Schätzmüller & Gunn – November 2012

Ute Schätzmüller and Gregory Gunn traded art and words. Ute shared a number of paintings with Greg, including pieces from the “Malerei – daniel sparks (II)” and “Light and Void” series (see full collections here):

In response, Gregory wrote this quartet of poems:

Deity Stages – Part I

Religions fall short, man-
made dogmas don’t hold
an ounce of water, you linger,
diminutive skin-blistered god
secure in your genetic reliquary,
panoramic province
of the precocious down
south centre, perpetually brought
back to life in fervour’s earth-
shattering yet irredeemable
Maytime grandeur: evident in
every distinctive mirth overheard,
your specimen remains all told —
articulations of the miniature
shrieking deity, a segment
of each & every organism.

Part II

The tiny parts, these
essential exiguous bits,
our matrix developed by
seedtime-integrating rainfall
whose gentle blank drops
alleviate a single grapevine’s
fever or a region descends
now in delicate percussion
upon the earth’s tense
wizened vellum skin:
each droplet could
influence a mind to
presuppose a footprint
of the deity, but out
of season, yet in
your immediate advent
figure out life exists
per se sans recourse
to any underlying
principle.

Part III

Religious studies
your various spheres
stretch all the way
through the domains
of logic, beyond eyes
of spectators from
tainted murals,
or the truth-seeker’s
fault-finding
intolerance to grasp,
to surrender to pre-
ordained nonexistence:
light years beyond
even the psyche’s most
sinister recesses
in a liana-diadem
or symbolic plastic cross
you mutate into
a nurturer or significant
other to easy targets,
their behaviours
and their exposure —
all the emotional centres
in the red or in the black.

Part IV

So at this point in time,
following a wide range
of experiments having gone
awry, we rendezvous
at this high elevation overseeing
an edifying vantage point,
psychologically better equipped
to curb overzealous hypotheses,
that were shot down by
illustrious authorities, those
half-finished papers;
uncrossed t’s
and undotted i’s —
all approached anew
and refreshed once more
in you, Deus Loci, presence
henceforth divined, delayed,
and waited for, O spirited place,
a contemporary utopia,
encountered mano á mano.

* * * *

Gregory shared this poem with Ute:

Mythos II

Time-honoured love is perplexing,
imparted by hazy indications.
Immeasurable times they ride
on the wind just happened upon.
To cross a threshold, the wonder-
struck child, the amazed adult
must draw rein at assorted stages.
For example, you make me over me
into a sort of mead and swallow me.
I am Orphic strings reverberating,
leading me out of the labyrinth.
You are Ariadne’s thread.
Helios is over the river Styx,
arranging us as flickering naiads.
Aeolus stirs. As we become mortal
once more, we must be watched over
wrapped up in each other. Yields
& refusals of consent come to pass.
Assurances not open to the elements,
remaining latent. Septimus’ tearful vial
infused in oil on Mount Parnassus.

In response, Ute made this quartet of paintings, titled (clockwise from top left) “As we become mortal once more, we must be watched over wrapt up in each other” I and II; “You are Ariadne’s Thread;” and “Helios is over the river Styx, arranging us as flickering naiads”: