Five Prose Poems by Charles Ray

For the past 15 years, Charles Ray has risen before sunrise each day and walked for several hours. For many years, he hiked in the Santa Monica Mountains near his home in Los Angeles. Now he voams through the city streets from his house to the Pacific Ocean. Ray initiated this routine for its health benefits, but his early morning treks have also become an important time for reflection in the silence of a world still sleeping. He recently began making audio notes on his iPhone as he walks in the predawn hours. Ray makes recordings every day, five of which are presented here.

The Moon 1968, 17'
Magic, 14'3"
One electron theory of the universe, 9'50"
Caesar's last breath, 1142"
Chabad of Brentwood, 12'41"

"I am an alien, but I don't remember stepping off a saucer," writes Charles Ray at the beginning of an essay published in the catalogue accompanying his two simultaneous exhibitions in Paris in 2022—at the Centre Pompidou and the Bourse de Commerce (the title of his essay is "57,000 Pounds," referring to the total weight of the works presented in these shows). Indeed, reading Charles Ray often feels like being beamed up into the world of Mars Attacks! Nothing corresponds to any usual set of expectations, and the tone adopted by the artist—who speaks to us directly, almost person to person, somewhere between a confession and a conversation-gives new meaning to what the French call the "view from Sirius." Such singularity is, of course, echoed and mirrored in the singularity of his sculptural practice, and makes him one of the leading sculptors of our time (and beyond). His commitment to both the practice and the history of sculpture can be clearly seen in a group of writings on what he calls "sculpture problems." Written in 2018 and also featured in the abovementioned catalogue, "How Many Sculptures Can You Fit in a Room?" is an excellent example of this penchant, which is prevalent in publications by Charles Ray (we might note that his visual work is almost entirely devoid of words). The prose poems presented here reflect another kind of relationship to language—more oral, more improvised-while retaining the reflective and hallucinatory tone that is characteristic of their author.

In 1968, the year teenage Charles Ray discovered photographs of Earth taken from space, Robert Smithson published "A Museum of Language in the Vicinity of Art" in Art International. This article explored the role of writing in the work of various American artists of his generation (Robert Morris, Sol LeWitt, Dan Graham, among others) and the previous generation (Ad Rein-hardt). Smithson himself epitomized the inventive shifting of language in relation to the works he discussed. As for the virtual gallery reserved for Charles Ray in this museum of language, it is surely one of the most astonishing you can visit today.

I met Charles Ray one morning in 2021, during the presentation of his two exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou and the Bourse de Commerce - Pinault Collection. I was slightly anxious about the meeting, as I often am when I suggest to an artist an "associated program" to go along with their retrospective. Shortly before the meeting, Jean-Pierre Criqui-Ray's longtime accomplice and co-curator of the exhibition—mentioned to me that "Charlie" was a big fan of country music. I jumped at the chance and suggested that he invite some of his favorite musicians to perform in the Auditorium. No reaction. Sensing I'd started things off a bit abruptly—cavalier and ill-prepared—I tried playing another card, this time a safer one. I talked to him about getting a well-known American musician, to create something especially for the occasion. The musician pictured a complex set-up: sensors embedded in the sculptures would trigger his compositions, sound coming through speakers discreetly hidden throughout the space. Charlie, completely silent until then, finally grimaced— then cut me off: no associated program. No "echo of the practice," no "return to influences" that might explain a given movement in a given year, and certainly no "dialogue" between his work and anyone else's. Forget this dime-store curatorial psychology. Move along. Nothing to see here.

An unusual meeting—almost comical—and not exactly conclusive. I was getting ready to leave when Charlie decided to change the course of our en-counter. He slowly pulled an iPhone from the back pocket of his jeans, tapped on an app full of voice notes, and an entire world opened before me. Dozens of recordings of his distinctive voice, breathless from what sound like long walks through the streets of Los Angeles. One fantastical subject after anoth-er: the purity of the relationship between Earth and Moon, an invisible dog that neither he nor we could see, a magician friend who—for now—only makes a thimble disappear but should one day be able to make a whole planet vanish, or the suggestion of a collective rebellion against the principle of gravity. Charles Ray's poetry is staggeringly profound. Never released, simply archived in his phone, recorded at dawn coming back from his solitary wanderings.

I carefully recovered the files and remastered them in the studio with a former member of Nine Inch Nails. These five prose poems were played in the Auditorium during Ray's exhibition. Five UFOs that passed too quickly through the museum's basement to leave a trace. A few people heard them at the time. You now hold them in your hands.

