Prism

Richard says, “Vision in the 19th century was different. Many people didn’t wear glasses. The need to train people to see was something the state created— to grasp detail, in factories or mass employment. The state created a unified ‘seeing.“ In my 20s I rode my blue Schwinn bike across the Brooklyn Bridge. Sweat slid over the bridge of my nose and my glasses slipped down. In the space between the open air and the lens I had bifocals.
The avalanche of ambition hurried past in laughter and in screaming. I rode in the slipstream of cars’ fumes, as tankers and tugboats dragged by beneath. In the round building around the bend in the neighborhood at the canal, I would sit outside, beneath the poplars that had been planted to soak up an oil slick, where I’d read about the 19th century. Letters of Cezanne and Monet and the Impressionists. How they fetishised disorientation. Monet made his best work with smearing and blending eyesight. Cezanne would let the ‘picture’ he was working from, peel and cut into its surroundings. This was close to the Romantics who fetishised brokenness. I rode out the Brooklyn Bridge; my glasses had slipped below, and my seeing became loose from its prism, prison. The 19th century was free from prism and my body of state for a moment of slippage.

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© 2025 Jenni Knight

Jenni Knight is an artist and writer. She is currently making an experimental novel and practicing dreamwork. This is an archive of her visual art.