Haptics: Elders In Turn

At Play, In Power, In Anguish, In Prayer

Stephen Vincent

Ibrahimpaşa, Anatolia – San Francisco, California

July – September, 2013

9 drawings & text

3 3/4” x 10 1/2”   

Who? What can one say? Larger than life, unrecognizable. They hover inside, then outside. They enter dreams. Walk out. They lighten then darken the horizon. They are not without emotion. Anguish twists their backs, throws their profiles against an empty sky, the outline of a scream upon the lips. They do not dream of weight. They are weight. They stand tall, sometimes wide. They are benevolent then not. They take their chairs. They bend one way, then another. Wind passes through them. Their robes are caressed. The garments are checkered into the darkest, tiniest triangle. Yes, there has also been treason and exile. Figures split, fragment and freeze. The weight of decisions reconfigures into corrugations of motion. Are they women or men? Do they grieve or pray?  Fertile or not? No one sleeps here. Punctured then cut. Sliced. Anguish makes them larger, thins, turns a figure inside out. 

Finality is not an option. An eternity of presences. Worshipped they take a seat before those who worship. Do they have friends? Do they love? No one answers.

They do not come to tell us their names. They hover, they elicit. We speak but are not spoken. We dance but motion betrays us. Breath is constant, vibrant, then not. No one sleeps. No one wakes up. No one moves. The amount of supplication is extraordinary. The mother appears. Weeps. Disappears. She gave and gives not. We stand before to pray and do not know to whom. Who do they represent? No one knows. They were here before, here now, now not. They will endure beyond here, then not. We who would bless them going and in return.

— Stephen Vincent