more than this

 

perma-lost in translation (it continues...), for some reason speaking to me, isn't that silly?

in translation

does this make any sense?

Lobelobby ist ein ewiges Karussell … der neuromechanische Karneval spult all dieses Kleingedruckte zurück, ohne dass es für die darin dargestellten Personen eine Rolle spielt. Die Details der Schiffbrüchigen füllen meine Dachrinnen, und ein Blattspruch (Paul Newmans „Steak at Home“) huscht über die Dachlatten.

oldie, goodie

 

morning pages

I didn't this time, but really must start to do these now, as a practice, they popped up in my mind, I casually mentioned them in my last post, and then, Saturday night I think, randomly turned on the HBO remake of Scenes from a Marriage, circa 2021, not even going to the episode I had previously been on last year I guess but instead, skipping ahead to one where they are not only present but become a point of contention: Oscar Isaac is in therapy, doing his pages and he wants to keep them private, except he does want to be seen, of course, and Jessica to know about their contents, to exculpate herself from whatever they might accuse her of, and so they fight about them, these pages, plucked from my own consciousness, in the now...

As I once wrote somewhere else: an image is given, and from the image rears the serpent godhead. 

Usually I can very well look within. Today, though, it is easier to look back and out, and perhaps even ahead.

Landforms rising from sea, who are you to me

I feel sick of myself, the movie Patrick saw but I never did in the end, and tentative in language, especially in this brief jaunt back to the "United States", which is kind of a painful place, and as I said over text, nauseated by the wind beating down on the family mast, wind I knew was coming...wind I even tweeted about, and my father sent me a "sad but true" message and now here I am. I am trying to be calm, in integrity, sovereign, collected, not ill. but instead I am increasingly nervous, in the studio of all places I am nervous, about validation, my "career", my work, where is it moving...how does it entangle with recent "events", maybe not at all, and likewise about the knowledge gaps, about the time not had to sit and be with words, to edify, to "learn" even as I am learning...even as I have created, carved out this wedge of time for myself. how quickly the cake melts. On the seemingly endless plane ride, the first of two this week so I am already mobilized in anticipation, not even trying to undo the jetlag—I thought about many things, subtleties, goals on which I can't seem to get a grasp, at least when I don't have some stationary container (ritual: shall I pick back up the morning pages?) and about love, what it is I really "want". 

Nature book

Painting that is art historical the way that The Nature Book (2023) is literary. Paintings of the trace, via 

Bridge to

Teribithia, I thought about like LOL amid the clearings of Barbizon, and now, mid-crossing—on the way, back again to the art store—it occurred to me, this being inside of a live temporal relationship is what I must reevaluate, I need not rush, I do, in fact, have time. The paintings I am working on now, chiefly in constructing (stretcher bar stage) is a herbst suite? for this herbstsemester, it is a semester's worth of work planned and realized in November so, in a way, two-thirds through, but that third third being the place of condensation, concentration, seems appropriate: a third way in for a subject of third space. so I don't have to run over the bridge in the rain, I can wait for my friend to bring me her roommate's cart, I can take care, be deliberate, slow down. turn around, eat lunch, start again later on.

Uhhhh

With every new painting I’m like wait did I make this painting already no it cannot be…it’s hard to say if it’s a memory, and a reminder, of inevitability in the work, of its issuance in parallel (1Q84 and the like), or in fact some external referent

Monday finds you

Picking back up, perhaps out of necessity, with a painting diary, the body a little broke from 24 hour travel window and walking my 2 plus meter stretcher bars over the bridge to the studio. 

Entered the morning with one set of compositional ideas, emerging by afternoon, briefly distraught at supply store, with another set, more resolute. 

Managed to take care of two tiny canvases from previous weeks, possibly even finished, so pleased about that. 

Having a larger room to myself for the next several I think will be an important crucible, already it’s a push to do it all, but some uncertainty arises always at key moments. 

Moving through those feelings of doubt or what next on my own, to simply be in production, relaxing into the great experiment, is also the so-called educational project. 

rewind...who shall i say is calling

It felt right in recent weeks to be more in the silences, having experimented in September with throat-activation, throat-opening...having to speak, not in the abstractions of diary-here, but to real people, about my work, in real ways. 

Even so, I was able to still summon my regular elliptical rhythms—my roundabout manner—with those 2:4 hermit-opportunist tendencies or as my mom told me yesterday on the phone, my mode of half-speech, talking through a push-pull where you never quite know what's going on, but from fragments of information, conditions, variables, a narrative begins to unfurl: 

introducing my practice by transferring water from one container to another, pouring it into a bowl, reading a text, having the water collect the words, sending my classmates to the window, me out the door, heading downstairs to the little smokers' patio, while they watch from above, at an angle, as I take my shoes off and walk to the only solitary bush, and sprinkling the water on or before it, I say, hello.

The first step, I suppose, in staging for this new landscape, untold,"neutral", a micro-alchemy of my micro-universe, an autopoietic circuit of private, specific passions.

The next day my professor comments: you were reading a bit too fast for non-native English speakers, of the text I had chosen for the occasion and where the language is complex, with some words made up, as I explain to a colleague who didn't catch them all, but could nonetheless tell that language does, for me, have a certain importance. I am touched by her observation, or by its indication, that something of "me" is discernible.

