Text for The Missing Eye
Mattia Parodi & Piergiorgio Sorgetti
136 Pages
24,5 x 31 cm
Soft cover
Text by Ginevra Shay
Design by Giovanni Murolo
ISBN 979-12-80177-03-2
Published by Witty Books, Italy March 2021
In a sloping back garden grass edges up to an old rectangular pool. Steps run across the length of a short side, sinking into murky green water. Grapefruits fall creating a plopping sound, alligators swim underneath as the fruit bobs in and out of the surface. A heavy red and purple storm looms above the surrounding trees, deciding whether it will break or pass, a shape bred to be gently suffocated.
The physical sensation remains
Imprinting weather on the double-sidedness of a dream. Then I remember to ask, where are we going?
A cobb’d field stretches along the highway, next to sunswept flickerwood with worm-webbed limbs, worms limbering in tents haunting foliage. Four teens stand barefoot on the bridge, they wave then stare across the reservoir, as if they could choose, the mud buried beneath their fingernails.
If the dream is the liberation of the spirit the walk is a physical becoming: streets embodying the flowing of time, opening layers of pavement the body re-forms with every transgressive step, until finally in open air, skin becomes skin, when before it was phantom or shard.
In the dirt of night, I wake in my grandmother’s bedroom. I get up and look out the window into the back garden. Figures dance under mammoth oaks, chase each other, weave in between shrubs, just beyond the brush at the edge of my vision. Their radio static bodies levitate a curved path, never indicating the exact loudness, between the room and garden.
Textures rush down the throat
Sounds ooze filling the mouth
Plural eye in a shadowless sun
The unwritten memo for the next millennium imprinted on the backs of eyelids
Staying still the day holds its shape, after being stretched beyond measure, stretched the most it has in one hundred years. Then comes the refrain.
Water refracting turns the grapefruit into a dozen suns peeking through now quickly moving clouds.
The distinction between dreams and walks become harder to define. Aren’t they both a kind of haecceity, unique and completely singular in each iteration? Defining their boundary is a thin line of perception, a decision between what’s delineated as voluntary and involuntary sensation. The feeling is similar, a pre-cinematic suspension, like grapefruit bobbing on the surface of a pool, physically connecting water and sky beyond reflection.
At twilight the luminous move away from us. The gaze becomes soft, as the visible world leaves the eye, everything near becomes far. Unresolving the day.
Orange gets sucked from the sky.
