FORTRESS OBSCURA: twd an abject-oriented ornithology
Poetry
NICOLE SHUKIN on the findings of Dr. Sam Sheppard, an early 20th-century emulsion scientist for Eastman Kodak: Sheppard discovered that cattle who had eaten mustard yielded better film speeds… These sulfur sensitizers in mustard were of use to Eastman only if they had been metabolized by an animal and were lodged as accidental trace elements in its physiological tissue; in animal biology lay the irrational key to the technological success of filmic mimesis.
RUMINANT: the one who chews over and over, whose thoughts become flesh becomes image; grass or mustard greens, fleshy
What even is
it, to be one thing?
— hotdog sandwich! toast ’n’ jam!—
oil / gas / spread
mustard mustered
into
art & other forms
some of them
junk, others counterinsurgent
Technicians of the sensible
have always been military men:
camera obscura’s painters brushing fortresses
into life
Yet do NB: while not
all fortresses are born
visible, many can be made so
Once in an air port terminal
I saw
a bird
enter into a causal relation with a real pane
of glass
it was aesthetic!
my senses, pr actically re configured!
meanwhile, the bird,
the bird was screened
dead in plane sight while I too
looked on & on
Elsewhere, they’ve kept at studying the ants
learning not
how to follow but how to ontopower terrorist assemblages to life
a taut awlogy a hole game!
the same old empire shit
Having slept among objects
& their weirding onties
I sometimes am
preoccupied with
Reel Accidents
like
the mustard-seeded speed of film stock
a speed scraped
from ruminants heavy & hungering off leash from the holy! Bovinity! itself!
o, mobile colonizers o, industries of accidental origin o, production, cultural production
Anyway, Rome, as is well -known, was built over many days, &
from blood
loosed & spent
A kingdom made
of hands having been made
to work
But I suspect
you didn’t come to the poem
for birds once alive
or workers or violence workers or
our screens or the hours
btw empires
the ours there between
which still do kill
Even so, welcome!
shall we make toast?
I’ll admit I brought you
here for the jamb for red ajar
Because now the cops
own
the movie halls
sweet fruit pulverized, sticky
with gelatin mined from actual bone
Like the screen itself like film like
the hotdog sandwich or accident
both
of which do speak.