THE MOON 1968, 17’

1968 was an eventful year. I was young, and on Christmas Eve American astronauts first orbited the moon and sent back pictures we had never seen before –– the earth a little globe, blue in the nights sky, opposite of what I had seen before. And the astronauts read from Genesis about the beginnings, and for the first time in my life Christmas Eve seemed real. It was December 24th when these events occurred. Six months later, in the summer––in July to be exact––Americans landed a craft on the moon. Buzz Aldrin stood off the ladder, a small step for man a large step for mankind. Later in the week they came home with moon rocks and photographs. It was an incredible time.

But what was it like when the moon first tore away from the earth? How long about was that? What happened to the orbit? What did it look like in the sky? Was the earth still molten? Were there no beasts swimming in the lava? How unstable was the mantle? You have to think that at that time the relationship, if there were such things, between the earth and the moon was pure. There were no poets to sing “if the moon had a sister, she’d have to be you.” There was no reflective light. There were no night sounds of crickets in the moonlight. No harvest moon setting over Lake Michigan, no crisp, cold Iowa night with the moon in the sky. It was a different time the moon and the earth felt the pole and slowly over the eons the earth and moon stopped to wobble and somehow, someday, the moon found her place miles from earth. But those miles did not exist yet and the moon had a special orbit if you could call it that. It turned once on its axis every rotation around the globe. Mathematically precise, its face always facing what was yet to come. Continents shifted, tides filled the bays and the moon and the earth had a special relationship through the realm of the Jurassic. Millennium later, man fell out of trees, engaged the world and the season by the cycles of the moon. The light guided man on nighttime hikes and hunts. It gave direction, orientation, and poetry. But like I said, its beginnings were unique. One couldn’t even use the word unique because one wasn’t there, but I could leave it with the fact that the earth and the moon had an ultra-pure relationship. One could almost say that the earth in its monstrosity broke away from the moon rather than the moon from the earth. But all these thoughts and ideas and speculations are just from a mind out in time, speculating about what might have happened in the hyper chaos before there were calendars, before there were objects. Did objects come when we picked up a bone and hit our father over the head? Or did he hit us? Were there objects associated with copulation or were they associated with the hunt and the fertility of the ground? Were all the things we do and make however primitive they once were, they differentiated themselves from us or we from them. We were no longer the trees and the ground, the moon and the sky. We left the soup, so to speak, but that would be the wrong way to put it because there was no soup. There was no differentiation between you and me, between us and the earth, but that’s hard to understand because it can’t be looked at in reverse. There was a causality that cast us out of the garden of Eden. How are were in this day and age to know each other if not through our objects that we share? Do we have relationships to each other through our things? Are our things, our objects and the objects in our association––how close to us are they? Are they even part of us?

For instance, I have a dog named Air. He’s invisible and you can’t see him, and neither can I because my eyes are the same as yours. But he brushes up against my leg and I can pet him and I can feel his breath. But what I’ve wanted to know for a very long time is, why is Air’s bone that he chews on also invisible? Did the bone become invisible after it fell off a plate, after it was cooked in the flames? Or was the animal and the bone jointly invisible in the very beginning? The question confuses me because if I think of an invisible cow I have to also think of an invisible pasture because I can’t imagine looking at the digestive system of all the cows’ stomachs and working and churning and processing grass. I’ve never seen such a sight. But if the pasture was invisible, if the grass had no substance as you and I know it then the bone of my dog Air could also be invisible from the very beginning. The bits of blood left in its marrow could never be seen. And where did he come from, my loyal dog, Air? Did he come from the sky, the stars far away? The constellation Sirius, centered around the dog star himself? If Air disappears, I’ll know it for sure. I can’t see him but I sense him and he’s always with me, loyally at my side. Occasionally, he runs off but comes back. I don’t know if he’s smelling invisible things or smelling the visible. He is a beautiful dog, but he never barks nor makes much of a noise but I hear him at night, his nails clicking across the floor. A sigh near the refrigerator. Or is he sleeping near the radiator? And are his tags invisible too? Are they clanging against the metal pipe? Or is that steam coming up from the boiler? These are thoughts from late at night, from deep in my sleep, Air at the foot of my bed, a true companion. More loyal than people, at least the ones invisible.

