“Language is like drinking from one’s own reflection in still water.
We only take from it what we are at that time.”
Simon van Booy
I am in that wonderful uncertain state that obtains from living in fiction. Where everything seems possible, if only remotely, vague, unsettled, inchoate but perhaps.
Almost readiness, but not that far along – the will hasn’t settled on a course. No vision.
Like mentality, meshed, hovering over blank canvas or pages, just floating, sliding, swirling there, as smoke in greasy air, almost substantial, but easily wavered away.
The open. Projects jumbled in mind and heart but no spark, no instigation, a veil of nettles slightly stinging but not enough yet for action.
Voices, emotions, some words even, indistinct but actual, rumble about in cranium and neck, but none find their ink.
In Athens, in Russia, in Oregon. Younger, older, right now. Finland, Norway. Remote but still civilized.
I can’t tell whose stories are whose – other authors, your own characters, events, relatives, unknowns – dictionaries and thesauri swimming about,
yes, like that, the lessened gravity of submersion – eyes closed but able to perceive light, feel objects and presences, a wafting
and ever the questions – what now? who now? when?
“It is in the unconscious that fantasy, moments of the day, and memory live, a reservoir for the poetry of the world. Is everything else prose? Is what’s conscious ordinary prose, the prose of the world?”
“Or, I tease, the pose of the world. She is separating much too neatly the world she knows – I nearly wrote word for world – from the world she doesn’t know, the one that owns her and to which she is a slave. She is a slave to what she can’t remember and doesn’t know and she is a slave to what she remembers and what she thinks she knows. Her education has damaged her in ways she does not even know.”
Lynne Tillman
“But I have always spoken, no doubt always shall, of things that never existed, or that existed if you insist, no doubt always will, but not with the existence I ascribe to them”
“So I shall merely state, without enquiring how it came, or how it went, that in my opinion it was not an illusion, as long as it lasted, that presence of what did not exist, that presence without, that presence within, that presence between, though I’ll be buggered if I can understand how it could have been anything else”
I have the enormous pleasure and extravagant gift (one that I come to understand, delinquently as is my way, ever more profoundly each day and night) of living with, being married to, and working creatively alongside a tremendously talented artist, Holly Suzanne.
We work purposefully together in the rhetorical tradition of ekphrasis – that is, the representation of representation in various media. Usually I work in the medium of language and she in the visual arts. Sometimes we share or swap media in order to grow closer to one another, work to comprehend, and to challenge and progress our own capacities of creation and expression.
Not a Case in Point that is Perhaps a Case in Point:
Recently my wife invented this piece. It incorporates painting, collage and probably encaustic, containing metal “S” hooks, wire mesh, perhaps chain or other fabrics, perhaps wax, paints and probably unknown substances beyond. I can only say “who knows!” what makes its way through her avaricious mind and body onto these surfaces!
This particular work strikes me so, as I pass it daily to enter my verbal den, having been stewing this new year on conceptualizing for myself an attempt at an accounting (to/with/for/in myself) or presentation of how I consider artistic production as a human activity.
This morning I completed a re-reading of Wallace Stevens’ essay “Imagination as Value” from his book The Necessary Angel. A book I wholeheartedly recommend to any and everyone with creative bones in their bodies. I happened to copy out the following onto my 3”x5” notecards with which I fertilize my working-space:
“the operation of the imagination in life is more significant than its operation in or in relation to works of art and letters…the chief problems of any artist, as of anyone, are the problems of the normal (daily realities – my insertion) and that he (or she) needs, in order to solve them, everything that the imagination has to give.”
