In Resonance

Danielle Vogel

I begin writing with a simple, maybe impossible desire: I want to translate the logic of light as it moves. And not just visible light, but also the hidden light that occurs at the microscopic levels of our nervous systems.

I want to flood grammar with light. To see what knowledge might be illumined within our alphabets, and also, to observe what resists light, what in me—what in us as human beings—is unable to be brought into sense through language, but remains an atmosphere at the edge of experience.

“We come to life now. When we. When we are. We pick up language like a lit garment, wet and shaken out. A shinbone lifts. An elbow. A paragraph. All shot through until our edges dissolve in pleats.”

DANIELLE VOGEL is an artist and cross-genre writer who grew up on the south shore of Long Island. She is the author of Between Grammars and the artist book Narrative & Nest. Her installations and “public ceremonies for language,” which investigate the archives of memory stored within language, have been exhibited most recently at RISD Museum, The Nordic House in Reykjavík, Iceland, Temple University, Pace University, and The University of Washington at Bothell. She is currently a visiting writer, teaching across genres, at Wesleyan University.