Blogging Reality

On By Alias HarlequinIn Current Reading, Experimenctes, Graphotos, Journallings, WritingLeave a comment

Blogging Reality

“we should start from the notion of actuality as in its essence a process”

-A.N. Whitehead-

“there is only one thing you can do about the kinetic, reenact it…which..is why art is the only twin life has – its only valid metaphysic.  Art does not seek to describe but to enact.”

-Charles Olson-

“life is preoccupation with itself”

-Robert Creeley-

            If indeed “reality is continuous, not separable, and cannot be objectified [read “stopped” or “paused”].  We cannot stand aside to see it” (Robert Creeley), as our sciences and philosophies have come to speak of it.  If language is an enormous fluid complex of systems, of ideologies and referents, socio-physico-psychological sounds and gestures always forming their contents and functioning their forms, as it is currently prevalently demonstrated to be.

In other words:  if life is a process we are unable to abstract ourselves from without thereby ceasing to live.  And “the reality of life is organized around the ‘here’ of my body and the ‘now’ of my present” (Peter Berger) our organizational notions of space and time, or mass and motion…and therefore all existing things are moving about, around, against, in or through one another (“Nothing is itself taken alone.  Things are because of interrelations and interactions” – Wallace Stevens).

“If” these faith-based-in-observational-perceptive-categories are anything like “on the right” (correlative, coherent fluctuating track) “path,” saying something functional or “meaningful” (say here “true”) about humans and the world – how might we be conscious of it?  How align ourselves mind and body with an unceasing flow we are unable to “step aside” or “back” from in order to observe or reflect, remember, recount or experiment “on,” but can only, in reality/actuality act “in”?

Another version:  how might we have some idea or “knowledge,” apprehension of what we “do” living?  (“we do what we know before we know what we do” – Charles Olson).

One possibility is to enact our own forming processes in/into the motion of all things.

i.e. “everything, always, in life just as much as art, is precarious – since it is mutable, everything is a disappearing act.  Things only survive if given an artistic form.  Art is, therefore, in a way, more real than life.  It is only art which is not mutable, which does not disappear: everything else is transient.  Only art, with its passion for form, makes up a permanent version from the made-up things of this world” (Nabokov as termed through Adam Thirlwell).

But art does disappear.  It is mutated by translation and new readings in different times and languages and contexts, different versions/pictures of the world held by each and every member of its audience.  Is worn away, stolen, lost, damaged.  Art is also part of the fluid precarious flow of actuality/reality.

And yet, perhaps, the work of art, the making process itself, provides us with something like a “knowing” or apprehending process within the process life is?  Adding rivulets to the river in the river, additional possible processes in process.  If the artist seeks to make from the full experiencing of its present motion, the many layers and currents a human touches, senses, perceives (and imagines to themselves – a “putting-together,” “drawing,” “enacting presentation”) converting them through one’s self into text, paint, clay, dance, song and so forth…

…no “product,” like no “event” is immutable, spaceless, timeless or immobile, any more than a stone or the earth or sun or moon is, and yet…

“electronic writing will give us a deeper understanding of the instability of texts, of worlds” (Carole Maso)

“What I seek is an active seriality…I write because it is there to be written…it keeps happening and the way the world then enters, or how I’m also then known to myself, is a deeply fascinating circumstance…a deeper fact of revelation I feel very actual in writing, a realization, reification, of what is” (Robert Creeley)

In other words, art-making, enacting in paint, in text, in images, sound and movement, is activity, not a “subject.”  We cannot complete a story or poem or song about what is, because what is always keeps occurring, to blog, to write in such an unstable, ephemeral and mutable medium as light and electricity is, perhaps, an extremely mimetic, representational forming of life itself.

It’s there, it’s gone, it’s always in process, revision, adjustment, open to alteration, deletion, disappearance.  Arising and passing, like thoughts, emotions, utterances and sensations.  Like beliefs and love, wars and peace.  Nothing is stable…blog it so!  The medium chosen, like film, like music, like the fluids of paint and possibilities of stone, paper, clay – themselves are our activity and process of being.

Precarious, mutable and disappearing…and important (to us) and beautiful (at moments)…instants processed in the flow, circumstances in the ongoing situation, new contents and obstructions in the river.

Flow on bloggers!  Flow on!

