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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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!
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 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.
