Last weekend, we visited the downtown Honolulu studio exhibit by the artist and poet Shui Tsang. “Sūt-Saeng ” (End of the Light) is a collection of abstract light sculptures and patterns in the form of leather lasso cutouts that seem to float from light fixtures. According to the artist, as the leather lasso are stretched by gravity, they begin to form new shapes. These pieces were created in parallel with a handbound book of Shui’s poetry written in both Thai and English.
The dark January night seemed the perfect time to walk among the entwined twists and shadows of the sculptures and contemplate emotional entanglements, change, and how we are caught within the invisible yet unrelenting pull of gravity. The balance and contrast is echoed in Shui’s poetry:

“The rope of you and me / we were placed / on a one-way worry.
But the whirling / centrifuge- raveled / the body into a looped trap.

This moving prison-path / This self-circling / I couldn’t wait.
Yet now, time is too short, / Now I understand / prey waits for me.” – from End of the Light, Shui Tsang

Within the acceleration of evolution, extinction, and forced migration brought on by Climate Change and technology, gravity is the one constant. Like poetry, gravity pulls us both to the earth and as orbiting bodies, to each other. Each time we see a canyon, an eroding coastline, a seedling take shape or our grandmother’s face, we are witnessing how gravity takes form in the beauty and tragedy in our lives. Much like our dreams, gravity can bends both time and light. Despite the inevitability of gravity, we often try to ignore it, fight it, challenge it, or lament it. As planets circle within a galaxy, we circle each other and have the potential to pull each other down or form something new, and better. In his poem “Gravity”, Galway Kinnell reminds us not to blame gravity, which cannot recuse itself:

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“If the pilot ejects one second too late,
if the condemned man shrinks at seeing
the trapdoor give way, if the man who stands
with fire at his back and a baby in his arms
hears the near neighbors cry,
“Drop her! Don’t worry! We’ll catch her,”
if the juggler gets behind in her count
and the bright object flies past the spot
where the other hand was to snatch it,
gravity cannot pause to rectify matters.” -from Gravity, Galway Kinnell