I touched down in Italia at the exact moment of the first “attacco” on the World Trade Center in New York City. Trying to comprehend, absorb, respond to and live with this “charnel ground” event, subsequent events and the ensuing War on Terror – along with the other denizens of this fragile planet – was the koan of my residency at Civitella. The ongoing conundrum for the artist continues to be the question Theodor Adorno’s dictum raises about whether it is possible to create after Auschwitz, after atrocity? We continue to witness ongoing atrocity and I believe we must, more than ever, respond and stand by our artistic work. We need to create alternative realities to the ongoing karmic cycles of violence and suffering and attempt to break those cycles – to make cultural, linguistic, political, imaginative interventions all the time. I wrote three manifestos while at Civitella, one of which was entitled Women Arise and Vocalize! (Is there anyone under that chador?)…

• It was in the middle of my life I read the world as • Book — faded gold stone dramas wind • Which parts are doctrinal on the one hand • And then you are free to live and interpret as you will • A philosophy gathered here • That’s to say relevant to say I’ll nay • Get shuttled or shoved by fear again • Denied in catastrophic nuit, noche, notte • Night and whatever extra bite for Javanese-Sanskrit sounding • Doth bring – calendar? cosmology? • No one can keep you from the gate • Collective civilization brings in love or • Destroys itself in kinship reckonings • Care is Huan and Human both and told this by • Biccolage or French cuff, philosophers’ • Gloom or sound oft foiled by threat then • Swims outta erotics full of war • A breeze blowing towards the land • Towards charnel ground of death • Syngamy of ether of appropriate time and place • Of lines never drawn, roads not buoyed •  But trawl a bit, cast a net for the others •  From Middle Dutch traghelen, to drag •  Travel far, not a wine that does not travel •  Thy medium loving in the direction of propagation •  The ice breaks, you are once again at sea and holy •  Pneumatically sealed on your boddhisattva path •  Air gets in the interstices you want to escape •  From while you are in an act of cross-fading •  Not a revealed religion but a walk on a wilder side •  You might survey your life from here •  The Himalayan flower, the spikenard? •  A book with no titular readiness •  Exposed to terror of horrible magnitude •  A book-that’s sans words •  Humectant person on the fertle plain • Delirious, the night is delirious you are •  Relegated to the lower animal realms •  Rein In The Doubts with your absent books •  Nothing unjust, nothing to declare, what’s the fear? •  Go up to the wall in your citadel •  Walls have ears in the desert night •  Offer a patois here a patina of humility