Text commissioned to accompany Watch This Space Ari’s inaugural Squash Court Commission
How the World is Scored
I imagine an oat-field at dusk—
a crop I’ve never heard swish in alternations
of intensity and subsiding intensity
tandemed to my step, a crop my knees have never felt unzip
around them as river rocks encourage rivers to do.
Surrounded by historic cacophonies—
which are pending cacophonies too,
since imagining is a kind of prediction
based on precedence, or a kind of presence
based on prediction—
I imagine the sound of activity
evidenced in smudges, divots and dents,
the meatier stuff too: where and how
a car is parked, post-ops, demographic shifts.
Since the half-moon smudges patterning the squash court’s
red Coca-Cola ad look like rising
bubbles, I imagine the sensation of sipping
something fizzy and the desire to experience
that sensation again.
I imagine the sound of smacked aluminium
surveying every smudge posing as a bubble— each deposited
by misplaced shots, balls dipped below the Coca-Cola logo
marking out-of-bounds.
Energy branches over history. You can’t choose
where it starts, though it could start with soil.
Soil gave energy to oats which found their way
to my bowl, gave energy to me. But it starts with something
earlier than soil. It could start with a gesture—the mis-struck
backhand adding a bubble to the group. But it starts
with something earlier than gesture, since gesture
starts with oats. I imagine energy. However it started,
today it became sound, heat, trajectory—a shot
and a crescent—then continued elsewhere.
In lieu of an ad, one court sports
a series of printed images—drum cymbals, basket of eggs,
ancient urn, laptop, space
hopper, seven glasses of
Beaujolais, house of cards, two-tiered
cake, balloon, pillows, complete
crockery set.
Half-moon smudges will litter these too
and I’ll imagine multiple
sounds—the ball colliding with the panel
and the object, if it were real
and not a print, suffering
the same collision—disappointed sigh
of card tower folding in, high exclamation of wine
glass shattering or bulkier sob of the urn.
The ball pings from the panel and dribbles
to a stop after leaving a smudge after being
propelled from my racket after
I swung after I gleaned
energy from oats after they grew in
soil in fields I’ve never visited but even now
hear—swishhh swishhh— even now even here—
seeds nodding in late light—all this time
you’ve been reading, still I’m wading
through that diaphanous crowd.