I want to move from my neighborhood. I want to move into an architecture that one can’t see. I want to move to an empty NATO village on Maddalena in Sardinia. NATO is a dinosaur that went extinct. Its village is empty, but not really, because I had filled it. I had filled the NATO village on Maddalena with a virtual army of mercenaries. They train in the fall and the spring but they are at my disposal and they are coming for you in the summer and winter. They will kill you Otta. They will kill you, your sister, husband, dogs and children. Nothing will be left standing of your mental mindscape. Your thoughts will bleed into the bay and slowly dissipate as the sun sets over Rome.

MAGIC, 14’3’’

There is a lot of magic in the world. I heard of the witch doctor in Haiti who through Vodou could turn a man into a chicken, a rooster into a cow, and then a cow into a cat and a cat into a bird. And this process, to continue … But what this witch doctor could never do is make a man disappear––to be gone. He could only make one thing shift into another.

I also have a friend who is an American magician. He has never been on TV but he has performed in rich people’s homes for birthdays and simple entertainment, for a billionaire’s party. And he could make a thimble disappear totally and completely. I never figured out the trick, if there was a trick at all. He didn’t crush it or hide it in an inner pocket because in great aspiration alone I once asked him to do it in the nude. Not sitting at a table, but just standing alone in my room. I had removed all the furniture, the bed and chairs, lamps, window shades and he held this little object in his hand. He closed his hand and opened it and the thimble and all its glorious metal was gone. I asked him to fill it with water and then make another one disappear and he did but the water spilt out of his hand––Or more correctly, made a puddle on his palm. This trick made me sweat because I never understood how it could be. How could you make one object totally and completely disappear and I have often wondered why he couldn’t do it with a larger object, a spool of thread for instance or a sharp object like a sailmaker’s needle. I believe even a penny had a circumference that was too large.

But I asked him once if there was a god, could a god make a planet disappear? And I mean completely, which is a complicated request because if you made let’s say Jupiter completely disappear, if you effected the gravitational waves and the positioning of the orbits of the other seven planets, if you could guarantee that the sun wouldn’t wobble, if space and gravity wouldn’t rush in with a horrible, horrible boom and fill the void from the missing planet––this is a complicated question because to completely and totally make a planet disappear, so much the causality and effects would have to be no more or never in existence and this I think that even God couldn’t do because where would it stop? Not at the Kuiper belt or out further into inner-planetary space, the far reaches of our spiral arm. And would there not be an earlier or later causality in the mind of a poem about the star? A thought about the red spot, where would it go? And all of its effects, no matter how minor, on the doings of man. Even Jupiter himself, would he disappear? Would any temple or thought of him become blank like a ghost? No, even god couldn’t make the earth disappear totally and completely, to never have been, to never have had an effect on the morning star. The poetry would be the first to go. The astrology and astronomy, losing its causality would become a babble of nonsense. A more practical question concerning Jupiter and its massive atmosphere almost identical to that of the sun: helium and hydrogen. Let’s shoot a series of hydrogen bombs into its red spot. Ignite them at different depths as they descend towards the core. Could you light it on fire? Could you make another star in the sky? What would happen to night? What would disappear in all of this light? Would we become too hot? How fast would it burn? What is its weight? Maybe it’s best to leave these thoughts out of my mind. And it’s very productive to think of the planets just as they are. But we do try to alter them. Pluto, the smallest yet most glorious of the all, far, far away, undiscovered for generation after generation. A wobble in an orbit led a telescope to a prediction, and there it was, Pluto, as it should be. And it filled our imaginations. It was as large as the sun, as cold as the star is hot. It was a wonderful thought and its name in the underworld kept my imagination alive all through my youth and into my adulthood. I thought of this place, this cold dark place. It was so far away, unseen with the naked eye in the night sky. It was a dwarf planet or at least very small, and then in the nineties, it slowly degraded, not in its speed, not in its orbital trajectory, but other objects were found out in the belt. And its status as a unique object was brought into question and then into doubt. Not an asteroid, but not a planet. Designated a dwarf, but how could you do that once it was found? And our minds tried to make it disappear. And as it went from a planet to an asteroid to a dwarf, what happened? What imploded? What crushed in our minds? Did this scientific discovery reverberate and diminish our Pluto sitting in the cold underworld across the Hates.

