After Julie Mehretu’s ‘Mogamma, A Painting in Four Parts: Part 3’ (2012)

If I could take each line and arrange the noise. If I could retrieve every body from every square, if I could take each line and substitute it for a body, if I could retrieve the bodies lined against the wall, if I could gather the desire-lines of bullets in one hand like a bouquet of naked stems, if I could unthread the line severing the head from the neck, I could take all the colour and put it back inside, skin enclosing skin.

If I could always see the edges, if I could always move the edges without losing the whole. If I could only see the edges bound the silence, the lightness of graphite, the lightness of graphite instead of bodies crowding the edges, soft belly through fishnet, fingers through the fence.

Every decision is a strike-out; every conviction comes at the expense of something else. A triangle floats, listing to the right — sunny but crowded with the hand’s currency, heaps and heaps of miniscule geometry.

A murmuration blacks the sky. A false cloud twists through the buildings, a flexing through vertical shimmer, like one dark muscle twisted in the surgical theatre, one dark muscle not yet sedated. To understand instability, you first must see the outline, the sameness, the order miraged through the chaos. The glass doors half-finished, exactly, as if arresting a flood.

In this universe there is no rot, only energy. No decay and no enemies. What would I give for a world emptied of people? For an estate of my memory of places? In this world energy passes swiftly without breaking. Planes kiss without interference. In this world energy depends on other dimensions, on moving through what isn’t matter, treading ground that doesn’t form but instead fractures.

In the right-hand quadrant is a slantwise yellow line. The line is muddy, charcoal-mingled. A wash otherwise precise. It links a spiral motif of streetlamps down to an archway, twin curvatures of form. Suddenly, the line strikes a window entirely. Lancing, it’s the only time when the line looks like light.

Thinking of fires, birds, and fires, and then of how impossible it is to leave behind association. I remember once seeing a student paint a succession of little symbols — swans, lakes, castles — onto a shopfront wall. And then she very carefully painted over it again. This is another thing I think about, with Julie: an accumulation of wholes; a freedom from the violence of erasure.

In the most crowded part of the painting, Julie’s smudges look like smoke. Am I reading smoke-signals, peering at a horizon to form meaning I’m scared I’ll miss? All around me people raise their phones and click. I tried that already, squinting at the painting’s reproduction on-screen and at home. A failure of resolution, every line rotten as a pixel, energy fizzing from the cooling corpse.

There are squares on the left, lonely incidents of window and cornice. They’re filled in with black, so very dense on the raw duck canvas, the blankness of which is still startlingly intact. One thickness descends. Anomalous, its totality is unwoven into the smoke and the glass, the birds and the fires.

Joining three of four edges is a vector which branches twice. I’m grateful the painting can be empty of sentimentality. It really is generous: to render something so precisely. Architects’ drawings leave so much room in their accuracy. Think of all those clean and empty spaces. Rooms furnished with paper. Rooms so clear that the appearance of smoke would be a feature, that a single bird feather blown in by the wind would seem obvious, intentional.

Later, it can be read that the buildings, impenetrable in their fragility, fence every significant square: Mogamma, Tahir, Zuccotti. It can be read that the topography swims into a plan for democracy. A setting for desire-points intersecting, pristine edifices awaiting history’s big party. A container for a flood of bodies, of bodies wanting, the wanting cohering the bodies. The rigour of love — which doesn’t appear here, where it’s all empty but for the tracking marks, the swarm of marks, the flutter of life in the shadow realm.