“You’re simply stuck with the original visionary experience of having been you, which is a hell of a thing…

that which exists through itself is what is called meaning”

-Charles Olson-

and facts are just points of departure

 

On Friendship: dialogue, conversation and becoming

On By Alias HarlequinIn Experimenctes, Journallings, Traces, Writing9 Comments

A Letter to Friends (far and near, now and future):

On Friendship, Dialogue and Conversation

(even those “silenced to pieces” – Paul Celan)

 

Addressing an interminable oath, a perhaps-always, perhaps-never, but surely an “only.”  Friendship.

Either there runs an essential conversation, in the realm of the impossible, that is, the meaningless, or there does not.  Meaningless, like infinity, like being, like love – each lying somewhere beyond rationality, or knots of multiplicity, that is, items we are capable of naming, or calling (calling-out toward) but which do not, ever, add up.

Things that are, that are unable to be explained.  At times we call out to them as “paradoxes,” “mysteries,” “ideas,” “sensations,” “beliefs,” and so on, these “entities”(?) “concepts” (?) – “observable creations” that require one another to be, but cannot be identified in themselves (e.g. “same”/”different”; “self”/”other”; “silence”/”noise”; “presence”/”absence”; and so on).  “Things” (?? – but what to name them?) impossible to know/comprehend/understand (even simply perceive!) as themselves, rather only and ever with; each “it” requiring, to be perceived/conceived, “not-it.”

In human relations, when this reciprocal necessity is “felt,” “per-/con-ceived,” “experienced” – when I, in some layered mixture of reason, emotion, situation and manufacture determine that the “I” which I hope/select/choose/desire to be does not exist, is unable to manifest or become without the “not-I” which is you, and You, likewise have this experience/sensation…we call out toward it – “Friendship.”

It is this deep reciprocation, this sensation of “identification”-without-which-not identifiable as such I am naming essential dialogue, through conversation – the activity of friendship.  “Dialogue” I conceive of as a process of speaking and listening, a taking-turns enabled by agreed-upon, co-crafted understandings (co-mmunication), filling the inherent gap between, accentuating and bridging this “lapse” between you and I as individuals…become/ing friends.  “Conversation” I am considering as entering into speech with unknowns…hesitantly and impatiently concocting utterances and responding, languages inviting, striving toward, asking for…dialogue (its possibility).

Friends:  I hope you recognize yourself in this address – you I sincerely hope I have communicated with in some form of dialogue, an ongoing essential conversation – that I would not be, or be able to become, that which I impossibly wish to be, without your specific “not-Is” founding, grounding, in-forming and co-rrelating with me through what experience, encounter, and engagement we share.

This is for you.  For many of you I am no longer in dialogue with, in fact I currently enjoy dialogue with so very few, two or three “friends,” but you are not the less essential, less becoming – we for that.  I am saying that the conversation goes on in me, the calling-it, calling-out, the naming and mystery of our initial and originary correspondences through, across, greater and lesser gaps and lapses.

I believe the conversation-toward-dialogue, the deep and ongoing querying after what is unknown in/beyond those whom one has ever had the intimate understanding of reciprocated dialogue, in general is or is not.  There must be changes chosen or lived through that indeed have the possibility of so altering an individual’s-becoming-I that those corresponding partnerships of dialogic interaction no longer serve their becoming, but I find personally, as I review you who have so significantly shaped me, that my calling-out really does not waver, only the directness of my voice.

I want to thank you each (and in advance those possible future friends out ahead of me) for engaging mutual becomings with me, opening and becoming always being process and present in silent infinite impossible conversation between known unknowns.  At some point we found our paths to dialogue(s), intimate paradox, and that does not come undone, but remains as fact and experience and fuel for our becomings.

Without-you-each : not-I.

Thank you.

For long lapses and enormous gaps I call out: may dialogue be reached yet again, somewhere, someday.

And above all…to become.

Today

On By Alias HarlequinIn Current Reading, Journallings, TracesLeave a comment

A steady, raining day (rare) for Kansas.  Filling it with Blanchot, Kafka, Beckett, Jabes, fervent standbys, companions in favorite times.  Stumbled across this while playing around with making a business card for myself (for a “Writer for Sustenance” – a “Heteroglossic Hominid”)…

for bloggers, then…

“right near the center lies a choice: to speak – a swift, unhesitating, irrevocable choice that leaves everything undecided…to choose speech turns out not to consist in choosing so much as in maintaining the wavering, undecided movement of the either-or (self-other)…What is it that must be said but not the only way it can be?…All that counts is to play; that means seriously.  Without reserve.”

