selections from Edges & Fray
//
Virginia Woolf wrote, “A book is not made of
sentences laid end to end, but of sentences built, if
an image helps, into arcades and domes.” I’d like to
think that Woolf understood about refuge, how we
might come to language as architects of relation,
collecting ourselves, a series of intersections,
seeking to build the largest, most intimate
architecture.
//
This slowness of building. Reformation
and sight. Site materials, presence,
perspective as it casts.
//
Where I forage feeling into shape into sound;
where I am exactly here, everywhere, and
nowhere at once.
//
Restoration
[res-tuh-rey-shuh n]
a means of healing or restoring health. Renewing of
something lost. The reparation of a building.
See: restore. To health of wholeness. Touch that cures,
after decay.
//
But let us begin at the beginning. With not the
word, but the animal. I am in pursuit of your
animal and mine. We meet in the breathing. From
where the word came and is going.
//
An archive is a record of structures. A catalog of
correspondence between something whole and a
part of that whole. An archive is the teeming
mouth of the largest unsayable. It is from where we
begin and through where we are going.
//
Some things they obtained: copper wire, comic
strips, thread, yarn, button holes, stamps,
newspaper remains, horse hair, bones, burlap
strips, handwriting, small bolts cotton, snake skins.
The colors: red, amber, blue, red, red, black, red,
white, yellow, blue, white.
//
When a nest is hardly recognizable as a nest. A
leaf-warbler, a wren, a woman. Moving material
from her environment toward her design. In the
undergrowth, overhanging banks, ditches.
//
Without this convergence and resulting
conversation, what would I be?
//
A dish-shaped paragraph, a cup, a bowl, a hollow.
The simplest cavity, a cushion.
//
I build the body with ephemeralities. Even before a
bird begins, she will make molding movements,
rotating her form in the shape her nest will
eventually become.
//
Gather strands and strips, carry them, weave
them through, all the shapes your body
can make. I hear this weaving. Shaped
from the inside, bright filaments brought
to the page and contoured.
//
A seemingly self-contained word as it reaches
out toward the infinite. The ghostly trace at the
margin of all things. Everything at the interval: that
place that houses an animal’s interiority. The
interval: all memory, desiring movement and
enclosure at once. An architecture that breathes.
//
What passed through, passes, gets caught, drained,
removed, tossed aside.
I write because I want to touch your thinking.
All photos © Danielle Vogel
These photos were taken during residencies at The California Academy of Sciences (CAS) and The Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at Berkeley (MVZ).
- CAS 10747. Pipilio. Nest Collected: 26 May 1962
- CAS 10764. Nest Collected: 17 June 1892
- MVZ 4185. California Towhee. Nest Collected: 28 April 1920
- CAS 10762. Blue-headed Vireo. Nest Collected: 1 June 1890
- CAS Archivist Slip
- CAS Archivist Slip
- CAS 9845. Chinese Bulbul: Nest Collected: 18 April 1939
- MVZ 4270. Calypte Anna. Nest Collected: 20 July 1943
- MVZ 4185. California Towhee. Nest Collected: 28 April 1920
- CAS 10764. Nest Collected: 17 June 1892
- CAS 10762. Blue-headed Vireo. Nest Collected: 1 June 1890
- CAS 9367. Shrike. Nest Collected: 1912
- MVZ 4905. Painted Bunting. Nest Collected: 12 June 1928
- MVZ 1119. Musicapa Cassini. West Africa. Nest Collected: December 1911
A note from the author:
Since 2010 I have been writing a book titled Edges & Fray. It is a cross-disciplinary project composed of essay- fragments and photographs. Within it, I relate the construction of bird nests to the acts of reading and writing—all three as complex gestures of the art of archiving, composition, and habitation.
