VIRGIL IS A CONCEPTUAL ARTIST

        Virgil is still haunted by LittleDandelion, playing on the Sit ‘n Spin. He realized, at the moment he wanted to take away the little white boy from his own ride, and LittleDandelion stood up for himself, that power is indirect. It moves in many directions (Bully / Assailant / Lover / Dream) and in different amplifications (Fear / Tightness / Realization / Fact).

        And though separated by weight and size, color and age, Virgil and LittleDandelion are twinned at mutual points of deployment.

        Two boys. One Toy. But the long history of the boys in location with one another renders them forever oppositional.

        As in The-One-Who-Renders-Canvas-as-Page teaches Virgil, opposition is also quiet, as in not taking a side, at all, so that not even forces, oppositional or otherwise, lay the foundation for Virgil’s many Actualized-Routes-to-Freedom.

        Object A: This is the realization.
        Object B: These are the facts.
        Object C: This is the projection.

        A: is a circle, spinning without or outside of Virgil’s control. The spinning makes a pattern, a pattern, where the colors blend together into a whir of visual acuity, a mix, but still, for the viewer who grows up wanting to fight, the victim might not have been killed, many times before. B: is for blur, the blur in the feeling Virgil felt, the fear that he could both embody and absorb, and it was hot, or at least it taught him a lesson. C: it was living, the assailant.

        Virgil will give a talk. Maybe he’s giving one right now. Virgil is not a slave, but often thinks of indentured servitude, or sharecropping, or gets the house in the deal, and it’s folded into a salary, and as one ascends, so do the others around him. One can be the ornamentation of desire, but Virgil couldn't care less about that. Fair is never fair.

        The fear he felt in that field was a buzz of emotion he still carries, a crutch, an absorptive feeling that LittleDandelion held, surrounded by his posse. They seemed so big, even though they were all children. C: is also that Virgil could have hurt him in the way he was in the end hurt but the threat of the whites surrounding him revealed his own fragility, the Dandelion seeds blown into his face against Virgil’s threat: a wish.

        TommyS describes shame as a multilayered set of streams, only stilled by what’s folded around the palm tree, the feeling of the body, roped, and bound, the body bound in exaggeration, looking up brown face into a wide-eyed where?

        Virgil is always moving, and sees the strangers for who they might be—in Deland, FL, he is so far away from the dream, but all the while he seeks encouragement, a feeling he cannot understand, a feeling that he knows is particular to sense, his being, his body, his posture as he gathers speed, too, is fact.

        The facts are, after all, an imposition on Virgil’s self-formation. He is on a bus. And in his sitting, he’s able to assess the routes of control, and how they are tied to knowing, which is radically different from fact. There is, after all, a big problem, the problem is this. The problem is related to the facts. The facts are in. Factoids. The facts manifest as mist. The mist creates the barrier between the pain in Virgil’s back and the depth in which he is unable to sleep.

        Is the relationship between as target and at rest the same as Virgil’s bowing down in contrition? He hates black people who feel the need to fit into the boxes that bind their faces, but he too is a black person bound by the same desires, and boxes, as a Flip, but the Flip, proven to emit keeps him moving, his eyes not on the prize, but to shift and bob.

        To be understood is to be broken, to be understood to be broken is the point of understanding floating and stinging.

        Is this what E-Red understood when she said you must stop lying down, and stand up to face it, and Virgil, took that as a sign to dance. To gig.

        The Russians are here! Look at this, Butch says, and shows the back of the NYTimes with their flag, shrouded over the US Capitol.

        So much of his imagination is up for open critique. Politics, deft. Birds puncture the air and race is what Virgil wants to negotiate, and to be found, not as an anomaly, but the point where the heart is born outside of the chest cavity, and still, the organ right below the skin, beats.

        Did Virgil recall this accurately? That he was Goliath, and LittleDandelion was David? Anger is both fuse and figure, but it is also fissure, and in this way Virgil understands that the haptic is something that manifests in the scene that he wants to return to.

        On a bus. Below the bus. Below a crate. Below bodies. Below the porn in which he wants to hear the accent of the BBC, and the WH, to see why, indeed, she is the site of desire that includes the use of the word, Nigger.

        The word, itself, is inevitable, the trigger, the space, the whisper, the feeling, the space of understanding that includes who she is in relation to him, or the fact that his dick is b and b and she is o and o and the viewer, runs, or at least Virgil does.

        Neither are, after all, very adroit.

        Where, for instance, is the canary in the mine?

        In Australia, for instance, the Blacks there were listed among the fauna. So what kind of Animal is Virgil, beyond the shellacked hermit crabs?—He tries to get into their shapes, and movements on the gym floor, as he thinks about the multiple failures, his intact self.

        It smells of gasoline. It sounds like thunder. His realization is a surety, a knowing thing, like where the clam’s foot is led to by an opening in the sand, a way in that cannot be seen for long, but Virgil understands clarity as that which quickly vanishes.

        Like the plovers that dot one shelf of the beach, like the entire beach that leads to no exact return in the shore’s timing, like the return that points him back into a wall, backed into a series of advancements.

        There are all kinds of equivalencies. This is the way that the body learns to tug, to pull the tide back into the sea, but the hole back is never an escape: this is why, a that which Virgil dances against.

        Or it’s a question of gravity, or gravity as a sealant.

        Virgil holds on to another scene—his body makes him feel more free than he knows, and he has found in this space a net of averages: I can’t wear that because of my rolls, sez CatEyeLa in the costume store.

        Virgil looks into her eyes, and sees their surfaces, that they are the color of opal with the sea, washed with milk, and sun, and captures as his perception, of these, and her, and even though her unrelated teeth—a jumble of rot—her eyes, after all are clear enough, lucid points in what Virgil does, for now.