Red Thread(s)

from an interview with Cy Twombly:
I work in waves, because I'm impatient. Because of a certain physicality, of lack of breath from standing. It has to be done and I do take liberties I wouldn't have taken before....

on The Bacchus paintings:
These were all done in a couple of months. It was just very ­physical; it's a process. I tried to do one since then, but it didn't work. It was the sensation of the moment; you can't warm it over, unless you want mannerism. When it does come, it's natural. I don't force it.

I'm not a professional painter, since I don't go to the studio and work nine to five like a lot of artists. When something hits me, or I see a painting, or when I see something in nature, it gives me a thing and I go for it. But I don't care if I don't go for three or four months. You know, when it comes it comes.

above: Untitled VII from Bacchus Series

The “true” -- if I may use what I am generally told is an outdated, if not outright suspect word -- seems to reside in the margins. In matters of presentation, style, etc. -- distrust of all showiness.

The work, unfathomable before its encounter, recedes once the book is closed. The “work” then, in terms of my recollection or commentary, is that of remnants.

*

“The really real thing that I have absolute faith in is the stars” says Moonsook, a character in Hong Sangsoo’s Woman on the Beach. When we look at the stars, we may notice very faint ones out of the corner of our eye; if we turn our gaze upon them, they disappear from view. The trick is holding them in the periphery.
And then there's the relativism of direct sight -- look at the blank space between two familiar stars through a pair of binoculars and the blackness opens up into a field of more and more stars. And nothing destroys our perception of a constellation more readily than a clear, moonless night in the country. Based on a few clear points, what we think of as a constellation is really more of a suggestion; something like a gesture, open to interpretation.

Regarding sequencing: if I do not look here for awhile, wch tends to be the case -- but if I use this as a notebook, transcribing things here as I might write in project-oriented notebooks -- the red notebook, the blue and orange books; the green one for dialogues... I discover a process of drafting [draughting] at work; moods and breezes dictate a general climate or tone. One item suprisingly connects to its lost predecessor. Another gesture might echo across lines months from now. Somethings lost in the flurries and mists.
To proceed with doubt as a general rule,

"But according to Montaigne, one is various. I can't lay down a rule for my feelings."
__ Virginia Woolf, Diary, 12,I.1924

on memory; from memory?
I cannot say for sure.

I thought/wrote earlier this morning, that "if I think for a moment that I write in order to remember, then I am mistaken, because I rarely look back. I must write then, in order to forget."

Been thinking a little about information technologies, and how all this apparent wealth of information has nothing to do with memory (although sites of "passive narcissism" such as Facebook and Myspace ensure that more drunken foolishness and more kittycats have been documented over the past month than in the whole of human history). Not sure where I picked up the "passive narcissism" phrase; on memory I borrow a little from Kristeva: memory requires interrogation.
"What Plato and St. Augustine referred to as memory was a permament doubting."
-- Julia Kristeva

If I write here to remember things, or to concretize them in verbal form, then I'm mistaken and my intentions are flawed -- for I never go back; I write but I do not read, so that the process of remembering becomes the process of forgetting.
I write not to remember, but to forget.

"...if I'm not writing The Brothers Karamazov while I read it, I'm not doing anything."
-- Jean Genet. Found here.

I dreamt last night, & vestiges of it have stirred up during the day, the way a slow breeze moves the surface of a pond so that a slip of water laps up against the far edge catching and reflecting the light for a moment -- or maybe it's the sound of it that draws your eye; the effect of some event displaced from its center, some unseen area, to the periphery -- and only a sliver there. Drawn to it, that space at the edge, its ripples having already fanned out, the sound already faded, so it's merely the sense of displacement that remains, an absence.
You worry at it like one does at the edges of scab, but you can't re-create, reincarnate the wound; one cannot will the revelatory effect of an involuntary memory.

I went to the library looking for a particular quote from Genet to post here, but that volume was missing. This, I wrote instead.

To be immersed in reading; to be outside of time. I love the slow feeling, the shift that takes place when I come out of its undertow and feel the tautness in my neck and shoulders; a mild, somewhat sweet morose delectation in my upper body's stiffness, the physical awareness that time has passed. Closing the book, I notice how far the bookmark has moved -- or, in later opening it, I become conscious of the thinning distance between the thumb and forefinger of my right hand -- lightening in the incremental shift of pages from hand to hand. I try not to look at the last page number, avoid doing the borderline-obsessive counting thing -- how far to the end? (Esp. difficult towards the end of Proust, the process of wch was its own little drama). I feel this bother, this business of getting to the end is distracting, and -- though I do it -- quantifying my pace in any way feels somehow beneath me. I want to be in the present, absorbed by the work & free to flit back and forth, double-checking things that resonante, or simply being there. Maybe it's why I tend to be more interested in the way things are told -- be it book or movie -- than what the story is. The turn, the break, the oddly placed scene, stray thought. Maybe it will make sense later; but for the moment, simply to be drawn into that fold.

The dream, then, of a book without page numbers -- or to read as if there were none.

