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Artist: Vivi Kawas
Sophomore Vivi Kawas is a literature major who is interested in exploring the abstract through writing. Kawas believes that pushing the boundaries of ...
Nov 21, 2015
Sophomore Vivi Kawas is a literature major who is interested in exploring the abstract through writing. Kawas believes that pushing the boundaries of language helps us “see what emotions, what thoughts or what ideas it can reveal." If unlocked, language reveals the ways in which "we can try to understand ourselves and the world around us a little bit better.”
Kawas' selected work, "Paralysis," consists of fragmented pieces that explore separation and longing.
Two extremes unable to find their middle: you.
Far
Remember morning.
Stars, mars, a neuron chain break.
Free with my desire.
Stagnancy: Ice and fire burning at the same time. Love: Ice and fire running into each other. An equation, but the ones I usually wasn’t able to solve, the creative combination of variables and constants, the means to finding the end of a tunnel. Funnel my thoughts to try to find their ends, I tend to dismiss, it’s an illusion. Hands, the extremities of the body that manifest impulse and hesitation, twitch as though they were thinking by themselves. They’re looking back on something they don’t want to tell me. Hands can protect you from the world, and from yourself.
We are born everyday. Blank slate, a few seconds before I regain my consciousness. We dream because nothing ever lasts long enough, and therefore, we live things indefinitely, until our breaths are forced to come back to the real world. The fleetingness of everything is the pillar of nostalgia.
Paralysis: today I woke up to a different sun, but I couldn’t see it. In my thoughts, it seemed like the same sun of some two months ago, when I was alone, when amends and expectation met the occasional time traveler. Trying to have the right thoughts, when thinking about those who are far, there’s no success. At least you can still remember the sunrise from those days.
Take a picture. Can’t write.
On Skin
Skin is not skin
but skies of a north forgotten.
Some trials of joy cannot be opened:
The words of a penniless poet
stream stories of parting.
Things change. Tomorrow: pain might come around and last long enough for interrogation. It might help align the parameters of regret with those of inspiration. Someone swallow the hero - it’s just an idea. It’s another box of chocolates with which we decorate our personalities.
Over-saturation, there’s too much sugar in my blood, there’s a child swimming in silence.
Words are your poverty. Portals passed, past, possessed -- to emerge from with another layer of skin torn out. Layers, my prayers aren’t enough because they’re wreathed in your fumes. Betrayers, it’s just vapor, it’s just vapor, it’s just vapor, it’s just you.
Processes, try to design one.
Melt, evaporate, condense and recover. It’s a rain that falls indefinitely.
Disintegrate for the purpose of having to integrate yourself back into a world you’ve become scared of.
Feature the places left behind, the familiar walkways that draw the contours of your figure, missing lines as it moves, because there’s something perfect and intangible about what’s alive. Bodies in full tide, photosynthesis is somehow parallel to eyes looking at each other. Behind the thick lines of light merged almost infinitely, the world, from where you’re standing, also seems to miss its end. Some things just keep going.
Dictionaries try to give words a pair of legs. Define.
Paralysis: a conversation.
Between ends, broken pieces make a body.
On Waking Up
Not given up, retraced,
The sun will be the same one
When day breaks inside you.
Vivi Kawas’ work was selected to be published as part of an ongoing initiative, run by The Gazelle’s Creative Desk, to create a space for student artwork. The Creative Desk publishes works selected by a rotating panel. We are looking for prose, poetry, photography, film, visual arts, music and more.
To find out more about Kawas' work as an artist, listen to the podcast below.
Send your creative work to isabella@thegazelle.org. Submissions are accepted on a rolling basis.
This week’s artwork was selected by creative editor Isabella Peralta. Graphic by Zoe Hu. Email them at feedback@thegazelle.org.
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