Which put me in mind of my recent assays and theories re: “Art & Appearances” and A+A=AA.
which are kin to:
“the intellect gobbles up everything around it, and as soon as it lays hold of feelings, it becomes spirit. Taking this step is the task of writers.” (Robert Musil)
and:
“In life what is important is the truth as it is, while in arts and letters what is important is the truth as we see it.” (Wallace Stevens)
Or that we humans are some bodymind processing plant ever infusing the unreal into the real, normalizing (for ourselves) the abnormal (each future moment and all of its inherent change) even by introducing abnormalities, concocting, fabricating ever onward…
grabbing “S”-hooks and netting and fabrics and wax, and paint cans and brushes and emotion and vision, hope and suffering, wounds and joy, and making…
and there are so many ways to see this
but I digress. As I was saying,
passing by this recent artifact of my wife’s making, it felt replete with myself – as if my strapping bandaged finitude were bound in the caging rectangle of chain, layered under the dark-hole gobbling gunshot wounds of my core fears and imagined (or real) belabored habits of mind and perception with innocent life-light, all filtered continuously through net-webbings of intellect, imagination and feeling which sometimes tear open or bursts or wing-themselves…resulting… producing…making objects, words, behaviors, actions or ideas into the elaborately variegated open of world…
as if, unbeknownst to me, or perhaps stimulating in me, or maybe inspired by me (likely all of the above) – a most accurate image of all I’ve been attempting to express these past days,
And cold because of the weather. Well below the freezing point. But his gloves staid on, his lips held a cigarette, and he boxed.
He could box that paper. That paper-thin page. Already beaten to a pulp.
Him with a theory.
The theory a sort of equation.
The equation as follows:
ALL (whatever a person is, has, does) + ALL (a person’s skill, effort, strength, talent, knowledge and ability)
= Appearance of Art (momentarily)
Notation: A + A = AA
An utter mystery to him.
So he sat in the freezing cold, a pen in his hand, the ink sludging slow, paper on a desk, digging/ exposing / exploring himself, believing / composing / revising language,
oh, and the catalyst necessary to the actual experimentation of this theory – (he writes) – MAKING
One had always to be making (working, acting, writing, performing) with ALL (of him or herself) and ALL (of one’s capacities, faculties and tools) to carry out this experiment, i.e. to test the hypothesis.
Source and goal (purpose, intent) unnecessary, indifferent
Any action requires an energy source. In this case: living organism possessing capacities, perhaps even proficiencies, and coffee, and cigarettes.
No specified laboratory or station or constituents (conditions) to each his own [marginalia]
Quite a simple test really.
Requiring no great funding, no special services or permissions, few qualifications, variant supplies.
Simply vast amounts of time and consistent (persistent) and enormous amounts of effort. (As he saw it).
Reviewing centuries of other experimentations and practitioners of this simple eternal test led him to observe : results in momentary airy results (often discovered in different places at different times dependent on observer – even in same test results – thus airy, ephemeral moments)
Feeling he had yet to produce an AA. A momentary Appearance of Art, he was compelled to introduce a compendium of criteria – identifiable attributes – whereby to justly analyze resultant artifacts and actions.
Again the qualities boiled down quite simply: put the equation into reverse for the observer or verifying assistant:
an Appearance of Art results through the remaking process or catalyzation of the observer,
requiring as a result, ALL of the observer’s person and ALL of the observer’s capacities,
faculties, abilities.
Notation: criteria for AA to be AA:
AA = (must equal) A + A
He practiced this experiment from both sides of the equation – attempting to verify Appearances of Art by engaging / observing / remaking results that demanded enormous effort, large amounts of time and all of his experience and capacities, and as the performer of the experiment – devoting vast amounts of time, energy and effort of his total self to the making of Appearances of Art.
It wasn’t going well.
It is hard (extremely difficult)
And it happens to be very cold (causation: weather in Winter)
He’d read of other conditions explicated by practitioners before him: contingencies such as warmth, geographical position, silence, wealth, solitude, suffering (the Ss came up quite often); specific environments, times or places, assistant substances or particular tools or resources, even difficulty itself had been recorded – but there seemed to be no rhyme or reason, certainly no agreement, in fact, very often direct and incommensurable contradictions between one catalystic experimentor of A + A = AA and the next, which led to his marginal note (copied above): “to each its own”
He carried on, in spite of the grave difficulties, confusions and multivalent referents of the equation’s elements. Once in awhile he believed he had discerned a momentary result – an appearance of art in his own private performances of the experiment; unfortunately he could not obtain verification of his tests from contemporary scholars/students/or adepts of the ancient and cryptically-clear equation.