I will see what happens to my love of linguistic play now, living among those for whom the entire lexicon is, to some degree, made up, fictive: we cohabitate in a mutual (agreed upon, or at least functional) fabulation, the others converge on English as a space of betweenness to join the islands of their individual tongues, English as a boardinghouse, so that it becomes a brocki English with the marvels of parts collaged and renegotiated, and when I listen to their "finds", tertiary meanings installed prominently in unexpected corners, no, as someone wondered, I am not necessarily frustrated; on the contrary, it seems like a gift: freeing and joyful, revealing convergences, correlations, etymologies, roots, inviting me to go deeper, though perhaps not in my immediate circumstances, but once I arrive "home" (recall the familiar, slightly fetishistic template of Beckett working in French, Jhumpa Lahiri in Italian—what is made possible by freshness). There is the inverted symmetry of the fact that, because English is my primary, like them, I have the privilege of re-drafting its interiors: building parapets, extensions from historical blueprints, I can furnish these lushly, absurdly, A Rebours or Arakawa and Gins style. Regardless of location, I have long been inclined to devise an English that even from inside, is uneasy, where you must hold onto the walls, yet that still aspires, because of a default (shifting?) baseline of dominance, to be understood. 

I agree with him, my teacher, that I went through the piece too quickly: my voice was shaky during the "ritual", it was so strange and discomfiting in the moment and yet in concept, natural, this need to perform, to instigate a chain of events, a process of—favorite, overused term—transmutation. Did it help you, though, was it useful for your work, he continued, and I say, it's always helpful for me to conduct myself more publicly, to give myself what elsewhere I have termed "due berth", or to bring the great Within out into a larger Zone of perception. Actually, I have been thinking lately about Stalker, about independent ecologies, quests and so-called "wastelands" and what we can neither demarcate aloud nor turn back from detached, when instead we are forced into momentum, movement towards a violent yet nebulous core.  

Kollwitz

There were days on earth (long ago, or not so, relatively) when earth was dark and musty 

woody it smelled always of wood pine

Now it will smell of metal and burnt plastic it will be 

dirty without dirt, without dank soil and dark again too

Only the dark will look like white it will look bright 

glass bright and becoming but

really though it is still dark it’s just that 

no longer are we entitled to pine

Why are you here, part II

Following up on a previous iteration...

Why are you here, why this city, why this program, why this [insert variable] etcetera...questions posed often to me lately as variations on: peaceful inquisition, niceties of making acquaintance that constitute, nonetheless, a prodding…undergirded by, further thoughts of, why did you not stay in the place where you are from, which must be so much more [adjective]...where, well, wouldn't you be happier wait why weren't you happy there, versus here where...Anything might happen 

or may very well not.

and I respond, in turn, by indicating that here there is indeed A Lot to do, I enumerate this Lot, I give different versions of it in explanation, I am always tripping over reasons, descriptions to explain Myself, adding that, where I am from there is really too much, a gauche too muchness of yes, things to see but primarily, ways to be seen,  involving an exaggerated straining to the point where they became, for me, ways to Not be seen, or maybe I even say, if I am feeling especially proximate and confessional, where I am from I was never seen as myself, somehow it is easier to be Other here than it was back there to be myself, isn't that funny...ha ha.

In these exchanges are questions inside questions and answers inside answers and all concern the vagaries of belonging and the presumptions we have around the state of...what it looks like to embrace and to partake of a place without a definitive pre-concept for how your budding relations will culminate; to be, still, Discovery Mode-ing and to anchor in this openness with a cool trust in the eventuality of a desired outcome. And with, too, a basic will-to-adventure and to being lost and pointed at, having to continuously re-remember your direction and arriving at the gates, towering or squat, to rap on the doorless window or is it a windowless door, hoping to be let in and to get to work. 

What I find most amusing about this template of informational, also quite existential back-and-forth baked into every new conversation and encounter is that I am asked for my Why well in advance of its organic resolution, as if I have not traveled to said context expressly to find it, the Why I imagine sitting with hands cupping cheeks, stranded somewhere along the highway of here-to-there, waiting for me to drive by and pick it up, en route to our next station. It's always seemed quite natural to me to learn about the decisions I make by making them, to be guided towards particular sites and approaches and people and slowly then do their roles in some larger scheme come into view. While that sensibility perhaps challenges normative expectations of how life works, a rhythm of...with action and belief, revelation...certainly befits an artist, suits me even on days when I do not think I am one, or a very good one...and so, suits me now. 

In this empirics we have the knowledge, too, that doubt is co-creative, hence Doubting Thomas, hence their rhetorical fingers in my wounds, hence mine in theirs, for it must be an aspect of me that has materialized, or made myself susceptible to, "doubting" discussions, perhaps as to maintain one foot out (back home, back there), or one foot in the reflective, the hypothetical...if the judgements of the external world are designed to activate your self judgements (matching pictures), and to get to you as they accumulate, a barrage, all at once, it remains that only you determine their relevance. I have had other travels, moves that defied logic or convention but after a while since, and resting in the assuredness of origin in between, the Justification game again needs some adjusting to...I had forgotten this form of self-definition instantiated by clawing at territorial validity, by claiming one's Right to be transiting existence in general, to be at school on earth, earth-school, taking notes.

images: Maria Schneider in The Passenger  (1975).

outline

Themes I am (in some cases, once again) exploring in my "sojourns"

• Rootless cosmopolitanism and lineage-based imaginaries of self/Other
• American myths: abstraction, projection, decline
• The axial centrality of New York, what it outwardly represents (totality, dynamism) and harbinges ("danger", competition). Versus, in my years of observation, its actuality as a kind of supremely provincial, dense experience like any other, and specifically designed to support lower-level inquiry (money, power, glory). Grossly over-aware of its inspidity, smugly so, lacking in life force because of too much false-force. For me, evoking a sense of pride and a quiver of arrogance, with embarrassment at both, when raised as a topic of conversation
• So how to show the superfluity and likewise, the distinct affordances, of New York, in framing my own orientation? And to argue that all places offer variations on such conditions, and their effects can, or should, be quite personal
• The remit of the English language: its functional necessity and therein, the hubris of round-accent fluency in it (obvious point, but anyway)
• Internet consciousnesses vis a vis the maturation of the divine feminine archetype *more later
• Aporia: memory fishnet with so much seeping through, lost?, to make room for fresh information, difficulty calling on certain key pieces (words, vibrations, philosophies) at key moments amidst the rush of additional variables for inscription. 
• Reduction to aphorism, common terms for ease of conveyance
• Conventional initiation rites of (Young) Adulthood, such as: tools of proximity (alcohol rears its head), the ubiquity of urban housing crises
• How to feel at home in body, anywhere
• Alongside: nature, devic kingdoms
• Suspending the anxiety to allow for...