ONE ELECTRON THEORY OF THE UNIVERSE, 9’50’’

When I was young, I believed in ghosts. I wasn’t one-hundred percent sure, but I was pretty sure about what I felt. Ghosts were the recent dead, the restless dead, and some, I think, were spirits both good and evil––but mostly monsters, maybe compound objects between power and dead people. There’s the idea of demons which are different than ghosts. Power, trajectories, a bird could morph into a person at night who could do you great harm. The pattern of an owl’s hoots or a car with one headlight was a precursor to doom. Numbers and magic, the world seemed a flux of good and bad—an unstable place built upon an illusion of stability. Families and houses. We didn’t think of white privilege, we only thought of avoiding the inner city where we might be murdered. And there were saints and the ghost of Christ. Blood. Good Friday was offset by Christmas Eve and the Easter basket at the end of winter. How all this happened in my mind, I’m not sure. But of course, I carry this belief through my early years in college, and if it morphed into more reasonable concerns—other life forms in the universe, dimensional beings, time travelers—these faded away also the more I read. Characters in novels became kind of ghosts to me—fictional characters with no physicality, but a strong presence in my being. And people who seemed alive, associates and friends, people above or below me in the social strata but people I dealt with on an everyday basis or even ones such as critics or administrators much higher up the academic ladder than I. My conflicts developed and burnt between me and them and the idea of ghosts receded. Serial killers that I read about, the night stalker and others. My own stalker, while perhaps not bringing terror to me, brought great anxiety and concern. Was I being followed? Was someone in my backyard? And then, of course, the murders I witnessed throughout the years both younger and older in Los Angeles. Robberies in stores where I was shopping—it seemed I lived in a sea of mayhem. But perhaps I was just out more than most people, riding my bike and walking the streets, dissolving––not quite invisibly––but into the social strata of my time. I was lonely and felt I had no power, but from afar, as the war of the sexes developed, it became apparent that I had great power. Today the student became morally suspect. The idea of a freewheeling artist in a university disrupting, displacing, however illusionary that is, also became forbidden. Throughout my teaching career students slowly gained power, and I think that could be thought of a good thing as well as a bad thing. The idea of the research institution and a mentor and a mentee have no life in such a strong corporate hierarchy. There was a time when you would open the rule book and nowhere in it did it state you have to like everyone the same, but that seems to be a predominant rule today. And if there is no gender, if there is no difference between what we call the sexes, if we are really all the same, perhaps even Richard Feynman discussion with Wheeler in the middle of the night, when Wheeler called Feynman and said, “Now I know why every electron in the universe has the same weight.” “Why?” asked Feynman. “Why, professor?” “Because there is only one electron moving in and out of time, forward and backwards at great speed, weaving the tapestry of our reality.” Perhaps too, while this isn’t true, but perhaps we can take the lesson from that late night phone call and see the reality or the possibility of the fact that there is only one gender, there is only one race, there is only one person, and it is not Jesus Christ.

CAESAR’S LAST BREATH, 11’42’’

Ladies and gentleman, I would like to address each and every one of you––people of color, African Americans, Caucasians, aliens from war-torn and poor lands, even aliens with pointed heads, small mouths and big eyes from distant star systems, animals that talk and other possibilia such as forests that think, plants that feel, sets of numbers and equations that have awareness. To all of you I want to ask, “Why do you not separate and revolt from the gravity that holds you to the ground?” You may tell me that abstract numbers and equations aren’t bound by the gravitational field, but I think you’re wrong. I think these numbers and these sets of numbers are, in a sense, all there is, but why we don’t separate and hold on as we do to the fallacy of unity, I don’t know. What brings us together? I would like to ask, have you ever come across the concept of Caesar’s last breath? Do you know the atomic weight of oxygen? Do you think of oxygen as O2 or simply O? Caesar’s last breath after he was betrayed, stabbed also by Brutus. The number of molecules in any breath is so large simply because molecules and atoms are so small that when Caesar exhaled the very last time such a number of oxygen atoms entered the atmosphere in many different forms. O, CO, CO2, O2, H2O––all of this oxygen was bellowed out of his lungs. It entered the world as a cloud of gas and it slowly mixed with the atmosphere of our world. Over the years, centuries, millennium, each and every molecule and / or atom dissipated into the solution of our world. Such was the number and such greatness and largeness as the solution today that every breath you breathe breathes in at least one molecule or atom of Caesar’s last breath. You may tell me that this means nothing. It’s like talking about the temperature of the sun. And I would have to agree that all of this has to be forgotten if one is to return to the one. A strong A.I. scientist or artificial intelligent expert from MIT confronted by John Searle was asked, “What are the limits of artificial intelligence?” And a scientist replied that “even a thermostat can think”. And Searle asked, “If a thermostat can think, what does it think?” and the MIT scientist replied, “The room is hot, the room is cold.” And I think he had a point, if you can conceive of the mechanism of a spring sensitive to the temperature gradient, you could say if the thermostat spring doesn’t think, it sings, at least. But only we hear it. And we feel it with our bodies rather than with our ears, because the room becomes warm and we understand that outdoors the frost is cold, but the room becomes cool in the sweltering of the summer heat. And the thermostat sings and we think. And we look at systems like the sun and we see ourselves. The sun, the stars, go on forever unlike our thoughts, they never die but like Caesar’s last breath, they dissipate into the night sky.

