Or picture it this way: a runner yearning to the tape.
Arms flung back as if flagged by a gale, chin and neck making way for the shoulders – a pure strive.
And rushing against, past and around…force and flow. Learning the body by all that surrounds, through which it hums and throbs.
The air is full of waves. The waves are full of particles – particles agitating, dancing. Or the fragments are waving, threading this way and that – streaming and winding – I feel it.
Over the curves of my shoulders, the chorus. Deep in my belly – the bass and the drum – caverns of mind. The ticking, the singing, the whispers and thrums. Brass flowers into blooming curlicues, echoing labyrinths – my ears.
In such a wind the eyes will close, and the legs will strive and stride. No matter my position, in the medium of music, I am always moving forward, setting forth – possibly sailing, possibly struggling with every ounce – but making progress.
It glances off the elbows, reverberates the bones. Fills the mouth, stuffs the nostrils – can make it hard to breathe. Sound. Shuddering loins and quaking knees, a tremor-massage, a tumbling. A sleep.
I lean in. Becoming a shaping of waves – reaching, aching and out of breath. Receiving the blast and caress. The force and the flow. I listen, I feel. I am drowning, aware of each inch of my skin. I am falling in flight, my organs engorged. I am musically shaped as a man.
In attempts to make following/reading easier…particularly for pieces and fragments of ongoing series…I’m adding new pages under “Experimenctes” page, a miscellaneous…a fetal gathering of “I, for Instants” posts…. and sections of the work-in-progress “Unknown and Unnamed” and images that inform them…
I venture to say this piece is unnamed and unfinished, but I tell you it’s alive and it dances!
I can touch it with my hands. The wax is smooth like flesh, the collage like scars or scabs – where the texture lies.
Up close – I am underwater on sand, watching the fluxing of weeds. Looking for retinal patterns.
At a distance it traces a woman, her dress kicking out, a-twirl and limning the lithe.
I’m entranced!
It’s Chinese scriptwork of wisdom and way, a beautiful nude languidly branding the air with her limbs – fertile signs and images prodding me – “move!”
Move myself.
Activate.
Address.
What looks like dark ink stands out, but in reality swims under the surface – blotting, inscribing and guiding the paths.
Emotion and gesture alike: drawn swiftly and sourced far beneath, or pressed on and affixed from outside. Each leave their marks – stark and prominent, – resonant emblems of what lies beneath, what responds.
I pretend I am calm, blank canvas to world – but when it brushes or cuts, smothers or slaps, what is bold in me reveals. The fears, the wounds, the anger and dream.
My vision scatters in rage. Vehement dashing and strike. I can promise you this: the world will reveal me.
I have told you: you are with the unknown of the unnamed – a nothing answering to nothing – a cooperative become.
At the end I will be named, will have accumulated and inscribed them. Surface, object, ground: our object.
overweight head, foreshortened body (misjudges lankiness for heft), unintended while inscribing a circle, lines of meaning?, where the webs are sourced?, self-reflexion
To all concerned, or the least bit interested, I am no one on the road to nowhere. It’s taken me a long time to set out, but I have begun! My path has been wily. Many joys and celebrations, discoveries and inventions mark the past. Wounds bored of enormous riggings and bits; injuries, damage and crime barbwire the road. Imprints of loss – great and unexpected gains pock my surface. Years of input and adventure, learning and error track me.
Now I am no one. Purposively, conscientiously and chaotically venturing into the everywhere that is nowhere. Now here.
Sure you can read the past’s path – identifying me, mind and body cropping up here and there, in and out of people’s lives – particular places, practicings and performings. Believe me – that’s not the point.
The point, or series of points, or scattered suggestions of borders, like shot smattering air…is where everything meets, interacts. A porous place, undefined, ever-defining. Unknowns cropping up everywhere.
I’m talking about the enormous field wherein which forms mingle, shaping and providing contents, ever on the verge of in-forming. This inchoate and omnidirectional process we name “becoming,” “coming-to-be,” we know so little about but strive so constantly for a sense of.
Image me then, if it helps. Outline a human, male, having endured four decades existing, of average height and weight, nondescript. (It doesn’t “matter” – the matter is shared commonly, specifics will rise in and out of clarity through encounters).