He had no trouble himself verifying most attested AAs, given sufficient time and effort, but, as he progressed in his work, identification became more efficient yet verification demanded more and more of him, devouring his time, energy and effort, interfering with and greatly complicating his own experiments and test cases from the equation’s other end.
He began to understand why past personages were led to choose to practice and perform the experiment from one side or the other.
It is hard.
It is cold.
And there is only so much time and effort.
There is only so much living organism to be had.
Limitations began to seem insurmountable.
But by now he had come too far.
There was only to go on.
It is hard, he wrote.
It is hard and it is cold, he recorded.
Hard as in difficult.
Each thing.
And cold because of the weather.
But my gloves stay on, he wrote, and my lips still hold a cigarette, right to the end.
“In short, there are two realisms: the first deciphers the “real” (what is demonstrated but not seen); the second speaks “reality” (what is seen but not demonstrated): fiction, which can mix these two realisms, adds to the intelligible of the “real” the hallucinatory tail of “reality”…the onset of historical intelligibility and the persistence of the thing in being there.”
“the author that I am can say: I am not me. That is all.”
-Helene Cixous-
“We are a sign without interpretation”
-Martin Heidegger-
“the irresistible compulsion to seek the tiny spark of accident – the here and now”
-Walter Benjamin-
“we always envision as we see…because all of us fictionalize our lives and the lives of others who have a part in our story…the frame excludes more than it includes…”
-Mary Price-
“I consider fiction the main reality-making art”
-Ronald Sukenick-
“the suffering of being: that is, the free play of every faculty”
-Samuel Beckett-
“language owes its existence and identity to what it can never be, to what it can only point at…the sound of language is the very embodiment of desire”
words of Clarence Majors, Helene Cixous, Simon van Booy, MAK Halliday, Samuel Beckett, Alain Badiou
coffee
therapy
music – Do Make Say Think and a composition of my own
the thises and thats:
“For we live in deeds, not years; in thoughts, not breaths; and our time should be counted in the throbs of our hearts as we love and help, learn and strive, and make from our own talents whatever can increase the stock of the world’s good.” from a monumental-looking effort of A.C. Grayling “The Good Book: A Humanist Bible” – I recommend you pore over it
“The author has a passion for doors. All doors: doors to mystery…the passion for books, the ferocity, the need, the exultation, the haste to flee the places inhabited by those people close to me, in order to regain the poets and other characters, in their books…In the middle of the house we open the white door and we’re no longer here…escape in broad daylight…people I would’ve never dreamed of approaching while they were alive enter, sometimes, in the very moment I turn toward them as toward people essential to my existence, forever indissociable from my taste, my mobility, my view, enter, suddenly, my other country…” -Helene Cixous “Firstdays of the Year”
Imagine that! After all that time, to come again. To make her approach in a light summer’s dress, just as I’d always pictured it, but somehow more real the last time.
Always like a dream, with soft light, hazy, dust-motes and sun’s rays and then
she approached again in a light summer’s dress. Floral prints, breezy. Perhaps cotton. But nothing is simply cotton or silk or chiffon anymore, no, some bastardized blend or mixture of cloths and stitchings.
Nevertheless, she came.
I might have known before that she would. Where the dead go, or are. Might have known by that time, or deep enough in sleep, perhaps comatose, the locked box, the secret safe, the without key, that it resided somewhere down in there, somewhere always just further off. But not without effect.
No, it was not without effect I perceived her waltzing forth again, all calves and hips, slim-shouldered and ankles, her long goosey neck, a summer’s dress, aswaying, coming up the walk toward the house.
Must be 36 years, more or less, decades anyway, since before and then to now. Hadn’t expected a return. Might have, or hoped for somewheres secretly, but not expected. Not maybe or perhaps. Not even wistfully.
