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.