But what does any of this have to do with the sculptures in this room? And I’ll tell you it has to do everything with what you see.

The activity of making the structural configuration came or tumbled out of the directed activity, a mode of being. It was a thinking not about a sculpture but through sculpture. It came from a kind of desperation to structure––a thought in the formality or language of an art form. I was taught not to make preliminary sketches or drawings, to forget my girlfriend and portraiture but head directly to the studio floor. It was a behavior and you never knew when a sculpture would be found. A configuration would be interesting. It would lock together aesthetically. And if I came back the next day and it was still there, I would begin to think of it as a punctuation mark in a larger activity. These punctuation marks didn’t come every day, every month, only two or three times a year.

CHABAD OF BRENTWOOD, 12’41’’

I can tell you a story. I can draw you some flowers. I can walk up in the mountains in the middle of the night. I can sleep almost anywhere and my dreams wake me. Like medical devices that hang from our belts, our memories also are outside of us. Like notches in the trunk of a tree, markers on a trail, we know which way to go, we know how to think when we consult our devices, but if they all disintegrated in a mental storm, in a magnetic storm, what would we do? As I grow older, I like to think my memory begins to dissipate with the causes of the effects that were both good and bad that propelled my life forward. In all of my thinking I had assumed that the mental was embedded in the physical. My brain preserved what was there, and in this perception, and this awe, I found my soul. Occasionally, God would cross across the sky like a thunder storm only to dissipate after the tornado, when the skies clear and turn blue once again. I brought God into myself, but in time and age I began to wonder if the physical was really embedded in the mental––a universe and landscape of thought.

Pick up two mallets and bang randomly on your xylophone. Beautiful patterns and sounds emerge and occasionally a new note is created through the combination of vibrations and it hangs above the xylophone, above the steel bars almost like an after image, but it’s there pointing the way to the landscape of the mind.

Ghosts are entities from the past, uneasy in their graves, but your own ghost occasionally steps out of the future and confronts the present. To this phenomenon you have to pay the strict most attention. Understand that what you know of the world is an afterimage of images you cannot grasp. The universe is less a human construct, a society phenomenon, a way the world thinks. If you tell me that black holes exist in a physical world, that light bends around different distant stars, that gravity itself is a geometry that bends both space and time––if you tell me that, then I’ll tell you that I didn’t make my sculptures, they were preexistent like the figures in Michelangelo’s block stone. At different moments we perceive the preexistent in different ways. A photon travels instantly across the sky’s galaxies and the spaces between. It takes the shortest route and is not affected by our view of light years. There is an entanglement between two particles that can exist at opposite ends of the universe. Scientists and philosophers can grapple, but what would there be if none of this was brought up in the first place? It would be preexistent, waiting for the stone of this idea to be chopped away. I’m not saying that it is a construct. I am saying that it is a part of an infinite reality that has no parts, only infinities. As David Lewis so elegantly stated, the question is, “Are the events of causality infinite or just an extremely large number?” Are ghosts still connected to lives of the past? Is my doppelganger appearing to me from my bleak future, or are ghosts alive living their everyday existence, and you and me are dead? I tell you we are not buried under ground. We’re embedded in a physical reality, trapped like a photon moving from the north star to the optics of my eye. You ask, when will it end? Or perhaps you wonder if I will ever shut up, but that’s the wrong question because any answer creates a preexistent question.

For all images © Charles Ray
Courtesy of the artist.
Courtesy of Bourse de Commerce –Pinault Collection

Translated into French by Catherine Vasseur

Jean-Pierre Criqui, Charles Ray dans le musée du langage, 2025
Cyrus Goberville, Magic at sunrise, 2025