No, just flitting dreams or visions, sometimes sounds, like scents or memories of the dead. Occasional, accidental, ephemeral, nostalgic. No expected return. Past history.
Not this elegant aged woman wearing a summer’s dress, tottering up the walk, holding herself dignified, looking 19 or 25, but well beyond that, decades beyond and unexpected.
My own skin drained of its sap and crinkling. Spotted and buttoned and slack. My eyes burn from the dryness, always wanting to close, me always urging them open, just, probably, for such sights as these, some hope somewhere, not quite really a maybe or perhaps, no, nothing like that, but irrational, breathing, looking, listening about at my age. For something such as this: dignified first love now free of the world, unwanted and failing, and, alas,
she comes back in a light summer’s dress.
And I too old, too tired, to make the stairs, to holler out, to see,
I sit without believing my eyes, certainly not believing, (there was no perhaps or maybe)…no perhaps or maybe, just time coming on, asunder, crumbled, eroding, no eyes for that, for glimpsing an approach, no ears either, barely a lung for the breathing, just barely. With the music loud the melody line can be guessed at but no tune really, I don’t perceive an actual tune,
the songs, then, are gone. The songs are gone. And the trees, not well enough to see branches anymore, sometimes vaguely a trunk or a tangle, if old enough, if large and ancient, but no songs or views, really, no language…
especially not for this, though they say this happened, that nearer to the end she came back, on round the fence, walking the walk, opening the gate and come knocking, in an elegant summer’s dress, not for that, not I, no, not that much sense or detail without perhaps or maybe,
more like the comatose or anesthetized without enough dosage, something like that in my reading chair, at my desk, unable to be “through,” to cease altogether, just present there, something, to feed and to change and medicate, occasionally to move, perhaps a push or a roll-over or around, so as not to break anything not already broken, who’s to say, the children perhaps, or whoever “they” is, voices indistinctly murmured as if shouting about and around, not me, not for me to see or to say
how she might have appeared out of a glaring haze, what all sunshine becomes by now, a headache and a blazing fog, in a light summer’s dress, sure I see her all those years ago, that I might recall, perhaps, occasionally, like the dead, my parents, my children, my spouses, my love, occasionally in that way almost, maybe, like faulty memory bandied about or smothered together, flattened I guess, two-dimensional in there, behind the eyeballs, like a camera, nearly black and white, maybe like that I’ve seen her come around walking
but not with real flesh or real eyes, none of that lioness hair, no almondy skin, no hips no shoulders or neck long like a cobra, no, no hands there, no wrists or ankles, no voice,
just hazy, the fading-out of dusk or dawn, I guess is fading-in, but always dusk then now, dawn is just blindness. No details, no objects, maybe light, a little movement, no more beyond, and that from hearsay, like the children, the smaller ones, as a mouse in the house used to be, only from the corner of the eye then, only that, some dim sense that something went past, and at times it is haunting,
like that, might be, hard to say once you’ve almost heard them say “she was here” “A woman came to see you ‘pop’ or Mr. so-and-so, or somesuch, came back in a light summer’s dress,” they say.
What I might have given. The lock, the box, the key.
Sleeping between books, in the firstdays of the year, surprise falls out toward me in the form of two. Two persons, two photographs, surprising joy. Perhaps I tell you about them, for they drive my pen to paper, to tell myself. Writing comes about for me when I want to tell myself about something I seem unable to know.
Not even for certain, but merely to recognize, although like-recognition is the sort of feeling that spurs me. Then I want to tell myself about what I think I almost recognize but am unable to say. To claim. Only, apparently, to guess. And guessing into writing enables an object that might be examined. Scientifically, almost. Constructs an object that is there, to be perceived, rather than a deep in moving waters that might be called intellect or subjectivity. Perhaps intellect is just that – subjectivity cluttered with objects?