"The priest wanted to admonish him to stop this absurd searching. Well, said vapeur, maybe you'd like me to work in the filature, like all the other blockheads, and maybe you'll say that as I know something about machines I might even become a foreman. But I don't want to become a foreman, I like sitting in my shed looking for something that can't be found."
-- Louis Paul Boon, Chapel Road

The light
Of the closed pages, tightly closed, packed against each other
Exposes the new day,

The narrow, frightening light
Before a sunrise.

-- George Oppen

“The narratives have dropped away like those rockets that disintegrate in the atmosphere once they have placed their small payloads in orbit. Detached from their original settings, each scene is now the satellite of the other. Each echoes the other, increasingly merges with the other, and I experience a kind of fascinated incomprehension before the hybrid object they have become.”
--Victor Burgin

between rising and burning the toast

--Up early; sitting at my desk at that point where everything’s blue, blue tint to the frost on the neighbor’s rooftop, sky seems to be clear or thinly clouded, there’s some texture there; a bit later, the streetlights go off one by one, but within the space of a minute. One lags behind, as it has for a few years. I'm occupied by some thoughts of moving, and not just across town. What books would I pack if I were limited to one suitcase only?-- but that’s hardly a question to waste time with when things are glazed with a powdered sugar freshness. It’s these waking moments -- and it takes awhile, this waking process, I have my rituals -- that are prime. The best time to mull or muck at my desk, a good time to read, though I always have to reread a bit later. As my mind, still tethered to sleep, is slowly reeled back into my body (this line, I think, I might be paraphrasing or riffing off Proust here; that’s another feature of this waking time, not knowing of a thought is ‘mine’ or elseways borrowed) -- there are quite a few skips and misses; reading over some notes -- scribbled in a darkened movie theater, say -- I’ll misread a line or a word (my handwriting doesn’t need to be done blind to run, alternately, slack and thorny). Often the misreading evokes something else, cuts a closer, other truth.

I go outside for a couple of cigarettes; I look at the name on my mailbox and it doesn’t quite register: another skip. It’s clearly, plainly spring in many ways, though temperatures have been as low hereabouts as I can recall -- some cherry and jasmine has blossomed, but offers no scent (yesterday, in the warmth of the sun, it did [and that blue sky conjured up another time and place, more southerly, a beach, a happy time]); but I’m not scanning things as fall as I did a few weeks ago. (Coming home lateish one night, 2-3 weeks ago, I went by a different street and saw Christmas lights hanging in an apartment window; my visceral impression was "oh, it’s soon to be the holidays" -- wch I quickly, mentally corrected; the upcoming holiday was Easter, after all -- but I've been inhabited by a strange & pervasive feeling of autumn). Autumn, a disembodied time, a time of slowness. Because I’m literally retracing my steps here (a remove upon remove), a marked passage of Wittgenstein seems appropriate enough now (these shelves, these books with protruding slips of paper!):
“I feel my arm and in a queer way I should now like to say. I feel it in a definite position in space; as if the feeling of my body in a space were disposed in the shape of an arm, so that in order to represent it I should have to model my arm, in plaster say, in the right position.” Hand (holding cigarette) attaches to arm, attaches to body, containing lungs and heart; mouth wch opens, exhales smoke, wch rises and dissipates in the morning air. Same hand holds pen, scratches out a few lines, refills pen (fountain) from glass jar of ink, crosses out, writes again, later types out, extends, digresses. Computer crashes, and this “post” -- as in lost or errant letter, this writing -- is mostly lost, then translated again, broken, sifted up from memory and a few notes.

Slowly. I use the word often; a few years ago, a friend and I agreed that it’s one of the very finest words. To not rush, to read slowly, to breathe slowly. To drift calm and without anxiety. Slowness, if I recall Badiou correctly, is one of philosophy’s greatest qualities. This morning, smoking a cigarette in a leisurely manner, at a point in time before the light rose over the horizon, listening to birdsong, I experienced another “miss” -- grazing the edges of trees, wires and rooftops, I looked for the source of this song, and my eye caught an object in flight, but it was an airplane; for a second the two impressions coincide, coincided). Dawn having broke, the day entered, I turned back towards the building and out of nowhere a single word suggested itself: “Hegel.” A word as specific or as general as “alone” or “bread.” And then I came in and wrote for a bit, and then lost a good deal of that, as I have mentioned. What happened along the way, I can’t entirely account for.


***

“Someone has torn up a letter and thrown it away. Picking up the pieces, one feels that many of them can be fitted together.”
-- Sei Shonagon

Down the allley, forsythia, and jasmine starting; startling at night, the scent. But little fills me with horror like camellias; reddish blooms browning, rotting on the branch; pink-red petals strewn down the alley, among the crush of gravel and brown pulp of last year’s leaves and pine needles.
And this morning, late March -- clumps of snowflakes falling amidst the rain, like the ash of paper and shag from a hand-rolled cigarette.
This mood leaves me nothing but a few phrases.