Foreigners Everywhere

Performing at the Cabaret Voltaire this evening (of all places), Ingo Niermann read from a text evoking the exilic legacy of Zurich—artists there to wait out wars—and the Swiss cantonal model as a baseline for socioeconomic stability amid surrounding European turmoil. Now, as ever. Seeking to playfully counter what he argued is a dearth of European "conspiracy thinking", at least relative to the US, Niermann introduced his own "Dadaist" concept for exploiting and disrupting reliable Swiss neutrality as, so he posits, the country embodies a highly migratory, anonymized future. 

For my part, I have not felt very anonymous this week, rather the opposite, reporting to the registration office, the phone company, the bank, the train line, always needing to prove my identity, verify my presence, corroborate my positioning—fiat and physical. (Such bureaucratic machinations were later taken up by Hanne Lippard in her portion of the night’s performances, in their relevance, perhaps, to her residential status in Berlin). What I have experienced thus far: someone in the crowd was talking about all the cushy, well-paid jobs that bring foreigners to Zurich, versus Basel, where the population is still more native, interactions more personal. That feels true. When you hear English on the street here, you think, Googler, or, Zuri Disney theme park moment.

In my German class, I am the sole native English speaker, everyone is learning German twice or thrice removed from their "mother tongues", a predicament I do not envy. So the connection to German in the room is predominantly through tertiary mediation. One thing we do all seem to have in common: the wish to make a life abroad, away from our home territories, irrespective of where and why or how. Such is the prerogative of the artist, attuned to the fictions of a set of given circumstances and so more inclined to seek out others. Palpable here is the nature of electing for exile (self-imposed), or in many cases, its necessity. How big the world is being what Niermann suggests as smol Switzerland's reminder, its utility as a conduit and paradigm for true "democratic" relations.

Walking by the lake at night as I made my way home, I contemplated how these topics entangle with two things: first, a recent giobiology newsletter heralding the BRICS summit and anticipating a larger global shift to Swiss-style direct-voting cantonal governance, particularly in the US, in the coming decade. From my new locational vantage, American capital certainly appears to be on the decline, or the fact that being an American, despite its fictive cache and select freedoms therein, is such a logistical pain in Schweiz underscores that likelihood. (If it were good to be American, wouldn’t it be easier?). And second, the 2024 Biennale theme, Foreigners Everywhere, with its Claire Fontaine source material, this title ringing in my head all the time now.

My first name, my Vorname, as a few people have asked me about lately, means "from the water," after: Moses, the archetype of diaspora, of in-betweens, he who leads towards land but is left without it, denied a landing so as to be kept at the penultimate crest, in the inframince, like an observing gusset, a reminder of desert-past. In its full extension, my last name, my Familienname, means “small-er,” an elaboration of the petite objet. So cumulatively, we have a "smaller exile," a shorter climb, or in my current Venus phase of watery murk, a dispatch to the riverbeds, overlooking and waiting…in watch for something firmer. 

Anita Brookner world tour

The heart a woven thing
Garrulous sometimes

My sister a fallen weaver she forgot
All curtains fall
All contains all

The second thing

Underneath the irreality of the dream come true
There is the second, finer thing
More difficult to digest and to know 
What is
I wait for the oracle cards to tell me I don’t go 
In for another reading — this time, I read within

I steady my self, for the body is recovering

I jumped and the current was cool and fine 

The air is plenty but nerves abounding I 

wonder how I made it altogether it’s a 

matter of mindset

I had been asking and wanting telling 

to ask is 

For experiences, only the sign says 

Sheer carnivale

Here in new York I am remembered at convenience

At least when it comes to friendship…preoccupied with their mirrors I 

Release mine in swoop

I want to go where I will be remembered, thought of

Cherished?

for all I Am for all I might be for what 

together we refract

Ladyfingers

On my way home from French class, talking to the Artforum lady who is at that wonderful age of being ripe for us to ask, or is she still a girl?, I recognize why I need more practice at making let alone speaking about my art, showing her photos on my phone as I have done countless other times, I sensed my third energy center collapse inwards and while the verbiage around the paintings, the black ground pieces versus the tiles which might be more ready for reception, was quite correct, the images themselves, the details, what they represented, were not yet in order, meaning they or I were lacking a conviction in their legibility as Important and worthwhile, meaning that if the viewer, the first viewer being myself, is at all tentative about what I am placing before them, that feeling-state (mine or theirs) becomes absorbed into what I show and how I show it, instead of what I should be doing—via, as Viki says, my "dragons": surrounding the work in a firelight of clarity of being and awareness. 

No wonder I have been having a bit of trouble (relative) preparing to go back to school. This is the most important lesson of all! That the work will continue to get better as I continue to bulwark it, as I and it together become impervious to what might be called the violence of conveyance, rather than reverting to a veneer of invisible and ineffable. Phoning Rachel earlier today I laughed at how I must have thought I would take up painting and BAM! success—success in what or whose terms…I made her promise to hold me to the promise that by the time It All comes, I will not care whatsoever, but be so integrated in totality with my own process any acknowledgment is irrelevant. Now how long will that take, what did I set myself up for…Carmen Herrera. So naturally the evening brings with it an illustrative situation. Also, bonus, after I gave her some context on the exhibition we were in, the writer said she was surprised I was a painter cuz painters don’t normally articulate themselves too well…so of course I did something exaggeratedly jejune and formal at the end I actually shook her and her roommate’s hands.

always

funny how in a certain kind of book there will always be a female George along with a Beth...not in name, necessarily, but in concept.

whole heart provisions

Three meals a day

Why the completionist fantasies
to find more ease, more options
The therapist says it’s about my —
about authority stripped bare
and returned to this time, the soul’s task
The magician’s workshop woody, cluttered, I hover there in must and
fetters stillborn dolls aglow his wife and daughter
in the kitchen
waiting for the broadcast

Her eyes all large and googly from behind glass
Eichmann in Bacon’s box
Ariana is a cup overflow’th, angel man had said
the technology, it's so potentially amazing she tells us until they fuck with it
the soul needs food Ariana says
J— volume is what she has, I say
Creasing a crest

I don't know that she knows anymore, more than the rest
I know what I know,
you know?

