letters to all kinds of friends. Her letters are not stories, ponderings, accounts; her letters are practices at single letters of a minimally shifting alphabet. C had not known precisely where to start, she started where she did not remember having had begun. Does also not recall when she stopped making sense. Starts creating, instead of paragraphs & sentences from letters; starts creating, letters & lines from letters. Copy-book schoolbook between-two-lines-letters; tightrope-trapeze line letters, electric wire safety-line letters. She swoops into a language she does not know. She begins with letters Roman alphabet; ends with partings of the, from the, page, the squiggle, hardly signalling a trace; or bold; or wildly patterned. Somewhere between the fully cogent epistle & instances of random seeming squiggle, C cleaves a speed enmeshed with sensible & possibilities for sensible. C plays with variations infinitely present in the alphabet that slowly becoming alphabet, become anew another alphabet. A tendency, as if infected by a fictional disease; concocted, yet one that people somehow believe. C is infected by her alphabets & in turn traces them into process of decay. C writes her letters into ruin, collapses her K into a ruin, doodles H’s into whispers, scrawls her C into a squiggle. The changes are not planned but neither are they abrupt or random. C writes outward; shifting overlapping seas of ripples, varying in minimal degree, affecting minimally, each other. Inversely, she is surrounded with, much of her room is buried under, piles of received, unopened letters; with more than unwound majuscules & minuscules. Her letters received remain unread. Her letters received have proper complex sentences, the paragraphs the arguments; & questions. C’s corners are padded by these unread letters, big patches of her floor are carpeted with letters. Why you write but no reply? Why you no reply? C, slid position, slightly outward, reckons negative, sunken into about to have sunken into. C’s correspondents smell already soon, a stink of absence, a correspondent phantom pain of amputeetered vacillation, vanishing of morphogenerating letters. C found, when dead, with pen hand trailing an untraceable line; her mouth a lovely grimace; its outline forming possibilities of letters, any number of,

A try at breaking & piling Beginning finally when it was just about, to begin, too late, she could not not begin no more, C stacks her hopes against the odds, grinds her odds into a frenzy. Moving methodically yet without outline, without drawing board C enters a destructive tract, with firm & moment movements, her breathing easy, even, her eyes open unblinking; or shut & to corners wildly pulsating. Breaks what crushes, shatters, rips apart. Slashes with a knife, what is too tough for her skin-and-bone hands, hammers with a pounding. Mattress slash, the feathered room, heavy pile of wardrobe MDF boards, clothes torn hand by hand, curtain stripped from rails & ripped apart. Kitchen space a cloud of spice and herbal trace, a pile of spices, pans, pots, glass, cutlery & cups. C moves from edges of her living room concentrically more centrally. Turns over dinner table, hammers into table paws; pulls down curtain down, quarters the four chairs; vivisects & autopsies & guts two sofas; topples, onto top of the pile, in the middle of the room, her one bookcase facing her one other bookcase; topples onto middle pile her other bookcase facing no longer her first bookcase; rips slightly at wallpaper, dawdles indecisively, strays unwound, uncertainly, meanders into bathroom room, hangs herself, wet towel, for some time over an edge of a bathtub; locks the door and waits for an appointment to arise, a visitor to come and knock; C sits onto a closed toilet manually folding certain pleats into her pants’ pleats, presses with her hands and rubs direct down. Presses, rubs. Unbuttons up & rebuttons down her shirt; uncollars then folds down the collar of her shirt; unties thus reties very perfectly the laces of her shoes; speculates for a moment, had C long hair, she would braid her hair in two; nostalgia for a moment that was never there. C sits straight on the toilet, head high back straight, fingers pointing forward resting on her thighs. C waits to be beamed up; C readies for a visitor to come and knock.