In any case, while reaching the book to its resting place, two surprises slip out I almost recognize a secret in. A secret that I think I might discover by telling about them (it) on paper, in pen. The photographs are objects: they represent, image-in, two figures against a slab of wood (it appears). I remember, immediately, and happiness as well. But between myself and the photograph-objects, what is recognized founders. I almost remember, almost recall what the photographs imagine, imagining to myself, and therefore losing objectivity – a certainty, a palpability, as it were – in a kind of alpine air, like memory.
As if visualizing distance. Spontaneously – surprise. It takes up 8 inches between my eyeballs and the glossy surfaces of 4”x6” rectangles of graded color making shape and form. Of two faces, my wife’s and my own, before she is my wife, before I am my own. Cheek-to-cheek in the one, lip to lip in the other, taken minutes apart in a restaurant booth by friends across the table. Our eyes and smiles say joy is frozen there. Not many years ago. By friends no longer friends, in skins that have slackened and wrinkled, from eyes the worse for wear, with different combinations and cuts of hair.
Surprise! A “shock of recognition” emotionally evocative, rationally unsure. Distances of many angles – 8 inches from my spectacled eyes, thousands of miles from this desk, years of days from the present.
The gaps are the voids that vacuum certitude. What looks like a record of an instant or instants of time passed, vortices layers of interpretation. Viewing the photographs is a NOW, an actual happening, a direct perception of images of my wife and I very close and notably happy – no suggestions of misgivings. Great pain lies before and ahead of these recorded moments. This I know from experience. Experiences as tangible as this Fujifilm Crystal Archive paper held between the pads of my fingers and thumbs.
We are beautiful. The surprise lands like sunrays warming the chest on a porch in Winter. I am not surprised that we are happy. What takes me off guard is the unexpected and unpredictable re-cognition of what must be called re-imagining experience through objects, fragile paper objects featuring a depiction. Light – ephemeral and enormous light – bounces off a substance that must be real enough to reflect it, gathers onto chemicalled plastic, negative-thin, gets held there, imprinted and re-produced in darkness, transcribed into colors like our flesh, our clothes, our hair, our eyes. As we were. The photograph is.
These happy chance surprises come to me in the first days of a difficult year, out of Helene Cixous’ Firstdays of the Year. This is part of the surprising. That the rising (or falling, really) of the physical objects imagining us, the photographs, should tumble today, from there, to here, just now.
Into the midst of, I feel certain, millions of other circumstances and situations contingenting a new instant from the instants recorded there. And yet… and yet… the immediate almost-recognition they provoke is also familiarity. A strange agreement, a feeling of compatibility with what I see. That is me, that is her (is it not?), we are happy. I know that press of shoulder, that squeeze of hand and silken neck. Those eyes lit with verve and passion, with gratitude, with pleasure. And my own – tired from wandering, matched to hers. Our life, emblematically.
Two heads and partial torsos. Two lives held on a dime. Before and after pouring from the back of the papers. Clipped. Shot. Stolen. Photographic terms. Seconds we are gathered for, doing nothing but presenting.
More than that. The chosen action. What’s deliberate. We are sweet, close and radiant, but look here – we are joined. It is clumsier, not posed. At times to near to see one another, not ready, we are there one to the other, in one another’s space and face, mid-sentenced and off-guard – surprise!
This is how we arrive, and select, falling always from betweens, in instants, we appear, we draw nigh. With barely a moments notice we are made objects, describable and frozen. Until we act. Say, believe or move, and we are subject again, alive and becoming, undoing. Which is why it comes as a surprise, an almost-but-not-for-certain, neither cumulative nor complete at any click.
I don not know, do you know? Who these two are. They are perhaps, but not yet done and never-ending. Even eventual stillness, like these photos, continues on. They say “this happened” “is a once” among billions of particled others. “They were there.”
If only a fleeting moment.
I digress.
Like a vase of perfume in the passing, it alerted and re-minds. Somethings and manythings, unsure and inconclusive. We began and we begin, and always further on. I almost remembered what is not quite known and began telling. I went further. Did I?
All my Words are Silent 