Everywhere I look in the work of Valerie Kabis, I see Atlas without an earth. His arms are lifted, ready for the great undertaking. But in the place of the globe, an “unquiet void” (to use Kabis’s own words) defers that fulfillment. Countless are the deferments for each of us, on any given day. It puts me in mind of Robert Burton’s singular masterpiece, The Anatomy of Melancholy—Burton, who said:
Melancholy . . . is either in disposition or in habit. In disposition, is that transitory Melancholy which goes and comes upon every small occasion of sorrow, need, sickness, trouble, fear, grief, passion, or perturbation of the mind, any manner of care, discontent, or thought, which causes anguish, dulness, heaviness and vexation of spirit, any ways opposite to pleasure, mirth, joy, delight, causing forwardness in us, or a dislike. In which equivocal and improper sense, we call him melancholy, that is dull, sad, sour, lumpish, ill-disposed, solitary, any way moved, or displeased. And from these melancholy dispositions no man living is free, no Stoic, none so wise, none so happy, none so patient, so generous, so godly, so divine, that can vindicate himself; so well-composed, but more or less, some time or other, he feels the smart of it. Melancholy in this sense is the character of Mortality.
Certainly, it is the character of the selection here, though not despairingly so. Kabis’s Burton-esque meditations tremble and shimmer with a kind of ecstatic lyricism. We see this in the images too. A thin, excited light quakes in the margins of each frame—coalescing into something neither Atlas, nor any of us, can possibly imagine.