-Ann Smock, What is There to Say?-

Scripting the Photographer…the Photographer attempts a poem

On By Alias HarlequinIn Experimenctes, Photography, Poetry, WritingLeave a comment
from Alejandra Figueroa's
book "Corpus"

Corpus

(after Alejandra Figueroa)

 

Here I cover the surface of the body

the body the surface, the covering;

One begins by entering the frame

the body the frame, a welcoming,

a focusing and open terrain,

I advance

 

A boundary frames a region

one must discover how to explore

a removal of the covers

may expose the surface display

the region, the mounting and frame are one

to the senses

 

I attend

with hands and smell and vision

I cover the surface of the body

bringing the cover to surface

entering the frame and mounting

I go on

 

To penetrate the body,

uncover what the covering covers

seek what surfaces in the surface,

mysterious border

pliant and porous

a solid liquid, an ever-forming form

 

I retreat

impassable yet liminal

covering countering my own

I give space

to space already withheld

and everywhere available

within its frame

 

The asking gaze

ensnares what it questions

but cannot possess

the living surface does not answer

but responds in its covering

at one with what’s beneath

 

Inseparably inhabitant

to countenance this cover

is to uncover, to discover –

surface to surface –

indecipherable content

Wisconsin

On By Alias HarlequinIn Experimenctes, WritingLeave a comment

(this piece is derived from and to be read in the accomaniment of Bon Iver’s “Holocene” song + video)

Wisconsin

            My fingers felt the indents.  I knew I was alone.  Had been left, alone.  Had left myself, alone.  A jagged vacancy, thick without “us,” and filled with pounds.  Each weighty page struck and branded, burned with this black blood of ancestors.  I could feel them, gentle as I turned each page, hard and sharp in each dark divet.

I smelled it.  Them.  I deciphered their messages, long ago and near.  From ages, this age.  I smelled it.  I looked out.  I heard these smells, ironed leaden letters smacking, tracking, leaving.  Open sky, soaring bird, jagged peaks, thick with ice.  Each ominous digit of tongues, hammered black to brown to rusted and yellowing green, bantering about the walls of my emptying skull.  The lost decree, saying nothing, enough for me.

And at once I knew I was not magnificent.  From my fathers burdened library of laws and languages to the clean green and snow, silvered bleak of lake and stone, the clouds beyond.  And beyond.  I could see for miles, miles, miles, following that bird.

I set out.  Into the jagged vacance, thick with ice.  Thick without.  My legs weighed, I could feel the imprints’ stains on my hands, spines entangling my own.  Pulling on a woolen coat, full and encompassing, and handling a sturdy stick, I set out.  Away, toward.  From the windows I could breathe the miles, their width, their breadth, their depth.  I would be in them like a bird, once beyond.  I climbed.  I trod.  I set out.  I carried with me what I knew for certain and would always know and all at once each time: I was not magnificent.

Partway through the day I met a lake.  Mirrored, grey, and deep in silences, the whispering began.  Voices from here and there and far away, the hallow bright, jagged vacancy of my memory.  I smoked the screen to hear what they might be, hands cupped to mouth and breathing deep – hah…hah… forming curls of smog to make the utterings appear.  To make it what it was to be, not the needle, nor the thread, but echoes, echoes, whisps of hollowed wind, odd edges of light around crooked lines of night.  Wordings, phrases, myths and murmurs, poems and songs from long-fingered wraiths scribbling my mind.

These had carried me, stolen and created me like dreams and nightmares, goblins and godparents, stitching and twisting me like frost along rails and tunnels and streamings of light.  My body, and all that’s immaterial in me had portaled through them all my years.  My openings, my escapes, inscribed riddles of the dead.  They rhythmed and rhymed me, cradled and rocked me,

I could see through them.  Their spines and tangles, the jagged vacancies they ripped into my home, my school, all my solitary life.  I clutched the light of them tearing their screeches and lullabies, dancing, shrieking, rumbling their caresses.  The path of the wide-winged bird so high.  I set out.  The lost decree.  Each wave and ripple of this mimicking lake an intimate familiar, voices echoing from the leaves, the papers, the books.  My fingers felt their divets.  Sweet long Braille of what is gone, my companies – the gone, gone, gone.

At once I knew…I was not magnificent.  Not unique.  I looked around.  My chest and limbs a giant valley, empty and overcast.  Thick with absence.  I knew I was alone.  Miniscule.  At the mercy of.  Full of insignificance.  I scrambled and scaled.  From here, high above, left behind, I could see for miles, miles, miles.

I spread my meaningless arms.  Wind.  Water.  Jagged vacancies thick with ice, without an “us,” with or without a me.  The bird circled slow.  It trembled.  It swooped.  It dove.  I followed.  Not me.  Not anyone.  I knew I was not magnificent.  I could see what forever might be.

