Sam Truitt & Kimber Truitt, multimedia
Dicteedict
Outtake from the Video Performance
Author’s Note: This one-minute outtake from our performance video of Dicteedict is part of a two-hour telling of Dicte: A Triptych, an earlier multimedia work that moves back further yet into its origin, my book Dick: A Vertical Elegy (Lunar Chandelier Press 2013). Kimber Truitt and I (T&T Art/works) huddled together over two nights of filming in December 2024 to speak that book's words. The sounds and sights of that book’s AV reflection overwhelm—as though it were one echo. And at its edge, we find rhyme. In this case, the rhyme falls to the double “e” in the title’s palindrome—“dicte” and “edict.”
My audio-visual work Dicte: A Triptych transposes word-sets made from a year-long, daily interaction with 144-word blocks of a sequential, thematically loose-jointed text (Dick) into sounds, music, speech, recordings, symbols, images, photos, films, movies, and whatever seemed to magnetize to what that day the words said (with some themes seeming to carry for many days as experience dictated). Edited, recombined, spliced, diced (at times to the fabled tenth of a second) and overlaid with text, the work mounted up each day from November 2012 to November 27, 2013, the anniversary of JFK’s assassination in Dallas.
This Dicte text is taken from the earlier book, Dick: A Vertical Elegy, which is a prose poem about the assassination that includes the name of one of its plotters. Cloaked through a number of layers of cipher, that information is transmitted through Morse Code passages, the seemingly undifferentiated plane of which is broken up here and there with stage directions from Shakespeare’s tragedies ("Who's there?").
This original 12-year-old work has an uncanny relevance to where we find ourselves today, amidst the Fascist rise. Reaching out of a vector of our collective Zeitgeist, Kimber and I hope you may glimpse a way out of this mess.—ST
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The first half of Dicteedict (performed December 4, 2024)—click here.
Sam Truitt, poems
One After Another an Anamerica
Leave the lightning, the “revealed,”
this punctuation of nothings, this lure of
illuminations which disappears into
the passing actuality of the image, to give
itself to a duration where rhythm multiples.
—Edouard Glissant
The shapes of the sea don’t repeat themselves,
"“the main character in Capri pants totally
vapid”"
—
"“the shapes of the sea don’t repeat
themselves”"
—
“held by everything that is outside,”
““the shapes of the sea””
—
in the axes of surrender ocean waves open
sound a wave once listens out surrender wave
to what sound ocean waves confound,
rid as well as we were able
—
in the axes of surrender ocean waves open to
—
""& not necessarily in that order""
—
all of them
—
““the simplicity of being is buried under,””
don’t repeat,
““““the shapes of the sea””””
—
"“as we all should be able to go wherever we
want”"
—
the shape the sea does not surrender
—
““““the shapes of the sea don’t repeat
themselves,””””
isla sin fin,
“island without self”
Missing All the People Mudra
There's a light knot past what density itself rests
inside one drunk propped up guarding a
nonexistent tree that laughs in our leitmotif's
sleep
—
""glaze-eyed with my hands folded into a sign
we share one breast""
—
or there is an area that language casts past
itself
when at its peak near opacity what it is appears
past its locality any signal sent into which you
hear back again because it was never gone or
near & we are its twists wove to hold us this love
knot,
Anamerica
Rhyme the Sky Inside a Wound
How many impeccable rhymes have arrived in
the human mind while passing time hunched
over this log
—
""here in homage my brother rolling a number on the cover""
—
or open ground or braced so along that wall
taking aim at the void in one direction or another
we didn't know we had left any of to build from
spell out the end of what we know is coming
Anamerica
—
""sea dead calm no names no waves just herms
unwritten on""
—
whatever that may be let we be whatever may
be