Notes on Reading Archives

Sense of Direction

Laughing in the basement.

If revelation is marked by unknowns, happiness by suffering, ease by difficulty, then it’s not a stretch to recognize that those serious truths everyone has been so steadfastly seeking were under our noses all along, hiding among the stuffed jesters and the Lego bricks in the carpet. If truth’s constant companion is the absurd, let us sit in the dark and laugh.

No, but seriously, you said, and raised self-doubt to the level of moral imperative, and at the crossroads between Either and Or, you boldly announced, neither will do–and chose anyway, as one must.

In your good company, we sleep no more in this underground of mirrors and toys; instead, we are awake with the question of whether we are, after all, in or out, as relates to the houses we once took for granted as ours. And now, you said, for my final performance, I shall confide the meaning of life to this scrap of paper, which you cleverly managed to lose.

Easy come, easy go, you said, while continuing to insist that neither would do.

***

Earlier in the week, some other search reminded me back to some of Søren Kierkegaard’s ideas, so today I am appreciating his teasing sense of humor.

Dreaming a Discovery

Fresh eyes for old forms.

It began with an idea. Considering certain fundamental principles––of geometry, for example––what if we replaced points, lines, and planes with words, sentences, and paragraphs? If truths lend themselves well to interpretation where correct structures are used, why not apply some rules to the invention of new forms?

No one needed to make anything up, only to let the new rules serve as lenses trained on what already is. It was settled, then: a movement began. To join, one only needed to commit to certain practices. Once elected, no one could quit. No one wanted to; there was freedom in constraints, and practitioners learned that they might move easily between Hegel and comic strips, philosophies of mathematics and conversations overheard at flea market stands.

One of the leaders can be found among these every day, scouring the aisles and the remainder bins, the trash piles, and the antique shops with the same reverence he wears in the great libraries of the world. You will hear him muttering to himself as he picks up one after another item to add to his collection. “Hmmph,” he will say, “this might be useful.”

***

Inspired by the work of Raymond Queneau and the Oulipo movement, while consulting Warren Motte’s article “Raymond Queneau and the Early Oulipo” (French Forum, Winter 2006).

Catalyst

A body in motion.

There is a large megaphone. The artist has a question. Is it possible to turn every cell in a chosen direction and if so, what if? What if we all––did?

If the forest is an archive of breath, who keeps things in order? The trees are silent, but not the wind and not what flies and calls between the limbs.

Here is a study in the movement of these bodies answering a call. What does it mean to be here now, together? Meanwhile, trees listen.

***

Inspired by Sioban Burke’s article in the arts section of yesterday’s New York Times (“A Choreographer Who Merges Art, Activism, and the Natural World”) on the work of Emily Johnson. Italicized phrase appears in a recent performance.

Between Worlds

With Graham Greene.

You wanted only something hard and certain to hold against the flux when the dark sky of your childhood pressed its wet lips against the windowpane. The heart of the matter, you suspected, was conflict: between this world and the next, sanctity and goodness, but the connection between these defied reasoning. Wanting nothing of the graceless chromium world, only sainthood or damnation interested you, with their questions about unknown and unobtainable Heavens on the other side of death. Yours was a world in slant, angled like the posture of a desperate man with courage to frighten the flock, in clumsy prayer.

***

Today is the birthday of English writer Graham Greene (1904-1991), best known for his novels, which often feature characters in states of existential and moral crisis. In honor of this day, I spent time this morning with these two articles: Graham Greene’s Dark Heart (by Joan Acocella, The New Yorker, March 2021) and The Two Worlds of Graham Greene (by Herbert R. Haber in Modern Fiction Studies, Autumn 1957).

Against Silencing

On the question of how to respond.

A common complaint of today’s sighted: I can no longer bear to look. Someone proposes the role of the artist as scribe, as ear for the abused, writing backward into the dream, imagining that if one speaks the horror aloud, another might be released. From what is uncertain, but any horror is magnified when suffered alone.

The sounds a body makes in distress are the sounds it holds before language. Where pain shatters language, perhaps it is still possible to pick up the pieces, assemble some makeshift wordhouse again. To the challenge of yes but is it true, the only answer is a reminder back to an earlier truth about the basic needs of a body. One is shelter.

***

Inspired by Philip Metres’ description of the work of artist Daniel Heyman and others in response to torture.

Orphic Journeys

With Jan Carew.

In the dreaming month when sea drums echo, here come the opposing spirits of ancestral dead, and here is the body in-between. Also here, a motley collection of other spirits of various purposes and temperaments, each with their own will to interfere. Balancing between limbo and nothingness, the dreamer leaves, searching for an end to exile.

The first sign of trouble was the ignorance of proper names, and then came erasure in the land of wind. Now throbs the ache of missing limbs and thirst beside these drained reservoirs of memory. Dispossessed of a place in the sun, the dreamer enters the tombs, to gnaw at the bones of collected griefs in shattered time.

And then, trespassing through prehistory to recover a lost Eden, the dreamer returns to the hills, and then to the river and finally, to the same sea that was the beginning of looking out and beyond.

***

Today is the birthday of Jan Carew (1920-2017), Afro-Caribbean poet, playwright, scholar, and novelist of far-reaching influence. In honor of this day, I spent the morning with his essay, The Caribbean Writer and Exile, published in Journal of Black Studies (Jun. 1978). This post is assembled using images and phrases found in Carew’s essay.

Intimate Immensity

Once upon a forest.

Behind the dying wind and softening rain, silence compels the listener. Since the immense is not an object, it relies on imagination, and so it becomes possible to open the world by seeing more than what appears to be. In the immediate immensity of the shattered forest, piling infinities far from all history of men; a curdling quiet trembles. You’d need a map the size of a given world to make it truly accurate, so the dreamers continue.

***

Notes while reading Gaston Bachelard’s “Intimate Immensity” in The Poetics of Space.

Possibilities for Becoming

With Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

If much of sight is the weight of understanding––the weight of the world, as the saying goes–– why not a vision to pull us forward and up, binding us to one another and this earth? What happens when one person and then many––live in devotion to the process of discovering this renewal: its anatomy and breath, its sublimated wants, and how its needs at their core might include us? In an age of crisis, we face over and again the possibility of a coming end, on a road increasingly populated by our dead and dying. What does it take to remember love––even here, and hold it long enough to see a way to its next beginning? You noticed sacredness in imperfection, even pain––because it is, because we are, because we are becoming. Of this age of loss, you suggested, now we are getting somewhere.

***

Inspired by the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

Altitude

And the ones who come down.

In another world, everyone lives in the mountains where time falls more slowly. To boast in this world is to speak of the heights you knew, have known, will soon attain. The elites put their houses on stilts.

Only the careless leave the peaks for the valleys, to feel the soft grasses and the waters of the streams and lakes. The people of the heights watch them and scoff at the waste, but sound is denser in the lowlands, so the swimmers cannot hear them––not with the all of the birds and the crickets and the lowland creatures in the grasses and not with the water in their ears. It took them by surprise at first, the noises spilling out of these lowlands.

What’s that? They wondered at first. Later, they knew it was time. The creatures released it. The visitors caught what they could and threw it back. They began to make their own and it was music.

***

Inspired by one of the worlds described in Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams, (“26 April 1905”).

Inspired Interference

The urgency of destabilizing symphonies.

Here is a signal and here is noise, interfering. But what happens when the noise is the signal, calling us back to the fire? When everything is permitted, nothing is necessary. Now the artist becomes the cacophonous jester to unmask and unmake the quiet throb of lies from the seat of power.

What is unpredictable is not random. Consider the rhizome, its growth an explosion of connections. What’s real is not the direction but the becoming. In a world of free-floating signifiers removed from context, an artist makes noise to negate the negation of life.

To navigate the soundscape, a listener will learn away from selection and discrimination of important from unimportant sounds and learn to maintain a continuous span of listening. The art in this is how such surrender makes it possible to read meaning where it seems to be gone, when all known categories collapse into an unknown being, distant and familiar.

***

Notes while reading the opening section of Joseph Nechvatal’s Immersion into Noise.