Drift: proximal distance from the center (Part I)
In the Merriam Webster Dictionary, drift the noun and drift the verb are defined in a handful of interlocking and overlapping terms. Each time a new meaning is offered, the word drift can attenuate or accumulate. The word comes alive through the accumulation of meanings. As the meanings pile up, the image of drift crystalizes. A series of images of drift appear: drift in the natural world (an ice floe could drift); drift in our thoughts or speech (the conversation drifted); drift in a geopolitical context (a doomed vessel drifts at sea). In the litany of meanings, there is also: “to move or float smoothly and effortlessly; to move along a line of least resistance.”
The resistance is what I return to—resistance as the possible antidote to drift, or maybe the antecedent to drift. Before an object or notion drifts, there is often the act of resisting it. Embedded in the act of drift can be a prior commitment against drifting. Drift extends time on either end—implicit in drift is the knowledge that it, too, once held the center, and that it may not come back to hold it again. We succumb to drift. Or, we can create the conditions in which we always know we will trouble the relationship between center and the periphery. We succumb to that relationship by design and desire. In drift’s relative distance from its center, we acknowledge the rupture in coherence. Logic has frayed, the object has frayed. In training our eye to the center, drift brings the center’s acuity into sharper relief—brings it into focus. In naming what constitutes the center it also names what is not at the center.
Drift also relates to the excess, the portion that exceeds or defies expectation. It moves at a different pace than the center—and that altered pace defines it as relative to all else that remains fastened. In this way, drift can become the non-sequitur, the ‘over there.’ Maybe, at first we don’t see it or don’t understand its historical relationship to the center, if there ever was one. In this way, drift is wrapped up with time. How long does anything need to move away from the center for it to constitute a drift? When do we finally name it drift and what are drift’s relative conditions to its center?
The looped image moves
There is an image in the final section of Dawn Lundy Martin’s 2018 collection of poems, Good Stock Strange Blood, in the poem “Operatic, the Book Escapes the Book.” The image actually appears twice in the span of approximately ten pages, but it is not the exact same image each time it appears—it only seems to be the same one at first glance. The first time we encounter it, we see a Black person, slightly to the left of the center of the frame. The eyes are soft. Is it grief? Sleep? Sadness? Exhaustion? My gaze meets these eyes— even in their softness, they demand attention. The person in this image is Black and is surrounded by more blackness. Nothing else is revealed, except the person.
Some pages later, the same person appears again, though this time the image seems to be double exposed, and is both out of focus (which further softens the gaze) and zoomed in. The frame tightens. The two images are not identical, but they are twinned in the sense that the same figure appears in both. The images become linked in my own mind, and I think of this as a roving image. The image drifts. It becomes a repetition in drift. How does the image become a call and response, the call being the first time we see it and the response being the second time it appears? The second time this image appears is on the final page of the collection, but if I were to pick up Good Stock Strange Blood and start from the beginning, I would be left with the residue of the final image. It would continue to loop and reverberate and in appearing twice, I would wonder whether it had appeared elsewhere and I just hadn’t noticed. The reason I recognize the double appearance at the end is because of the proximal distance between the two roving images that constitutes an accumulation (or drift). What is the furthest possible distance between two things to rope them, to link them together in some possible coherence, then accumulated drift?
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*Portions of this essay emerged through conversations with Sarah Jackson during Telepoetics: Crossed Lines, which was a symposium dedicated to exploring the relationship between telephony and literature. The event was originally scheduled to take place at The Dana Library and Research Centre at the Science Museum in London on 27 May 2020. Due to the impact of Covid-19, however, the event was hosted online (https://crossedlines.co.uk/telepoetics/).
Other thoughts mentioned here emerged in the days that Brandon Shimoda and I co-taught a workshop as part of Pacific Northwest College of Art's low residency MFA program.
The image mentioned in relation to Dawn Lundy Martin’s Good Stock Strange Blood is a still from a film made by Sienna Shields and the HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN? artist collective. The film was shown at the 2014 Whitney Biennial.