Milk of the Moon- blog tour

BLOG TOUR

Blurb:

In the midst of an existential crisis, poet and author, Sen Rajah stumbles blindly and emotionally empty into the world of Milk of the Moon. At a point when he has almost entirely lost any sense of self, this bright, young, tragic girl whispers her stories to him, weaving a tale as melodious as it is sad. Through her visits and comfort Rajah finds his way back, unfortunately by the time he recovers Milk is gone, leaving behind only fragments of her story.

The exhibition contained within these pages is part memoir, part poetry and part something entirely new. It explores themes of otherness and rootlessness, the colonialism of language and many more themes associated with being “a person without a country”. Each piece resonates with feeling, abstract and allusive, they beckon you to engage, not just to observe, but immerse yourself and read the artist, for as Milk of the Moon says, “only in the act of interpretation do any of us exist”.

EXTRACT

Extract from the opening of Milk of the Moon: A Dispatch from the Edge of Consciousness

A Message from the Curator

It’s often true that only in a state of personal distress do you find an artist or a work of art that has some resonance for you. This was certainly the case with my discovery of the artist known as Milk of the Moon.

I met Milk at the height of my despair. My life had imploded and I was suffering from what I now understand to be a complete mental breakdown. How had I come to this? How does anyone? Choices made without thought, small decisions that build up and up and up, then cascade and finally coalesce into a moment where you suddenly don’t recognize yourself, where you’re nothing more than anger made flesh, where you find yourself addicted to all the easy pleasures that relieve the pressures building up within you, one tiny paper cut at a time.

One day on the way to work, I just kept walking. I threw away my phone, my bag and just concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other. I walked past the familiar monuments, the everyday signposts, through streets that became reduced to abstractions, straight lines with the same colors that disappeared from view up close. My head was a buzz, it was a swirl of sloshing turbulent liquid and the only thing that gave me the sense that I really existed was the almost imperceptible push back of the tarmac on my feet.

I didn’t notice her at first, a thing so small, that kept herself to herself, a shadow. It was only when she spoke to me I realized that she’d been following me, that she’d been there for a while on the edge of my sight. She didn't wait to see if I’d acknowledged her or understood her, she just spoke. Words jumped out of her like sparks from a dying flame, unstructured, natural, they had a force to them that were as real as a touch, a pinch, a slap. They weren’t abstractions separated by the distance between speaker and listener, they were direct perceptions, brush strokes that painted you from the inside and I could do nothing more than succumb to their beauty, their horror, their unbearable sadness.

I was finally hospitalized, drugged, given therapy and through it all she was there with me, popping in for short visits, keeping me company with her words, her stories, her story. It took days, then months but slowly I began to recover, if such a word can be used appropriately in such a context. Your mind is not like your body, once broken it doesn't heal in the same way, it doesn’t leave a simple scar or a slight resistance against its movements, it changes, reshuffles memories, erases, edits and so you emerge as someone different, like a song that has been remixed, a distorted shadow of what once was.

And then as I was leaving the hospital, I found her art. Squeezed into the pockets of my coat were pieces and pieces of scrap paper, old receipts and discarded envelopes, I pulled them out in clumps, not knowing at first what they were. I could see by the look on the orderly’s face that she wasn’t sure either, that she was worried whether this was a symptom of my psychosis. As I picked up one of the pieces that had dropped to the floor I saw the writing on them and immediately recognized some of the words that the writing spelled out, somehow or other I had managed to capture her words.

She had her own language, a language that didn’t appear to have any order, where the same word could take on a host of different meanings depending on where it was used, where words from other languages had been stolen and swapped for a particular use that had no connection to the original one.

It was like looking at a torn-up map of the night sky, a ripped up constellation that reflected her experiences, a secret code I knew in my heart that I could unlock.

I spent the next few days trying my best to unscramble the words and put them in to an order. I didn’t edit or rewrite, I translated, I curated.

I chose the words in my language that were closest to hers in both rhythm and meaning. I placed the pieces side by side, above and below, only so that they appeared to complement each other. But it soon proved to

be a futile task. I could choose any one of a thousand and one variations and her story would still make sense, granted each one would strike a slightly different note, but the overall sense would remain the same.

Was this an effect of my translation? My curation? Or was this a code that had infinite solutions? And if so how would I decide which solution was the one to be preferred?

It was at that moment an idea popped in to my head. I gathered all the pieces up and threw them in to the air, letting them fall where ever they wanted, I then closed my eyes and began tracing a path over them, after all, hadn’t I followed her blindly before?

The order I accepted (that finally stopped me from shuffling and reshuffling) is the order my stumbling footsteps took. I didn’t just take little steps, sometimes on a whim I would jump to other side of the room, and so in a jagged and sudden leaping fashion I found my own way through her words.

To present Milk’s work I was faced with the problem of how to get another soul to have the same experience of the organic order that existed in her words. I finally decided on attaching her words to string and hanging them from the ceiling of an exhibition space. A person walking through the room would therefore be forced to make contact with them and at the moment of contact a recording would come on that would speak those words to them. In this fashion, the damage that would have been done to her words had people been allowed to walk on them would be avoided and it would also allow every experience of her story to have a different order, a personal order, a unique order that existed just as long as the persons path through them did.

(For those of you who have purchased her art in a physical book form, you have a choice, you can either follow the route before you, or if you wish you can always rip the pages out and do what I did. I promise you nothing will be lost).

Nothing can ever quite capture the feelings that arose when I heard her story for the first time, her words had the effect on me of being carried away on a river made of all the things we throw away, a rushing spinning surging stream of sewage upon which you yourself are spun, upon which your body is thrown and bent and broken up and pummeled with every push forward, with every push back.

If, as curator, I have managed to impart an 

iota of my experience then I have succeeded.

Sen Rajah

Sen Rajah Bio 

Sen Rajah is a man without a country. He fled a civil war at the age of five and grew up in an environment as empty as his history. He is a nomad. His writing has more in common with abstract art than literature as it's commonly understood. Manipulating language to fit images, distorting structure to find form, his writings are installation pieces, thoughts to be experienced as physical reality.

He freely admits that his work isn't for everyone, unshackled from history, he feels that he is free to create a form that is unfettered by the rules and conventions that have evolved over time. He believes that writing should always be pushing at the boundaries of what can be said, discovering new ways of thinking, showing the infinitely many ways that a person can be a person.

Media Links

Twitter - https://twitter.com/senrajahauthor

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/SenRajahAuthor/

Website - https://www.manwithoutacountry.co

Goodreads - https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/17913181.Sen_Rajah

Book links

Amazon UK - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Milk-Moon-Dispatch-Edge-Consciousness-ebook/dp/B07BPQZ569/

Amazon US - https://www.amazon.com/Milk-Moon-Dispatch-Edge-Consciousness-ebook/dp/B07BPQZ569/