Posts tagged: photography

Gary Indiana

By TNV, July 15, 2009

flood

In the next village something terrible awaits you, all the storm and stress of the village you set out from, and it will take an entire lifetime simply to reach that next village, and yet, something compels you to go there.  You will meet the same people, but in the next village they are refugees from the village you left, having abandoned their families, friends, and belongings to reach the village where they anticipated a better life: there is no going back, for time has run against you, and you’ve brought with you everything in the old village that you hoped to escape.

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Gary Indiana is a writer, film maker, artist and essayist. His novels include Horse Crazy, Resentment, Gone Tomorrow and Do Everything In The Dark. A collection of essays, Utopia’s Debris , was published last year. His new novel, The Shanghai Gesture , has recently been published. He lives in New York.

D. Coys

By TNV, July 8, 2009

D. Coys' The Next Village

Lying

I recognized I had contrived to understand the next village as a small and overcrowded planet. Even before the clarity of survival began to reveal the business of this anxiety, there was impatience with my obsession, with my bidding to understand the never ending journey with aching feet and tired limbs. I just didn’t understand what religion people around there belonged to. Astoundingly, they had outgrown the valley of darkness, neglected to follow the diversion both from the route for happiness and beyond necessity, as though seemingly satisfied with purpose alone. Remarkable! I recall I found this arrangement odd. They did not really understand the persistence in talking about and awaiting the potential of association. Maybe they were just too polite? But now they are thinking more about the place.

Indeed, however they slackened before, they now speed their decision to reveal what shall make itself, in the end, and I say this with confidence, invisible. The next village is receding, for its outskirts are very abstract, and eyes curious enough to look are suddenly struck with talking about an insight that seems merely the lowest, simple superstition. The problem at first was that anyone who had looked up its postmark was throwing the village open before there was a technique designed to settle argument about it. So we have taken to watching it from some undefined point as though it is all-encompassing. We unsteadily took to work with novel, quiet, bright and curious eyes, optics that never blinked with their technique designed to carefully decipher and verbalise the faith that is printed and scattered among us from the first sentence through to the sweetness of the conclusion without affirmation. But we realised that the image was transmitted in the shape of the transformation itself because we slander with misrepresentations and darken with falsehoods.

We might not be a great preserver of the next village, but if we are not lying, we are lying down. By being pacific, how can we justify its unassuming perfume that buses off ceremony? We would be diverted to the shadows in a fight that is of everyday relevance because all that is born of freedom are little seeds of defiance. The village has caught us. The path riddled with remarkable concision and mechanical utility will found the irresistible as lacklustre, but to take away the custodian means no longer remembering or, better still, trawling through the rhombus of our miscellaneous memos of forgetfulness.

Either way, it is always a dream that proves to become preoccupied by its forgetfulness, as if secretly we could ascend to sacrifices to, albeit haltingly, envelope a pedigree of imagination, only to find it delivers nothing more than defensive answers, efforts assigned as a mistake right from the very start. Yet it seems we still involuntarily keep thinking of the next village despite our footsteps being wreathed in isolation and failing. How dreamers will climb. Perhaps then it is enough to settle on the immediate honesty in this?

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D. Coys re-authored Lying from some of the existing texts at The Next Village. D. Coys writes a blog, here.

Paul Ishian

By TNV, June 29, 2009

jk

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Paul Ishian is a poet, photographer and architect. He currently lives in Istanbul.

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