Here I am, essentially:
Pocket into this figure, wherever you like – an education in classics, advanced studies in music, theology and philosophy. Twenty years of retail labor in bookish culture; three wives, seven children. Smear that around with geographies – their weathers and landscapes, flora and fauna and politics – of the American Midwest, big-city Northeast, farmlands and Great Lakes, Germany, UK, Pacific NW and Israeli-controlled Palestine.
Inject strains of passions: fine arts, literature, music. Linguistics, semiology and phenomenology. Parenting, intimacy and artistic creativity. Psychology, biology, mythology.
Take and run an eraser randomly across, leaving trails for griefs, abandonments and disillusions. Separations, misunderstandings and woundings, coming and going both ways.
Scribble. I mean doodle maniacally in pencil or pen, any color or width. Scratch, wobble, circle, until the figure looks like an indecipherable tangle, a rough frenetic sketch, something built up and crossed out –
that represents the meld. The interlacing and cross-currents of all the things within, without; nurtured or native; learned or instinctual; native or chosen; perpetrated or inflicted.
Voila:
ball-point sketch Alberto Giacometti
there is no one (or every)
moving nowhere (or every)
save this monumental caveat: that bungled mass of human has a goal. In keeping with appearances…he (I) purposes now/here…
For this foray I need, as they say, a “blank slate,” “carte blanche,” a banded void.
In other words, I know what I’m doing this time, not relying on the “shoulders of giants,” resting on no other’s laurels, or catapulting off some foreign quotation. No grand metaphors from the dead or established.
I’ve come of age.
I view the spines of those lying around me – oh they’ve had their say and sung it quite loudly if you ask me! – now mouldered and whispering like ghost-chatter or chains rattling in a cellar wind. No, those pregnant freight-train loads have departed this station and become imperceptible tremors, thunder-rumbles echoing to far dissipation.
I’m setting out my own trail. No trail. Expedition – yes, that’s it! Packed with only myself and whatever remains undigested in my system, I’ll set out, set in; implore and explore.
My eyes, my hands, my legs and feet. My lanky arms, my ears and my snoot – my particular mindbody complex and whatever might come to surround me!
No more reading! No more imitating masters! No more interludes and origins – referential abysses! Nay, only this human specimen armed with senses and gestural capacities – engaging this world!
Sounds heroic, adventurous, creative and crafty – as a Ulysses hoisting his sail – a voyage and a journey, an epic assay of discovery! (Forget the “Ulysses” slip – no more of that, believe me, I’m on my own here, now). I’ll delete out the crutches and mentors, all competitors now on the lyrical battlefield of verbalizing existence! Stand back! Give way! Fall silent! (please???) – it should be my turn now!
I’m ready, able and willing – this is my moment.
Cutting ties, spreading wings, taking the stage, the road untraveled, for I’ll be building it as I go – my road. My way. My path. My vision.
You’re probably wondering to yourself how you’ll identify something so unique, unprecedented and individually differentiated – yes? Probably brimming up with anticipation and excitement – as if attending some grand unveiling, or approaching the mysterious goal of a lifetime’s pilgrimage? Quite right to be ecstatic, verklempt and even a good deal afraid, perhaps intimidated – we can never know when awe and glory might undo us!
Prepare yourselves.
From this point forward you’ll be engaging this writer’s voice. Texts, language and letters funneled and revealed via this being’s mediums and convergences. As I invade and am invaded by my existence/existents; subjects, objects; realities, fancies and facts…you, dear lucky readers, shall be privileged and forced into a kind of secret society, veritable coterie and gnostic initiation into
the unknown of the unnamed one
For indeed, perforce and assuredly instigating, nay, creating (as if ex nihilo, pro nihilo)… beginning such an enterprise as this requires all become fresh and new –
nothing answering to nothing
absolutely! A virginal venture for all – an only! Circumstance in the making of being made – the copulation of a human complexity encountering and being-countered-by ALL (within/without).
Oh, I’ve come of age. Proven my ability to survive, alive, and to endure all the many centrifugal/centripetal formulating methods of provenance and progeny, culture and biology, genetics and genius,
have undone, erased, reformed or assimilated
and set forth as if naked, stripped bare,
into a fantastic actuality (“reality”!) likewise deposed and evolved.
To the marks!
On your marks (well, mine, actually) –
get set –
and here/now GOES!!
[drat! here/now went!]
Again…
“in response, you make a gesture filled with uncertainties…”
All my Words are Silent 