A try at organising things neatly C tries to organise her house, the objects in her house. C lays out lines of objects, begins in one room, begins again, until in every room the objects have been laid out line for row. When entering there is a hall, with right a bedroom, left a bathroom, straight ahead a living room and through that on the left a kitchen. Wherein C opens all her cupboard doors, reaches in with both her hands at equal level equal pace, the fingers alternate to grab like tendons then like vices the foodstuffs living on the front row, or in hidden shadows. The best she can is what it looks like when C is done; label-facing spices two rows deep, multi-shaped cartons of teas bricked neatly as a wall, behind which baggy packs of flour, baking soda, sugar. C does not change the Seinfeld wall of cereal, she rearranges condiments, stacks mini-packs of multi-flavoured jam, places on top of peanut butter, peanut butter. Inside her fridge a puddle leaks unevenly to one side. So for her books & bookshelves, sofas chairs & table, desk, C creates the even lines of parallel and equanimity. C fluffs & beats her sofa pillows beats her carpet. Lays her carpet beater in the hall, parallel the sole left / right shoe, the doormat. C meditates on throwing out half-empty variations on a theme of shower gels, instead she hides them in ascending order, behind a bottle full of shampoo & a bottle full of body gel. Three toothbrushes, one unknown, are arranged on an only bathroom shelf, along with two toothpaste tubes, one plastic Gillette razor refill cartridge with one remaining blade. Ten rolls of toilet paper rolls sit in the corner of the bathroom shelf against the wall above the toilet. Before C lies herself onto her floor she opens up her wardrobe door she pulls open the drawers, pulls out her drawers. C folds her shirts and socks and drawers and pants & pieces onto their kind and into piles & piles. Having worked contra disorder frenzy, C sits, by hardly denting, in the middle of the middle of the sofa. She thinks about the puddle in her fridge. The puddle & her body, the only objects left uneven in the house. On her desk, C eyes a row of pens, soldiers fatigued, unto death arranged. C lies herself onto her floor precisely alongside carpet lines, with arms straight down, with palms flat on the ground. C slides up her hands up, to where her elbows were, between two lines of carpet, 90° approximately, a strike-a-pose, a doll about to push upright. C’s one eye, lazy, weaves wayward between the straight(ened) lines, a drape threads dark, slant penetrating sunlight with slant grimy shadow. Trying to forget itself, C’s body presses into this rug, emerging and collapsing, nearly, in & out of trembling, regular as quantum clock.

A try at stroking C edges minimally direction sofa armrest, rests her arm so slightly ever over barely type of sofa armrest, C strokes ever so ever. This feels workable, opportunity like. In the get up & rush out, C brushes her homeroom-plant, hallway-wall, her corner-door, her outside-door, with calves, shins, back-hands, shoulders. On a street she turns the sun onto her face & still as a performance artist / mannequin, she stands, next to a lamppost, traversed by sounds of the construction of an urban street scene. C moves from one to one foot to crush precisely with a twist of toes a relinquishing fat moth & when it happens, C stretches out her hand toward, who happens by, a figure & who in that moment stretches, distracted, hurried, out her left arm to free her hand up to her head, to scratch her nose, to hear her phone, pull at her ear. C’s back of right hand brushes along the figure’s left three middle fingers & they exchange barely skin and touch. The figure almost distracted out from her distraction, continues, puzzled about did something happen just? C’s hand remains for some full seconds suspended, partly, on its way back from fully stretched, uncertain if it had meant to friction against this figure’s fingers. C leans for inhalation into the meeting of her back & line of lamppost, she fondles very carefully her right-side little finger, she strokes, with her left-side middle finger, circles around, the little bone protruding from her elbow, presses against the underside of her right knee, pushes flat her tongue into the oxter of her arm,

A try at lovesong, or Wormrot & Dirge Dirge hums for the passing of Wormrot. Dirge drivels a mournful hymn for Wormrot’s moving on. What is a neighbour called who vacates to two blocks down? Dirge sometimes screams in a street in a night (when there are no people around, when it is cold, with thick absence). This settles his one scream into a cold black, the spray of a sneeze drifts into air, an aerosol of a spray can dispersed, venom of snake into air. Wormrot crawls sometimes on the floor of his house, forgets his eyes of blind spot, becomes all over, the empty marker his head. “Fucking fierce so what?!” Sometimes Dirge screams into Wormrot’s belly, with his face pressed into Wormrot’s belly. Sometimes Wormrot writhes his body into Dirge’s face, writhes his belly or the inside of his thigh, or the cheek of his butt, or face, into the side or front of Dirge’s face; or his armpit or backside into Dirge’s face. “All go no emo” Tend to, Wormrot & Dirge slide obscenely gently, into each other. Tend to, Wormrot & Dirge stand on their respective patios, with a lookout across a partway-distance, slant either in or away from their respective location. Sometimes when Wormrot remains, parsed, these two blocks from Dirge, Wormrot scribbles the unsent postcard, sometimes Dirge places, alone, the tea for two on his coffee table,

