ORIGINAL ARTWORK © DAVID MKRTCHYAN
THE SAINTS OF NEMESIS
“There can be no forgiveness without the shedding of blood.”
The Saints of Nemesis is slated to be a precious, hardcover tome--embossed canvas, fine paper of weight and texture, special media for seven color plates, each ensconced between parchment or vellum.
The seven Saints/Icons will be of seven Nemesis avengers and each will mark a chapter of the book and an act of justice.
New text is being composed for each chapter--historical, psychotopographical, soliloquy--with accompanying sketches, fragments of maps, letters never sent, mementos, and other traces strewn among the enveloping narrative.
The Saints of Nemesis bloats and tears at signifiers and refferants-- cultural hegemonic, personal introjected, and primitive primordial-- creating a real cultural reality beyond fact which inches mercilessly towards truth of spirit, personal and collective.
The breadth and girth--the sheer transcendental powerhouse of future and past embedded in an endless present--that is Nemesis, requires not just this, hopefully, expansive foray into the mind and heart, but a litany of creative gestures, whether totem or treatise that pay homage to justice and its purveyors.
This is just the first of many...
--akm
Ara Mgrdichian
The Nemesis Group
"Saint Soghomon," Acrylic on Canvas, Original Artwork © David Mkrtchyan (Saint Concept, Ara Mgrdichian)
(Ode to the Avengers)
Every Day...
and every night...
when I lay upon my cot
[for there is no bed for me
even here, even now...]
and I close my eyes
[since they never close
by themselves]
to try and sleep
You both arrive
You both are there
just behind my eyelids
alive with the mystery
of your deaths
so full of the lives you've led
and must now lead again,
for you are alive--
not just dead...
*
sometimes you bring along Yerganian's ghost
and he keeps dying of tuberculosis
and poor in Argentina
over and over and over again
pure avenger, vengeful saint
ending up half way across the world
in destitution and disease
after beauty, justice, and grace
I keep seeing you watching him
in his breathless, consumptive state--
on one knee--
misdirecting the mob in Berlin
with Shiragian running the other way
to fight them all off with a belt buckle
I see you smile
as you look over at me
from behind my eyelids
never letting me sleep
just making me travel time endlessly
with you and without
into the quantum parallels and present tenses
there is no past anymore for me.
there never was...
It was always now.
It is always now.
I turn a corner and see myself
with a bag of bones
on a Valley side street
making a left on Fulton,
looking out the window
watching MIGs drop half tons
near Archatsor
and when I look up,
through the top of my grizzled head,
I see myself gurgling
proto-syllabic baby sounds
as I throw myself into the air
and catch myself happily
while your mirth and breath fill my lungs
but, I realize,
as my breath gets caught again,
it is you I hold so dearly now to my chest
and I weep as I see you so small,
in the backyard
clutching your favorite toy
nothing has died.
nothing is dead.
you cannot let go and there is no reason to...
granny is being just born and orphaned
at the same time, again, in Der Zor
where they just destroyed a monument
to the Genocide still on-going...
I kiss you again and again for the first time
because you are always leaving here
and arriving right behind my eyelids
against the inside of my head
out in the world so vast
expansive vistas proliferate
the snow circles
the hot brass
the cordite stench
and the cow dung heaps..
.
The flowers in the rain
and the two of us
fucking away all the pain
*
I stopped asking you
why you keep visiting me
when I realized it was I
who was visiting you...
You are alive in the world of the dead...
...and I am only still a guest
--akm
Ara Mgrdichian
© Ara Mgrdichian
ORIGINAL ARTWORK © ARA MGRDICHIAN
