Lyrical Diagrams

For many months I’ve been collaborating with writer, David Greenslade to create 100 diagrams for 100 stories. Together, we have been researching, dissecting, and re-creating the history of the diagram.

Diagrams by Carolina Vasquez

Text by David Greenslade

Electric Jug Band

It was a controversial move, plugging in jugs and listening to them warm up and boil instead of getting drunk on cider and blowing into them.  The critics liked it, comparing the performance positively to Bob Dylan’s 1965 tour where he switched from acoustic to electric.  The jugs were cleverly amplified of course and the movement of sound, combined with effective lighting animated them.  When objects behave as though they were somehow imbued with life, the significance of pronouns changes.   It especially changes for those who journey towards the shifting metabletic feel of things.  You, dear reader, are probably one among very, very few and even you may still assume that recent pronouns refer to a consistent prescence.  But, when animated – as well we know, when haunted or when transported – objects change and take on the life we smothered – benign and glorious or spooky and malignant.  No novel could succeed without the animation of objects.   A whoodunnit featuring death by electric jug wouldn’t be difficult.  But the part of detective would have to be played by James Joyce with an attractive assistant possibly named Epiphany O’Tinge, a canny but slightly weary female whose singular observations make even the hyper-observant Joyce acknowledge that electric jugs might have secrets that a mere detective cannot fathom.

Closet Parthenogenesis

Things (I can’t bring myself to call them items) in a woman’s closet multiply by parthenogenesis.  They don’t need a sperm donor.  Handy little boxes, greetings cards that go out of fashion before they’re sent, belts, underwear, sunglasses, paper flowers, photographs, wrapping paper, picture frames. handbags, scarves, shoes.  The environment has to be favorably nurtured by a steady (it needn’t be excessive) stream of money and also by a flow of aimless chatter whereby things get mentioned often enough and then forgotten so that they self-fertilize and hatch into more.  A woman turns around and exclaims how surprised she is that her wonderful clutter, her closet objects have increased in number all by themselves.  As fast as she gives them away,  throws them out, carries them in bags to recycle centres or donates them to charity shops her things don’t get any fewer.  If anything, there are more!  When the closet has been ‘emptied’ it is still as full as the capsule of a deeply contented honey bee.  She feels ready to refill the hive to bursting point.

Man of Hands

Man of hands, woman of baskets, in the same improbable body.   As fast as hands gather, hunt, manufacture and provide, baskets fill and spill.  He can knit and she builds aeroplanes.  The diagram shows a cloth bicycle spinning from her sticks.  Its numerals are in and of themselves happy – walking on muscle springs, seaweed crosiers and cuttlefish all the way to the end of a simultaneous equation.  Diagrams spare their executioners and from this reprieve draw not from a life that might have been but vowels via air pour from the mouths of musicians and ears flash with lightbulbs until some fuses go!  Tamping incandescent bouncers furious at the antics of their wards distribute meat and cake.   A house built from their screwy plans would flare in seconds.  Already we inhabit it dousing its flames with extensions that don’t look half as good by morning.   This freak stacks shelves at an isolated one stop shop at the top of the road.  And so we look no further than what’s there, right?  But what’s right there wears disguise upon disguise and just as we think we have it, it puts pennies on our eyes.

High Hopes

Number one had high hopes.  It wanted to go into pure geometry, play a role landing a spacecraft on an asteroid or even label something unique.  But it works in a game show at the bottom end of a clapometer.    Its big moment comes when someone gives a dud performance.  One’s hopes were dashed, first in ludo, then on the dart board.   But it never gives up hope and notices some sympathy with the circle symbol at its one hundred and eighty degree indicator.  Unnoticed by producers, number one has acquired a punctuation mark.  Slowly, very slowly, it plans to turn this punctuation mark not only into zeros but also commas.  There are millions on the horizon and number one will be at the head of them.