I remember when Grimes discovered three meals a day
She was surprised it made a difference
She was surprised it filled her and that it didn’t
The lobes grew bigger and bigger but
her jeans still fit

inside

There are days when it feels very possible, as a principle of consciousness, that one is only alive inside creation.

Joyce, "The Dead", Dubliners (1914) - 

His soul swooned softly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

the where of it all

If I am to represent to myself and even to others a kind of witness consciousness then it is source that orients me as to where; where to go, because something is needing to be seen and I to fill the position of seer?

Le samouraï a movie i think boring srry

It’s only once I hit on using these black grounds, like SLAM! like here’s a starting point for you here’s where you’ll have to really begin that I have come to recognize how little I have done til now to truly “work” a surface how far they still have to go…I go to the galleries full of new weak coffee paintings same bodies tripled territory same thunderthigh transparencies that stand in for thought and I miss in painting the quiet facility I have with writing...in painting I really feel as if I am doing battle, that there is so much history to contend with and here I am, small, and seeking mark. I let go of shame ? perhaps for how long it took me to get to this humbling point for something that, well, it so easy to see it in others. To meet them where at. I must have become more forgiving with age, perhaps. And Rachel says I am a painting dj mixing it up and everywhere I go there are my paintings in trees and sky and on the floor and in the soil and when I turn back to the canvas there assembles the Greek chorus, the crowd, all my old and alien priors, Charline and Rita and Asger and Francis, those sometimes friends. 

tax season

it's raining out and the leaves are coming to

everyone at work on secret projects 

lamp black shadows and
the dog barks on 

i painted all day on emilia's roof i scraped away the paint with my sock, then my shoe

i had real branches in my face and fake pollen in my hair

andrea saw a fish and emilia the roof

I saw Susan Rothenberg Oehlen Rita Ackermann I saw lots of people but not myself

GAHHHHHH

emilia asks me if i've ever sold a painting people are making so much money from painting she says 

did i know this yes

i would LOVE to sell a painting only

she always likes my paintings more than i do perhaps this is the problem

i have not achieved what i want to achieve, what i know is dormant there

i struggle to advertise because the immediate results do not feel very true

only the process, of genuine interest, "inquiry" seems true

i think of Gene Kelly in American in Paris hills, vistas

the surprise of your work in someone else's sight

muscularly

still

coming home to treehouse grateful 
grateful for place, friendship

grateful for the loophole in time or change that will one day bring about 

in the work, summation

Thin voice

I wanted to write into the empty
when the empty came I  
got very still
I thought about the drawers and windows the cabinet with 

baby wrapped in paper
Keep quiet her perfumed liners I told them 
A trail fixed to the 

Cupboard still she lays titrating her genesis 

how many years there are in a day 

Quantum Laps

Co-creation, reality, sound, sight, insight, darkness, information.

Sound

What is a field? "A field carries the potential for manifesting a force. Particles of objects inside a field may change or move." The field of sound can be felt as potential force. There is active participation by the listener and co-creation of this form between the listener and sounds. —Pauline Oliveiros

Sight

As a child, before there were cellphones and cellphone-cameras, I took photographs with my eyes. I did other things with my eyes too, like home in on the texture of a particular surface, acquainting myself with its grain at different resolutions. Through these photographs, I saved sensations, or the feeling of a moment. Taking one, I would count back to myself all the others I had taken, measuring through them the passage of time, testing my ability to mark time's passing. I remember well the action-experience of ocular photography, even as the outcomes of that exercise are now mostly vaporized. This kind of conceptual atrophy is owed not just to the prevalence of the phone camera snapshot but to a personal transition from investment less in inscriptive immediacy than in a durational "filming" of experiences that creates a deep knowing of what has happened. 

A few weeks ago, heading out with dog only a few meters from the building looking on ahead at all of the building trees shedding their winter skin becoming spring yellow, lime green sprouting out from their beds, I took these cognitive stills again, I photographed the weight of the rain waving through the air the dark benches outside the armatures of the scene in different shades of blue. And the slim white calf of the man in grey sweatshirt, grey cutoffs with that anonymous 90s early 2000s face doughily downgraded Dennis Quaid and who I didn't recognize but it was lovely, neighborly, very Full House of him to say hello to me as he folded a child's bike into the elevator when we headed back upstairs. 

The turn of the man’s calf, what a classical drawing manual might call its torque or even better, its torsion, reminded me of the chicken leg "pulkey" that my grandmother talks about, the part of the bird she and her siblings used to fight over during the war, when they were resettled in Letchworth and food was scarce: the pulkey was special, if they had a guest at their table, it went to them. Last night Laura demo'd how to key a paint tube and I felt like a pre-pre-luddite before I forgave myself that, too.

Some people are saying we will have a blackout soon, no digital cameras, no technology, only analogue memory materials: books and paper and spoken word, the old mechanisms of cognitive generation. Some other people are saying this is, and will continue to be, a time of great hope. Both trajectories seem to me worthy of plaintive consideration and if necessary, equanimous response. Recently, I had to take another writing break because I had too much "homework" of sorts to take care of and the interior life was pulling at me in nebulous ways I didn't wish to relinquish to the page. March was strange, basinlike. Could April possibly be crueler?

Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. Austere sincerity and diaphanous with a hard edge. I understand now why the chemtrails of trying to write or do anything with Real Affect so often seem to verge on cliche, on too saccharine cupcake girl because that is what...as yet...we have been equipped with to approach the kernel of the numinous within the container of the cold interaction. 

I understand now, too, why I became an art historian first, why I trained so heavily in that modality, which is not only, as Andrea pointed out a while ago, because it involves dealing with old information, creating a foundation for the task of the artist, i.e. to bring forth new information—but also because being an art historian entails…staking an opinion about the information that you have gathered, not just piecing it together and handing it over to someone else, handing over agency or power concerning your own investigative handiwork, as I might have done in previous lifetimes…to have a critical perspective and to create from criticality, this is now the task, which sometimes means sublimating the divine neutrality of the buzzing buzzing bee (Bhramari breath) to ensure the free looping of the messily human.

reading

 

bugle

A new set of principles
unanticipated and unadorned thrust
into brass arms, open a niche at the sternum there we
burry the moss of our prior acquaintance and ask
them unto the other
Forgiveness for his absence from the natural spring bed
the dry tart whistle of
navel harp

postscript I did love Querelle (film) very much

ring the bell

bought, and sold, and bought again...

the dove is never free

I'm finally back to (really and emphatically now) reading Patrick's copy of the Houllebecq "art world" novel, The Map and the Territory and am about to go visit Laura, who once when I asked her for her proverbial anthem for an exercise we were doing gave me the literal song Anthem (Leonard Cohen), lyrics above. I am trying to do better about socializing from heart-terms, checking in with the heart map, the verdant dragon's blood a tree still grows in the Yemenite desert cardiothoracic terroir...When I look at my paintings, I swoon a little in the bad, seasick way, and when I look at photos of them it's even worse. I must finish with these tiles soon, it's getting late, it's time to move on. I can't tell if they're improving as I go or just becoming more fractionated, sequential, an evolution but laterally, across, unqualified. Eva Hesse diaries q o t d . . . 

Monday May 11. The gutters filled with creepy things and people and my creepy thoughts and I cannot rid myself of myself — nor live!

hope

 

In his April energy update, Lee Harris shares the theme of The Active Power of Hope and Its Rising Presence on Earth: Remember, hope is something we can carry within us, and it's a very active presence that we can use to keep the light and the connection to spirit in us. It's not necessarily just an escapist idea or a fantasy that someone's going to rescue us. We are going to do everything that we need from inside this body and our spiritual connection, and the active power of hope is when we really remember that. When we really remember we are not in this alone.

After

After some time passed wherein I abandoned this project for seemingly more urgent, important things, it hurts a bit to think of writing...to remember how to eek it out so fluidly...swimming aloud in one's own thoughts, like a child splashes out dirty bathwater...though it cannot hurt for long. Sensitivity felt from the interior end of the creative act seems pitifully casual compared to the tension exuded in two creations I watched this weekend, Pialat's Van Gogh (1991)...an exercise as usual in tempered violence, butter churned...and Christophe Honoré's AIDS denoument coming-of-age gentle bluish melodrama Sorry Angel (2018)...experienced in wretched succession. These films made me want to go nowhere, do nothing. See everything...feel everything. Whereas writing wavers hieratically before that binary of somatic desire, as an imperative it never really goes away, or when it does, it really just happens in observational silence.

What the world needs

 Is not another Joan Mitchell. Nevertheless 

Reset

I dreamt that I lied to a friend-acquaintance about some relationships or relational dynamics, personal history, I said I had been with someone who I hadn’t not on purpose but by simply not intervening to say—that is not what happened, something else happened—to instead watch the narrative she had corded onto play out in her dialogue, kept from swerving it back the way of mine. In the end, I found that few in our circle were listening to me anyhow and in order to change that I had to circle back to her and tell her the real story, in other words, the truth of some affairs, even as they were trivial, not even to save my reputation (for the falsehoods could be spread, checked out) but to deepen our amity. 

Morris' bird

Among the many birds that Morris Graves painted, here is this one: Bird Singing in the Moonlight  (1938-9) from MoMA's collection, tempera and watercolor on mulberry paper. Look at its quiet cry. See also, this song.

MIRACLES

 

Everybody knows

Everybody knows that the best questions are the ones that have no answers. There are the practical questions that can be answered through actions, such as what I pose to a painting: what do you need now? Or, what is being asked of me to bring you into realization? But the more base, more atavistic and innate knowledge concerns a not-knowing of the irremediable. 

Video I forgot I liked

 

capacity and void

Yesterday I went to David Zwirner to see the Richter show, which was full of dogs...Today I am thinking about...

Desire for connection is a funny pulsating thing that presumes void where one might generally hope to find capacity. In her classic treatise Gravity & Grace, Simone Weil writes:

We must not seek the void, for it would be tempting God if we counted on supernatural bread to fill it. We must not run away from it either.

The void is the supreme fullness, but man is not permitted to know it. What is permission to know? If knowing is determined by desiring awareness—the denial of permission to know is a voiding of that desire. 

Simone, a little bit earlier: We have to go down to the root of our desires in order to tear the energy from its object. That is where the desires are true in so far as they are energy. It is the object which is unreal. But there is an unspeakable wrench in the soul at the separation of a desire from its object.

If we go down into ourselves we find that we possess exactly what we desire.

Or, to extrapolate something I said to a friend recently, I feel freer now from many kinds of interactions where I was desiring something that was not there, that was unreal, and the desire was causing my soul to undergo a deep, miserable wrenching. Now, however, I can gingerly inhabit the supreme fullness of the void-conscious frequency, and I am so happy and grateful to be here that any connection that comes must be comfortable holding its own within this space, a space not of expecting supernatural magnetism, but of openness to and hunger for it. 

