Towers of Columbia Diptych

Towers of Columbia Diptych
Title: Towers of Columbia Diptych [Twin Towers Manuscript (right); Freedom Tower Manuscript (left)] (left); Freedom Tower Manuscript (right)]

On the Artwork

On the Artwork


The above images are composed of original manuscript art created from the pages on which these writings were first written. The two pieces form a Diptych entitled, “The Towers of Columbia”

Twin Towers Manuscript Art

I am telling a story with this art piece, made of the original manuscripts on which the collection, district.Columbia was written. First off, the emphasis of stream-of-consciousness, spontaneous improvisation in writing as my primary writing practice, is illustrated here with the use of blotter action paint. This style of action paint, where the brush never touches the paper is meaningful, because it further gives importance to the truth of the creator, who is the perceiver and conceiver at once, in relation to the subject.

The destruction of the Twin Towers, was a defining moment in my life as an American youth, however, I only perceived it indirectly, outside of any direct mode of physical inception. The media, through which I experienced the raging disaster, is here given precedence over the content of the subject matter, hence the liberal use of spontaneous action blotter paint using ink. The use of ink is especially significant in that it gives form, in this action painting, to the blood and tears of the victims who were affected by the destruction of the Twin Towers. This includes especially the peoples of the Middle East, and particularly Iraq, whose society was devastated by a flood of violence and misinformation. The blurred writing overlain with blotter ink enunciates the misdirection of media and information with regard to the victims of the aftermath of this tragic debacle in world history. The deep blue sky above is an unnatural blue for the sky, representing an artificial environment with a full solar eclipse, further symbolizing the concealment of knowledge. The dark red underneath the towers stands for the blood of victims seeping underground, out of sight, where the true colors of their suffering continue to pour. The center space is left empty to signify the great abyss or gap which continues at the center of our existence in the West, and indeed all the world, as a result of the catastrophe which ensued in the wake of this infamous event.

Freedom Tower Manuscript Art

In the second manuscript art piece, the ink, once representing the fresh sweat and blood, splattered onto the finely penciled writing, has seeped through the paper. This signifies the fact that even if there is a new tower in the place of the old, the events which have come to pass in the wake of the Twin Towers devastation will appear in the construction of the new tower. Above, the great mystery, a UFO, blinks in a polluted sky, foretelling the haze of conspiracy which will perpetuate misinformation and a misdirection of military technology into the easily distracted, dramatic mind of the American public.

The unpainted manuscript pages beside the tower represent the clarity of judgment foretold and seen by the construction of the tower; that it is supported, in many ways, by the blood of those who have passed while the Death of American Freedom has unfolded after a decade of war, lies, and invasions both personal and public at home and abroad.

Preamble to district.Columbia

Preamble to district.Columbia


Inspired by the pre-colonial and pre-revolutionist metaphor for America, “Columbia,” a Goddess of Freedom, is an archetypal myth, once proudly personifying poetic optimism through feminine form. Through these writings, I personify the process of mythmaking as a dedication to compassionate awe and voiced protest in the historic confrontation with self and nation. The name Columbia was immortalized immediately before the Revolutionary War in 1775 by Phillis Wheatley, the first African American woman to publish her writing, in her poem, “His Excellency, General Washington.”

Written primarily based on a visit to Washington D.C., this collection is a vocal reclamation. These chronicles present a visitor returning to his home country, where visitation is defined by traversing an international land border. I represent my struggle to reclaim and recognize my unique voice. In these pages, I confront the realization that I am, in certain respects, an inheritor of the American way of life. Regardless, the inheritance is fraught with the psychological complexities of exile.

In this reclamation, I throw off vestigial principles of experience. I attempt to revision a new way of being through the living temperance of the written word, and specifically, my own practice of stream-of-consciousness writing. Such revision includes confronting a natural process of self-awareness, whereby self-expression revolutionizes into an identity with nature as a self-perpetuating source of renewal and life.

Spontaneous word creation, or improvisational writing, is a natural activity of the human mind. There is a power within that endless fount, that when regularly tapped as a spiritual practice, unleashes one’s surroundings with an ever-renewing energy. Such a practice motivates one personally, to interact with one’s immediate environment in dynamic ways. The reason for this effect is because in this practice, which actualizes into a way of being, the present moment becomes central. When the present is cherished with just significance, the mundane begins to breathe with new life.

The practice of improvised writing, in this sense, outlines a processional transformation in throwing off sterile notions of self and environment. district.Columbia begins by defining autonomous interactions between self and environment (as to parallel notions of the “New World” for pre-colonial Europeans and pre-revolutionist Americans) and ends with a declarative pronouncement; to create an openness to uninhibited spontaneity in personal creativity and a diverse awareness in social activity in our public spaces (as to parallel the current fomentation of creative social activity blurring the lines of public and personal art).

Borrowed from the Ancients


An unseemly drink
Borrowed from the ancients,

My uncouth vocation
Feeding its own pride in a mundane host

Now calling
Sure in the wild dirt

Following the wave’s break
Chilling the surf in its open, living mind

Shedding tears
Upside into the sky’s unbroken cavity

When fish jump
And break surface of mental clarity with life’s untamed spontaneity,

When life emerges
And takes of its observant few what prophecies are foretold by nature

And her swan glazes over
On the picture board

Hot with fangs of ice and a sudden peering
Into human evil

As a featureless rock
Craving a home in the swallowing dirt,

A ruthless desire
To unite with physical being

In the cavernous play
Amid the muck and cry

Fraying at the end of a lost piece
Strung around the backbone of a house emptied by work

And the second family, recalling memory from grandparents gone
Into the naked beyond,

Whose swaying grieved for the longing that rustled sheepishly
In the bed of an unmanly heart

And drank from the undone wilderness
As a bush of masculine hair stroked in brevity

Upon the ash tray mug of plain sex
And the attracted flower of gender

Flipping across duality’s lofty existence
In our upraised addictions

Failing our deepest intuitions
With personified haste

To die the impatient death of youth
And brush past the envisioned self

Struggling to go together with soul
To the summit of human glory

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