SCARLET began as a digital visual/poetic meditation on the fractured state of psyche induced by extended social isolation under COVID-19 lockdown. The project has since evolved to document the social disruption of the pandemic as we move through its various mutations and surges.
The digital/visual poems are created through erasure of the novel The Scarlet Plague collaged with glitched imagery from everyday life during the pandemic. The titles of poems in the series are then derived from objects contained in each glitched still life.
Glitching is a technique that introduces errors into the code of a digital file or stream that distorts its presentation. The error-induced fracturing of images in SCARLET is intended to defamiliarize everyday objects and surroundings to reflect the psyche under the constant stress of the pandemic.
The Scarlet Plague is a post-apocalyptic novel by Jack London, published in 1912, set in California during the year 2073, after the world’s population is decimated by an uncontrollable pandemic.
—an erasure of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady
a smile of welcome a zone of fine June weather
a territorial fact native land a character
a queer country across the sea the rosebud in a buttonhole
these words of not perfect loose thinker
fell in love with novel’s fancy phrase in a windless place
I offer myself to you light turned into exhalation
caught in a vast cage
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Her ambiguities composed all of the same flower. Fertile. Flourished. A fault of her own. It might feed her. Like a small hand. A kind of coercive. Not neglect. A negative, imaginatively, already existing. Her eyes prettiest. The day that I speak of. The short grass. A shorter undulation. A handful put into water—an image. “To bring you to this house.” Isabel listened to this.
a need to be easily renounced
hampered at every neither father nor mother
poor and of a serious not pretty hundreds of miles of
“I’ll go home” the masses of furniture hid her face
in her arms like the payment for a stamped receipt
aspiring murmur a threat refused three times
conceals from you America diverted by a novel
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“A marriage,” said Isabel, “is not at all large.” In her lucidity, no light to spare.
a witness not struck with smooth woman
the fluttered flapping quality of the sadness now settling
empty; but no one invited her not the least little child
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Meager synthesis, impossible dinner. Inviting “them”—as something so literal, stupid. To be honest as most people, equally honest, flattering herself. Irresistible need living in the upper air, up a steep staircase perpendicular to husband. Wishes as good as straps and buckles. Devoted evening—“I’ve never given anyone else a mistake as perfect.”
drifting
take care heart take care
do you know where you are drifting?
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Under the influence of to marry, hands laid on. “Lay them on yourself.” A woman thinks she may doubt time. It came over her in uttering. A wounded face expresses nothing. The master; the mistress.
ah, don’t say that
fresh cheerful
facetious
the most charming young
only proves she wants
she wants proposition
obliterated
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Her dresses, her falsehoods. “What do you mean by ‘people’?” “Servants whom you pay?” “They’re human beings.” “Are there any women?” “You can buy me off.” “Take care of me.” “I submit.” And this was the only conversation, unpleasantly perverse, like the stricken deer.