Such a hunger is not about "wanting" in lack but service in roominess, it is about making room for breath and for what might travel to me through it. Void-conscious experience creates a framework for new pulsations directed towards what on your frequency is unknown, as well as appreciation for who is there already.

relinquishment

It's been a challenge today to concretize very much in language. Simple articulation feels full of mistakenness. Interesting how that coincides with an acceptance of fallibility at the energetic level and an acknowledgment that there is no wrongness in being...even making mistakes does not convert your essence into "wrong". I was very attached as a child to a certain degree of perfectionism and fear of being wrong such that I would deliberately perpetuate behaviors from which I was consciously moving away because making a change would invalidate the past behaviors as wrong—a weaving of learning and unlearning that does not get one too far. It is amazing how much in the last couple months I have relinquished of that pattern, of the tension in my day to day, the frustrations with "inability to do", and how much that relinquishment owes to surrender and thus forth, creation.

Amidst the many probable infinities

Amidst the many probable infinities, we return home...including by researching mesology, a concept concerning organism relationships and landscapes as milieu:

- Interview here with mesology's current "representative"

- From Augustin Berque's Mediance to Places talk: "Mesology, as I profess it, is a form of dynamic coupling between a given being...and what surrounds it, which constitutes the milieu, and the surroundings start out as an environment and then become a milieu in that dynamic and creative coupling..." Is that how we change our inhabitation of earth? By revivifying our dynamic and creative coupling with it? Berque calls this "co-suscitation". It is often said that magic is energy plus intention...Now more than ever...

home and garden

During the day, she worked in the wood-shop, and in between the cutting and sawing and seasoning of wood-flesh, she would slip away from the humdust of her studio to face the great, leafy out-of-doors. She walked the few meters to her garden half in float and meanwhile kicking up the loose rocks that light had crumbled along the path behind her. The garden was an opening of freestyled plenty: it fanned from the threshold of a house of glass, a conservatory she kept warm and nourished and full of changelings to remember the winters of her childhood. Where she was now, there was no more winter. You could assume that everything living and growing had survived the transition. 

The woman had a friend, another woman who lived on a cliff by the sea. The friend was a version of her Self. This friend was friends with Sinead O'Connor, because she read somewhere that Sinead lived on a cliff by the sea by her self, she read that after sloughing off all the not-her that once was, Sinead had managed to attain a private life of sacred quietude, a life that was resolute in being unresolved, that could smile at the stillness in its teeming—a stillness that had first come-to-surface as "brutality". That's how the woman on the cliff aspired to live, but she also liked the mask of the brutal, it made her curious about the others, about what she could see over her own end, meaning in activity. Even if she were one with the strokes of the sea, she was interested in the port that lined its grassy edge, that drew up from the muckraked bile visitors and goods and, so she thought, answers: news from the unseen, absent else.

The woman would meet her friend at dawn, at an hour when it is tolerable to seek only those you can be with in silence. They went to stumble about the dunes, watching the periwinkle wink, the crawfingers of the sky lifting up the sun. Mornings often began like this, the woman would turn the lights on in the shop and say hello to the passionflowers, the overnight blooms, and then it would be time to search for her friend’s old else in sea and earth’s cleaving. The woman had water by the sea, earth in her garden, fire and wood in her studio—what more could she need. The only element she had forgotten in her picture was metal. It wasn't mentioned in the initial face reading or in any of the preparatory material, but it served, subliminally, as the infrastructure for all of this, because metal had given her a place to dream.

Dries one

 

The world and the village

Exercise to do with my children if and when I have them…

First: the room. A big desk tucked in the corner of the large, openly laid out ground floor of a nineteenth century townhouse, somewhere in Europe…sort of like Isabelle Huppert’s workspace in Malina and when Miranda arrives in Brooklyn, in Season 6 of SATC. My desk is in an airy salon painted the palest shade of blue-green with deep russet wooden parquet floors. White decorative flourishes on the mantelpiece and ceiling. 

My desk is perfectly sized with a finely grained surface and gentle, delicate details, a crystal a pen a diary a stack of papers a Ganesha statue as tall as my thumb a ring of coffee remains an assortment of books placed just right. But not like in that Rashida Jones and Bill Murray movie, I jot down, On The Rocks, late Sophia Coppola. Because here there is balance and lucidity, this exercise is anti-paranoiac, the desk is where it’s meant to be, all is where it’s meant to be, so that I can simultaneously see out the windows, peeking through my long transparent curtains, and turning back, onto the fullness of the space within.

My children are very young now but I need to paint, write, to create, for myself yes but for them, too, to show them I have a self at all, to show them what that’s like. So how to synthesize their being and my making. Instructions:

- Put a small tarp on the floor next to the desk, add toys and things, music streams out from a recorder. Tell them: this is your autonomous zone, this is your little village, where you can always do as you wish, safe for I am close by, whatever happens to me and my desk, you will always have your village… 

- The tarp has many folds, unfold a square of tarp for each developmental stage I observe from my desk perch. Eventually they begin to control the process of unfolding. Over the course of five, six, seven years, the tarp expands to cover the entire room, so that my desk becomes an island in their ocean, a sturdy solitary thing while their space to play takes shape in broad, amorphous mass.

- Eventually the tarp climbs up the staircase and rolls from the windows. The tarp shimmies down the block, the little village of my children’s tarp starts to paper our neighborhood, waving hello to passersby, witnesses to its unfurling. To its peppy little village walk. Now the tarp peeks through windows, too.