She takes her language off She takes her language off, & then she takes the words off language, undresses them, undoes them of their sensible layer of preservative; infuriating image behind transparent something inside/outside. She tramples on their naked bodies, tiny beings, squirming, crisply, beneath her feet, like ants or what? Her words do not at all mind being trampled on, she sits in them, with hands on knees; the broken pieces of her alphabet crawl up her body; rest sometimes on her skin, & disappear into her holes of skin & cavity. She is unsure about her situation. sometimes she gasps & cries, but never with the sense & meaning, always with the burbles & the sighs. Her broken language is her blanket & her itch, it keeps her warm & cools her off & makes her twitch. & for her words & syllables she has become a spacious habitat, no longer throwing them around & pointing them at things like spears & flaccid cock. Her people, the ones she knows, put her away, but they speak gibberish. They send her to a big square building, in a woods; with white & with around it trees of wood & silver lines. She does no longer find her way out of the woods, her building where she dwells, is made of squares, disappearing, white, into each other; a square building into a door into a floor of square, into a square of tiled squares, into a bathroom square of square glass cabin, into the white square tiles line the floor & hallway walls, & in the rooms, her room, paper on the wall with squares of white, made from horizontal lines with then a hint of vertical; even her showerhead is square, but sometimes into the sink or toilet bowl, she hangs her head, she droops into where, here, there are the curves & she, sometimes, she hangs her head & stoops her body, for hours first, then hourly, into a patch of curves,

we In the arms of the two, the two rock & rock, in the arms of the two, & there is a space in between all the other space, where, here, all the things sway, it can’t be helped, yes, like a breeze, through a tree, only in that spring that perhaps never took place you were never sure if it did, & sorry because I know, breeze is not allowed, but here it is & it moves, for one moment every moment, only to the extent that it differs from itself, shivers with difference, cold not with indifference, chill; cold of expanse, of a ripple for the edges, wherever they are perceived, always about to fizzle out & from wherever centre bulge again, I say sorry because I hide myself from you, at once as transparent as see-through as a drawing on a glass plate, I say sorry because I see you & I cannot start outside & close my fist inside of you, I bow my head not to apologise for my body, but for a grace of a bowed head, but for a friction of barely touching skin, one forearm of the right arm along one gentle forearm of the others left arm, but for the curves of bodies that fit well into bows, but for that with my bow I hook into, slightly, your being, I tug at you with sharper than & through the fabric into which I bow, I tug, we do not bow to step out of the way, we fold each other twice & twice, each self away oneself, toward oneself, each self away each other to ward to warn each other, each away toward same time, colliding counter ripple into counter ripple, vibrant matter into vibrant matter, I bow to buzz precisely, sandpaperly, through your surface stuff, you buzz you hesitate & rush within your falling folding, we are torn it does not hurt, it hurts where we are whole, this does not hurt as well this wholeness that is not, this tear where we are separately I & where we are, conjoined as two,

she she is the saddest of her soul, she is not sad like tears or scowl or stone, she is the saddest only very little & only largest, only moment, very slightly, over only all the surface & throughout perimeter. Her body conjures up some tears, it’s funny because she’s sad & her body conjures up some tears. But this is not like billiard balls, her sadness does not cause her tears, her tears are not what made her sad, her sadness is not sad, her tears are tears but are not sad, a shiver takes her body once, so that a tiny tidal wave, & then it’s gone before it’s gone, her head rests back against her seat, her train protests against a curve, a dog shakes, water from its fur, but only once, as if then frozen into time. Her tears are out of open eyes as round as coloured Persian plates, her tears are very wet but hardly trickle down her face, one from one eye, one from one eye, & her others into inside her open eyes, she grips her seat into her fingers, she breathes her breath slow & forceful into the air into her mouth & windpipe, lungs & body blood. She falls apart 1000 times, she feels a fullness of herself pressing against herself, so that she spills a little over herself, her air, her tram seat there, the colours of her cosmos, she grips her sides of seat, she figures she is ebb & flow, &/or a piece of Onyx coloured Plexiglas,