At a precipice I flew.

Perhaps I circled, perhaps I swooped or even soared as I fell.

This I do not know.

But I smiled.  I laugh and smile.

I am not so heavy after all, not made of wood and wire.

I know I am not magnificent

but I could see for miles,   and   miles,

and    miles.

.

Transcription: Re-re-readings

On By Alias HarlequinIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

for any of you also fascinated by photography as an art, or the pull of images from movies to family albums, travel brochures to advertisements, even how you ought to “look” or you images of yourself…traversing literally hundreds of studies of images and their pulls, powers, possibilities…these I reread again and again – to argue with, learn from, investigate myself and the world:

“Another Way of Telling” by John Berger & Jean Mohr

“The Photograph: A Strange, Confined Space” by Mary Price

“Camera Lucida” by Roland Barthes

“On Photography” by Susan Sontag

“What do pictures want: the lives and loves of images” by W.J.T. Mitchell

and for core mechanics:

“Looking at Photographs” and “The Photographer’s Eye” by John Szarkowski

“The Nature of Photographs” by Stephen Shore

Scripting the Photographer, Pt. 6

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Scripting the Photographer: The Photographer Discusses His Many Eyes

I did not choose the square, I merely direct it, I “aim” it, what philosophers refer to as “intention.”  The rectangl’d eye limits me, but also sees things I’m unable to.  I need extra eyes, to see.  As you know, my vision has been bad from birth, have required many assistants.  Left to my own body I see a fuzzy swollen version of a clear night sky lain over transparencies of its negative.  Clouds and pom-poms.

I’ve turned to lenses.  They transcribe the world to me.  They record for me, cross-writing the world through direct impressions of light bounding off objects.  My boxed eye evidences existence and matter I might never know.  Where my vision is rounded and illusory, darting and fluid, my extra eyes, borrowed eyes freeze it a moment, show me distinctions and planes, colors and forms, what, perhaps, is really there?  Or also there?  Out there, out beyond the gauzy curtains draping my own eyeballs, spotted and stained and all warbly.

My four-eye captures shapes, tones, responds rather than interprets or occludes.  Perhaps mine is not a misfortune?  Perhaps multiple visions would benefit everyone?  Perhaps all human eyes inherently skew to their shapes, their veils, the thoughts and feelings of the bodies that house them, now constricting, now expanding what they perceive?  Smearing discrete objects and occurrences into a wash of associations, altering what they take in into an image of what they actually apprehend?

Sunset seen, described into a version of sunset seen, concocted over said sunset, compared to still other forms, visions, images of “sunset”?

I cannot speak for those of us boasting the proverbial 20/20, clear in-sight, for this I’ve never experienced, enjoyed?  I only know my many apparati that combine to provide, present, re-present an interesting show of the “world.”

Including myself.  Snapshots and Polaroids taken of me and those I know rarely reflect the image we have of ourselves, like hearing my own voice through a machine or over a wire or recording.  I never “feel” identical to what I see or hear.  I notice those around me (more reliant on other eyes than they might think) repeatedly and continually (constantly?) comparing what they are seeing to images, other visions – “that looks like a photograph!” (which photograph?), or “if only I had my camera” (how would that change, signify, preserve?), or “I don’t remember it like this” and so on.

My many eyes help expose each other’s deficiencies, particularities, distortions, additives and deletions.  I’m not certain I can ascribe purpose to any of the various visions, it seems that the blurs and framings, foci and subjects/objects chosen are particular to each kind and moment of eye.

But its why I listen to the speech of eyes, listening also to my own (“reading” – listening with the eye?).  The eyes of children and foreigners, the aged or disabled, the rich or the poor, males, females, video, color, black & white.  Every eye seeing its own reality, even from camera to camera, lens to lens, light to light to photograph (after all, once developed and materialized, the print has gone through processes replete with adjustments and accidents, alterations and mediums becoming yet another subject/object to be variously, multifariously “seen”).

Nothing exists unchanged or unaltered.  This is the message of my many eyes.  “Original” is an illusion – a manifestation of disappearance – a mirage.  This is part of the reason I suggest you grab for eyes, multiply eyes, hear eyes out from any direction or make – to “see what you can see.”  For each and every I/eye reports individually, uniquely, distinctly.  Layering and unlayering veils of vision, the optics demonstrate convergences and separations, agreements and arguments that help me, at least, to “see” what might possibly be “being seen” of this fluid process we call “world,” call “vision,” call “life.”