- From the little desk in the corner, where once it was I watchfully observing it, the tarp spreads so vast, multiplies so far, passes through all barriers in time and space, that the little village becomes the world.

passenger

too tired from sculpture class to say much. tonight we had to model each other's faces in pairs, same exercise as last week (after Giacometti) only this time someone else sculpted an image of "me" and I hated it but I didn't run far away like I might have once and my teacher said my own work was strong so at least there's that. really it was sort of Euan Uglow gone 3D-ish, it can be challenging to find a very individual language in sculpting this early into my explorations but it's almost there. as for my "image", it was described by a classmate, looking on at the person making "me", as cherubic but I am maturing more angularly...I feel I am hollowing out. I may disagree with any of the represented traits and then, I surrender passively to that person's expression of them, for according to certain principles they must constitute an impression I myself materialized based on lingering experiences of ? 

anyway...

swanbird waltz

Rewatching Jeanne Moreau in La Notte as the Durasian woman who sees but cannot speak, the woman at the party who morphs effortlessly from wounded swanbird to goofy waltzer, who talks to no one and notices all…the woman who, under speech arrest, keeps to her own tempo so as not to miss a beat: when she chats with the man who wants her we are not allowed to hear what she says, except when she says no, sorry, I can't...the woman who is so relaxed, so plum-ripe and ringed around her eyes, rings that make her plain no longer, you're so pretty now, her childhood friend observes, snide, but the woman takes it gingerly, with pride...that she does not care to hear from the girl about how she almost lost her husband. it's that he had lost her without noticing that keeps her at the edge of seen and not seen.

Moreau's acting reminds me of sculpture, where the most precise and quivering of expressions are found quickly and then disappeared, inside a mound of flesh. 

the high priestess

 Niki de Sant-Phalle:

Tis true. Everyone does need a garden to tend to...within themselves, and for the artist, with-out.

thank u g.c.

Finding out that her exterminator was buddies with George Condo was like saying to those demons that turned Francesca Woodman amid her same struggle for first-thing recognition, not today, Satan.

meditation

Swiped from Ocula...

Rita Ackermann, 2019

Oil, acrylic, pigment, china marker, and pastel on canvas
162.6 x 162.6 cm

Amrita

I have been researching Amrita Sher-Gil, the modernist Punjabi painter who I first learned about in 2018 via Durga Chew-Bose's affinity for her in a lecture she gave that I was attending for my job...she also talks about Sher-Gil's fashioning of her self-image in this essay on jewelry here, from the same year...yesterday I watched this video account of Sher-Gil's life made in 2007 by Navina Sundaram, Amrita's niece on hers paternal side (notice how Navina leaves the ethno-religious conjunction of Amrita's Hungarian mother's identification out of the family lore), I think it's a real testament to the slow-burning question of what does one do with the artist's "legacy", how to steward an after, how does the still-human keep hold of the mythic fire that has hollowed out the dazzling spirit's eyes?

I think this is my favorite Sher-Gil painting of the few that can be found often in low-res images online, Sleep, 1933. It is from Amrita's Paris years, and depicts her sister, Indira. I love how she's flattened the corporeal and compositional planes, and the mystical inclusion of the dragon-serpent motif that accompanies the figure through her slumber on that amazing pink throw. 

The sense one gets of Amrita from all of the available materials, in their totality (which I am only starting to plumb, I'll say that), is of a great wildish womanly fever and fervor, of intensity and commitment, and I know what that feels like in my own body. There is some arrogance, yes, in the conviction of her self-positioning but that arrogance is also familiar, it is something I like to hide, ironically it is something I let loose only among those closest to me, it is part of my big ROAR. Whereas Sher-Gil promoted herself broadly and enjoyed her sexuality broadly, however caught she was, on purpose and by external classification, in the trappings and distortions of her periodized time, contrasting from our current era of beyond-time—the earthiness (is this correct?) with which she carried herself, that Durga calls "enigmatic" but that at least to me is no mystery, is something I am considering emulating in Saturn's new turn to Pisces, which is amplifying my creative and sensual placements, and calling for my de-vaporization, into actual form. Regardless, it gives me courage, seeing her work.

Words

In keeping with recent themes, these two silly vintage songs becoming salient right now...the first speaking to the discomfort, sometimes, of deploying words when one's primary language is sound and vibration, the second to their perennial, a priori fallibility as receptacles for "what words cannot express", or can only express by trivializing as accoutrements of sentiment, as the veils of glamor or appetite fall down over their essence...Both songs articulate these properties in the context of love; if love exists to transcend our human containers, shouldn't it be beyond words? That said, what I do love is when friends will say: yeah, word meaning yeah, yes, I agree, I love it, too, I see the essence of what you're saying—it's been noted, yes.

+

=

How I sometimes experience trying to "use my words", if I cannot get the words right, if I am trying to access the lineaments of a feeling and am meanwhile being bombarded with stimuli outside that feeling: 

On being ready to write the book

 

Reading instructions: skip to 4:44 and then take a look at this…whatever you think of it, it’s nice to remember how every painter has at least one: an ür-image, a source code, the linchpin, the key, the door, the staircase, the stairway to Heaven…I remember mine, I’ve had a few?

Homecoming queen

 

Maryam in class today: [on earth] each person has their own garden and every garden is connected to Paradise.

and, it takes mastery and training to come here. people can think whatever but earth is not a prison planet, it is a gift, it's the most exciting place to be in the universe right now. there is a saying that there are eight souls for every body that wishes to incarnate. so it is a privilege to come here and confront this level of density. it takes courage and it takes work!

Both and

The story of Philippus from Plutarch's Lives— "There were two brothers called Both and Either; perceiving Either was a good understanding busy fellow and Both a silly fellow and good for little, he said: Either is Both, and Both is Neither..."

Where in the world are we? I accidentally on purpose took two days off from making posts for the first time since I began blogging here, in January. I have been busy but external preoccupations have never stopped me from putting up even a simple video link before. This writer's strike of sorts came from somewhere else, from a Piscean struggle to turn sensation into language and to come down from the hidden mountain behind the clouds of the spiritual download, where we receive, receive, receive...and we have to be ready to exist again in word. 

