The heroine, Anna Manni, stands spellbound and unsteady in front of Landscape with the Fall of Icarus and faints. The presences lining the walls and ceilings of the Uffizi in Dario Argento’s film The Stendhal Syndrome are more than just passing works of art to her. When I was very young, I stood on one side of the glass of a large picture window, looking out at a nonplussed bull staring back at me on my Abuelita’s property. Heady, just barely unafraid, I’m reminded of it when I catch that elusive, musty scent of tropical hardwood carved and languishing under decades of use - or disuse. I think of an aesthetic sensibility that overwhelms.
An interior image of the late Sri Lankan architect Geoffrey Bawa’s House No.11 in Colombo stands out to me. In a ground floor hallway there is a full height opening in the white plaster wall, and resting on a kind of stone plinth, you see the lower part of a tree - the trunk with its exposed roots spilling out onto a postage stamp sized plot of exposed earth on display. All this dark and messy, knotted life captive for cohabitation. How did he reconcile his spaces with all that earthly profusion?
My late uncle was a soil scientist in the U.S. Forest Service. Only later, when I began planting things myself, did I fully appreciate this. I planted five different kinds of trees and now watch as they start to reach above my height, one already towering. I feel oddly responsible for their subjugated life. Why does it feel subjugated? Maybe because they’re not in close company with their kind. Maybe because they grow on these gridded plots of land we somehow thought would be the best way to divide something that was never ours in the first place.
There is a favorite book of his I now have, Jon R. Luoma’s The Hidden Forest. In it I was introduced to new (to me) complexities: to life teeming beneath the soil, to a rotting log containing more living tissue than it ever did as a living tree, to an ecology one scientist coined “the invisible present”, in which changes happen too slowly for us to perceive directly.
If I were to break all of the above influences and reminiscences down into two symbols they would be the circle and the square. I like to think of them as representing (sometimes) oppositional realms. And somewhere in their overlap exists a kind of liminal space we can inhabit - a space between agency and restraint, in attention for wild wonder. All of this inspired Silent the Decadent Terror. But I leave the reader to take what they will.
Michelle Lynn Dyrness is an artist and residential designer. Born in France and raised in the Philippines and Berkeley, California, she now lives in Sacramento. Publications include Night for Day (JackPine Press, 2025), Midnight Grotesques, a collaborative work with Tristan Foster (Sublunary Editions, 2023), Square Confits (Overground Underground Books, 2022) and Silent the Decadent Terror (above/ground press, 2026). Her work has appeared in Mogadored (Tangerine Press), Firmament Magazine (Sublunary Editions), Inside the Outside Journal’s Right to Roam, and psw gallery’s ToCall magazine and elsewhere.
