Magnifico's Safer-Brand Tomato

Last month, I challenged Driz—who's amazing prose can be read at Ex Movere—to provide me with some imagery I could use to refract and distill a digital rendering of his love. He provided the following finely-woven tapestry, abstractions of image and form:
Looking through, looking past and into, a sideways glance, a shard and piece of the whole, half of a reflection, a tenth of soul and yet all too much substance, oppressive in her presence and demanding of my lips.
I feel like everything she tells me is a secret she’s decided to share, words I’ve earned, softly spoken, directly to my heart.
Wild acceptance, unending patience, friendly smiles, happy glances and giggles, girlishness and pride in and of it, sensuality of curve and curvature of senses, wild arcs in impossible directions and sly slopes of female in all of her form.
I feel like everything she does she does with grace, moving slowly as the world rips by at fantastic speeds, time itself bending to her beauty and pushed aside to make room for her divine soul.
Generous glee and softhearted insistence, pushing and penitent in her desires and drive; hesitant and anxious, self-conscious and self-conquered; well traveled and static; bright, loving, noble eyes.
I feel like every day starts where our last day ends, and the sun rises and sets with every sweet breath she drinks in.
God help us all if this love ever dies; she’s made with her love, this monster a monk.
And not in final, but with finality, to look upon her is to desire the memory of her the instant you see her; the very second eyes such as mine come to touch on her skin, I should never want of anything else again but to find that soft topaz glow in the darkness behind my eyes… I should become a defender of memory, guarding precious rocks and ore of the mind, crystal memories of only the best, and whole storehouses of past trinkets and the unprecious gems of my prior recall laid out with the trash to make good room and space for my new betters.
I am better for keeping my memories of her; all present(s) in her presence should be secondary to a burning and wild need to remember them. Men like me should see her and live in such unbelief of themselves at that moment, we should be human enough to fail at our understandings, and find ourselves scrambling about collecting temporal scraps of proof should doubt of her and our moment together ever enter our hearts.
She demands that I feel like she belongs only to me.
I demand then of myself that I rise, and deserve.
After absorbing the essay, I sparingly plied search engines with Driz's descriptive phrases (verbatim) and then crawled through the multitudinously-proffered images until successfully discovering all the materiel I needed for this piece.

I decided to compile the open-source images into this mosaic. Although it might be interesting to try and determine which phrase resulted in which picture (some are simple to see, others not so) I also thought it might be fun to try and de-re-construct the shattered kaleidoscope.


The completed digital rendering is titled Magnifico's Safer-Brand Tomato, for two reasons: because those words are an anagram of Driz's original title, and I think I was getting a little giggle-slap-happy-tired before I completed this rendering.


Art is a form of catharsis. — Dorothy Parker

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Veach, it's wonderful. I shared it and our process with her as well, and she too finds it intensely beautiful.

You've made our day, and likely many more days to come, as we look on it again and again.

I should very much like to frame it, so yes, I would like a png, as high a resolution as you can afford me. (drizitche@gmail.com)

Thank you for our collaboration; I am better for it, and proud of it's result.

veach glines said...

(I sent a png to driz at the time)

Anyone else interested in trying their hand at this, email or comment and I will digi-render your writing or photos.