Words are earthly object-acts with which I used to think I have an easy intimacy, and yes, I still do, but I recognize now that the why of such easy intimacy is their origin as concentrated currency, or the energetic force that rides on a wave and then the wave becomes word. The fact that the riding of the waves may be the root of all experiences in my human form is very assuring to me, considering that sometimes to myself, but most often to others who are better able to see this in me, for I feel it not (my multiplicities have always made sense to me however much secondary grief they might cause and despite the external frustrations): you are torn between different ways of working...between the logical and the numinously intuitive, between the detective pursuit and the organic, immediate knowing but the world wants you to choose a way. 

I would prefer to choose, simply, the wave.

When the world asks us to choose that is when we "drop out" from its fora to reevaluate. The past few weeks have been ideal for "dropping out", with minimal whiplash in its wake...Things are changing for me, perhaps, I am enjoying the solitude, accepting it diligently...

I remember as a child, after studying To Kill a Mockingbird in English Lit, I adapted a phrase from the book (about the accusing party of resentful poor whites)...Maycomb gave them Christmas baskets, welfare money, and the back of its hand...to describe the father of a just-divorced classmate: "he gave her a credit card and the back of his hand"...shoo young one, I pictured him saying. Leave me alone. Shouldn't material beneficence be enough? 

Is that what it means to drop out from earthly responsibilities like parenthood, to turn the back of one's hand to the world, in lieu of love, gifting mere stuff? 

I believe that when we ride the waves up, up, up to the mountain hidden behind the clouds, we are invited to see the world as it is, we are invited to hold that world out on a rose, in the rose's equivalent of the palm of a human hand. There, images will meet words but need not use them. There we are not "alone" but in elective oneness. Back of hand and front of hand are integrated. Stuff becomes seeds for something else. Either is Both and Both is Neither. This state of observation, that frequency of being can cause some consternation when we reground to descend...and some confusion, too, about how to make decisions via word's object-act...

as is suggested by the title of Huma Abedin's new memoir, Both / And — or, my preference, in this clip from Every Man for Himself (1980), the movie that marks Godard's second wind, I think he would prefer that term to the idea of a comeback (as he discusses here with Dick Cavett), where a woman forced to make a choice chooses "neither", and as is revealed over the rest of the movie, the woman who watches the consequence of her non-choice chooses the conjuncting "and"...to an either-neither sort of end.

probably

Probably one of my all time favorite screen characters—female characters, yes—is the sometimes irritating but mostly lucid and honest beyond expectations figure that is Jane Fonda in Godard's 1968 political post-op, Tout Va Bien (1972). Fonda famously plays a journalist for American propagandist radio station who, alongside her older Parisian husband (Yves Montand), a commercial television director, a so-called sell out to the system, is held hostage by striking workers at a sausage factory whose radical actions she goes to report on...I remember taking five hours, an entire day, to watch what in fact comes out to only ninety minutes, enjoying the situational comedy and tense but brutal girl-boss in the cross-fires Francophoness of the film. I love the fullness of Fonda's voice as it tries on the piquancy of the French language, I love her ridiculous mullet, and I love and relate to this reflective and incisive segment, one that cuts straight through to the negotiations of organizational participation, that I found and sent to Patrick earlier today:

why are you here

Certainly not to follow anyone else’s path! And indeed it is possible to exist alongside someone who is having an experience different from yours, you don’t have to co-sign their buy-in as an energetic price for sharing physical space. Whatever they believe is theirs. It’s part of the old paradigm to need external validation or mutual verbal assent. Minimal words are required for us to jointly habitate…but how do you be with someone who is “elsewhere", asks my teacher (Maryam), especially when they’re trying to connect? Their attempt at connection is a bid for a certain type of relationship—but who do you become when you’re challenged with that bid, based on whatever archetypes you’re working with? Maryam continues: notice what this brings up for you…crack open the timelines, and the resolution will present itself. Things get worked out.

Blue Christmas

The title of one of the most pleasurable Criterion Channel collections which are otherwise often subpar...I also like Noir in Color, but that's just me. Michelle (acupuncturist) said a few weeks ago that we are one month behind seasonally, so while it is in almost March that we are experiencing for the first time in this year's cycle the promised snowstorms of Februaries past I am feeling very holiday-style December internally, and thinking about her:

Emanuelle Devos as Faunia, girlfriend to the eldest son in A Christmas Tale (2008), or as the Criterion article accompanying the film puts it, "an outlier looking in".

sunshine when she’s gone

The sun can always come back out, trees can always at least be spoken to, or rather, coaxed into engagement, given that they have hollows instead of tongues. I took a photo this evening of a tree stationed along the border of Tompkins Sq park in the periwinkle dusk and called it a Lorax moment…I loved that book so much as a child, and I also understood from the start that the enmity and righteous negativity within it was not my own, and so I didn’t "eat" it, just as I didn’t need to eat the second bread I’ve made in two days, this morning—what matters more so is the process of creation, of fulfilling a task set before me by some other, inner voice. When I was a baby, instead of the Lorax, I ate Clifford. I nibbled at his big red blob. As I was baking earlier I was listening to the various songs I’ve been attached to lately, including the one below by Bill Withers, a former janitor who received the original Maurizio Cattelan Guggenheim toilet as a gift when this record went gold…the song is about the home we find within ourselves, it is clear from the male narrator’s perspective that his female partner represents home for him, and holds it in her person. He knows he doesn’t really know her, but more so her value in what it does for him…he misses her sun. I am touched, I guess, by him recognizing the eye-burning opacity of the feminine, and wanting more…wanting she who has left to return…and beam on, the way even Rupert Everett found Beatrice Dalle entrancing to go out with…or like a favorite short story of mine as a preteen, Cynthia Ozick’s The Pagan Rabbi, in which the organic entices the human into slipping away and merging with it...but just as you go forward, take care as to who is left when you’re gone.