Affects of Opacity

This text was commissioned by Kudos at Arc Creative UNSW as part of the Kudos Emerging Writers Awards 2021 and responds to Spence Messih’s exhibition Lectus at Firstdraft, Sydney (12 Jan - 13 Feb 2022).

My Dziadek used to make beautiful stained glass pieces: windows and lampshades intricately decorated with flowers, birds and landscapes. I still harbour dusty memories of him: sitting hunched in a stool. Piecing together fragments to forge a legacy.

When a friend and I recently saw Spence Messih’s show Lectus at Firstdraft I was struck again by the intimacy and precarity of stained glass. Seven leadlight works were spread out generously along the gallery walls — Cinder, Idyll I–III and Sinew I–II (2021), and a small glass shelf from which one could take a sheet of sonnets by Vincent Silk titled Fibre Portraits. The space between the pieces gave them room to breathe and room to speak — to us, to each other, and to the histories imbued in glass, lead and language.

my back is just sore so
I wanted to sit on the floor

my floor purpose is that I was
getting a bit hot 

and the ground is cool

climate                        muddy
controlled                        archives

cathedral bells toll through walls

and we are ethereal by proxy

it really feels like we could sit
in here for a long time

i really

feel like putting my hands behind them so I
can see…            do you

feel that?

this one, on the left, kind of

feels like a river — because of
its wiggliness

what were you going to say?

i’m not sure

there’s something about
these ones… that

feels very murky

mmmm yeah  —

feels like being in a muddy
river

and you can’t quite see the bottom

feels like trying to open your eyes
underwater

There’s something about holding space for both visibility and opacity, to wanting to be seen and denying a gaze, to making oneself simultaneously legible and illegible. Two seemingly opposite things, desires, necessities can both be true and met at once. Often they are inextricable. Colonial thought and power demarcates by difference. By centring an imagined ideal — the white, cisgender, hetero body — all else is pushed to the marginal category of other, where one can only be one or the other. In Poetics of Relation, the late Martinique writer and philosopher Édouard Glissant writes that ‘If we examine the process of “understanding” people and ideas from the perspective of Western thought, we discover that its basis is [a] requirement for transparency. In order to understand and thus accept you […] I have to reduce.’ [1] Glissant acknowledges that while there is value in the theory of difference as a struggle against reductive thought, theories of difference may form their own reductive dichotomies. With this in mind, Glissant argues for the right to opacity, the right to ‘subsistence within an irreducible singularity’ [2] — the right to be murky, shifting and indeterminable.

There is abundance in utilising illegibility as a form of opacity. It “jam[s] the diagnostic protocols that […] survey and delimit.” [3] The title of Messih’s show Lectus is a Latin word, the past participle of legere, meaning ‘to read’ [4]. Yet, in all our attempts to read and understand Messih’s work, we found ourselves leaning more into feeling as a way of acknowledging without necessarily understanding. We sat on the floor for respite. We listened as sounds penetrated the gallery perimeter. We took our time. We spoke and we were silent. Our conversation about the pieces jumped and jerked, feeling interrupted thought. This incline towards affect produced unimaginable capacities. Sunlight leaked through the windows and purple and amber hues bled onto the pristine walls, constantly shifting: never still, never the same.

I prefer to read in fragments, in rhizomatic patterns. One may consider this methodology distracted and incomplete, but I stand by it as a fertile way of learning without needing to know everything. Rhizomes have nodes that shoot out other stems, which shoot out other stems, which shoot out other stems and in turn compose complex subterranean systems of nourishment and germination. The term rhizome was adopted by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in 1980 to articulate what they called ‘substantive multiplicities’ — that is, multiplicities that are not merely features of an accepted unity. Deleuze and Guattari contrast the rhizome with the root tree: the symbol of the tree assumes the notion of a singular foundation from which all structures are assembled by way of a binary division. Whereas, the concept of the rhizome has the capacity to offer a more revolutionary understanding of our “ontological processes as dynamic and mutating assemblages” [5]. 

i’ve read the first three
sonnets

i’ve read one and two;
mother and father

fibre portraits. so they are
sort of portraits… are they?

Poetry cannot be read too quickly and is not easily deciphered. The complexities of poetic language shoot off in almost infinite trajectories, lineages informed by both the affective nature of poetry and the madeness of language: poiesis. Poetic language is not taken for granted, it has limits and infinite bearings. Silk’s sonnets duplicate something yet evade it. Bodies are posited and snatched back like elastic, like sinews pulled too taught. I read I. as mother and II. as father. Still, I know that considered methods of care and revolution complicate our understandings of biology. The two of them stack [6]. I feel that each sonnet is a vessel, already full and waiting to be filled — waiting to fill me too. A handbag filled with two wine bottles at the nurse’s head [7].

everyone in my family has these remnants of
stained glass windows that my dziadek used
to make

do you

feel like… do you have any fragments of his work?

my dad has a box full of an
unfinished window, just bits
of glass that he cut out

it’s hard when someone
leaves something unfinished

Even in rhizomatic fragments, Messih’s work is not easy to read. Still, there are layers of legacies submerged in the glass. A body becomes indecipherable; becomes a mass of tissue; becomes a mound of dirt; becomes a dog-eared hymn; becomes a pane of glass. The very process of becoming never ends, and understanding is never finite. One sits with the possibility of opacity. One accepts that fragments are not innately incomplete, but part of something bigger, something too great to be discerned.