“But them…they’ve got…no eyes.  More precisely: they’ve got eyes, even they do, but there’s a veil hanging in front, not in front, no, behind, a movable veil; no sooner does an image go in than it catches a web, and right away there’s a thread spinning there, it spins itself around the image, a thread in the veil; spins around the image and spawns a child with it, half-image and half-veil…and in my eye the veil is hanging, the movable one, the veils are hanging, the movable ones, you lift one and the second one’s already hanging there…”

-Paul Celan-

“the camera may be thought of as comparable to the eye.  The difference is that the camera is not more than an eye.  It does not think.  Any connection with judging, choosing, arranging, including, excluding, and snapping has to be with the photographer…what the picture is of limits meaning while it encourages the exploration of meaning”

-Mary Price-

Scripting the Photographer, the notebooks

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Scripting the Photographer: from the Notebooks

 

“It’s more likely that we take pictures in order to come closer, yet again, to an unsolved contradiction: the desire to ‘photograph’ something lying beyond the jurisdiction of the eye – and likewise beyond light, shadow, chemistry, polygraphs, time, memory, hope, etc.; something that preceded by a vague certainty that this ‘future’ image (not yet extant) has already been thought, already been in the mind, yet without a concrete ‘image’; the act of manipulating physical substances (such as glass, plastic, metals), distributed in time and shaped by the logic required for the execution of an ‘intention,’ is in fact a method of ‘visually’ demonstrating this ‘mental figure,’ which itself asserts the reality of one’s own existence whenever it becomes necessary to make such an affirmation, or else repeat it – which affirmation and/or repetition are, perhaps, ideal, tautological rituals that don’t derive something from something else but merely change one’s perspective.  When ‘experiencing’ or ‘studying’ a photograph, however, one is, in fact, less inclined to start an investigation, to engage in an aesthetical einfuhlung, into the simultaneity of absence/presence.

“What we want, simply, is to study ourselves through photographs, ourselves looking out onto the field of depiction; and our desire to conclusively combine the outside view with the inside is like bridging ‘tomorrow’ with ‘yesterday,’ deleting the space ‘in between,’ which is of course impossible, since we can exist only in this ‘between.’  In our desire to overlap these concepts – we are caught ‘between.’  The present will never be ‘complete.’  The figure of death doesn’t clarify a thing, no matter how many times it’s exposed.  One hardly ever succeeds in even grasping a simple feeling of empathy.

“Every photographic attempt to capture a wedding, vacation, funeral, statue, roof, bed, etc., etc., etc., is yet another meaningless attempt to convince ourselves that we exist.  Unfortunately, we are never wholly convinced.”

-Arkadii Dragomoshchenko-

“Images are not everything, but at the same time they manage to convince us that they are.  There is a peculiar tendency of images to absorb and be absorbed by human subjects in processes that look suspiciously like those of living things.  We have an incorrigible tendency to lapse into vitalistic and animistic ways of speaking when we talk about images. ..In its most extended sense, then, a picture refers to the entire situation in which an image has made its appearance…it is a very peculiar and paradoxical creature, both concrete and abstract, both a specific individual thing and a symbolic form that embraces a totality.  To get the picture is to get a comprehensive, global view of a situation, yet it is also to take a snapshot at a particular moment…”

-W.J.T. Mitchell-

I did it anyway

On By Alias HarlequinIn Experimenctes, Journallings, Writing2 Comments

CREDO

“art is not a mode of faith, it’s a way of thinking. In fact, it’s better than thinking because it’s easier and more rooted in experience, only we don’t have another name for it, other than art…

the easy way out that’s hard to find”

-Ronald Sukenick-

 I think beliefs are mobile manifestos

I believe we invent experience as we go along

I am uncomfortable with creeds

I believe in thinking it through

I think we feel toward thought

I believe that art is utilitarian

I think that being is ambiguous and ambivalent

I believe in art as relationship

I think language functions

I believe making is interactive

I think we are made as we make

I believe in the nothing between

I think everything is medium

I believe to do is to be

I think we are

I am looking for words

What Begins

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First Responder

Once in awhile,

perhaps always

(of this I’m unsure)

we answer;

and this answering is always a yes.

It may sound as a “no”

even feel that way too,

but “no” is no antonym,

only adjustment

 

A woman responds to a man

addressing a yessing already

to the asking

so even “no” is a “yes” to relation.

Negation may come

as it certainly does

in its various ways

but it cannot undo

or erase

the first token

(even if there are no children.

There are always children)

 

No, it merely describes,

perhaps even alters

the original gesture.

But yes is the endless beginning.