swifts  &  s l o w s · a quarterly of crisscrossings

words share boundaries
Daniel Barbiero & Ron Morosan

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The 19th century never ended. A crisis was declared when someone discovered that breath wasn’t a thing, that an idea had no volume. Images move over to make way for concepts, as the picture is replaced by what we say about it. Ideation without representation is alienation. Or something. An eye for a thought and a truth for a truth; something eidetic for something you can hold in your hand. Whether the world is turned up or upside down, it’s a sophisticated folktale all the way through, a teleology without an end. And in the meantime, the tragedian holds forth while the farceur waits his turn.

One can disappear into another language to look for le mot juste, with just the right polish. Parallel worlds on parallel tracks, bending toward each other and touching at unsuspected points, but no one knows how.  How, for instance, to partition the world in such a way that words share boundaries and colors are all spoken the same way by a cooper, a sailor searching for Franklin’s lost ships, a geographer. And understood that way. Instead, names drop out here and there and the forest of signs turns into a field cut in half by a river from which one emerges, muddy-faced, into thirty years of debt, depression, and angst.

Linen, fruit, and water, a hillside left by the wayside sometime in early March. A perennially bad conscience is one’s self-cross-examination to bear, made heavier by the futility of books and syllogisms. Schools fail, and Utopia is a tangle of conflicting desires. Flute or no flute, two years in the woods, with your laundry taken care of, is as nothing compared to six weeks in a hospital. The spirit of the age gets off the train at Concord, shrugs, and walks away on one leg.

Prose by Daniel Barbiero.  Paintings by Ron Morosan.

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Ron Morosan is an artist, writer, and curator. He has shown his work internationally at the American Pavilion of The Venice Biennale and the Circulo De Bellas Artes in Madrid, Spain. In the US he has shown at the New Museum and had a one-person exhibition at the New Jersey State Museum, and at numerous galleries in New York. He curated the Robert Dowd exhibition, Subversive Pop, at Center Galleries in Detroit, as well as Denotation, Connotation, Implication at Eisner Gallery, City University of New York. He has written catalogues for many artists, including Enid Sanford, Tom Parish, Robert Dowd, and others. In the 1990’s he started and ran B4A Gallery in Soho, New York, writing press releases, articles, and catalogues.

Daniel Barbiero is a double bassist, sound artist and composer active in improvised and experimental music and dance in the Baltimore-Washington area since the early 2000s. His music is inspired by the chromatic vocabulary, open-form compositional structures, and extended performance techniques of mid-20th century Modernism. He also writes regularly on music and other arts.