Parmenides, now there was a thinker - there was a time you could walk up in the middle of the day and have a conversation about something he'd said.
finds losing or gaining an hour's sleep irrelevant - has always enjoyed the novelty every year - wonders what adding a third time change [perhaps adding or subtracting half a day on alternating years] might be like.
just passing through, a spot, a bit of sun, something to eat, someone to love, a nice drink, then in Pound's words, quick eyes under earth's lid. Try to do the best with it. Try to savor enough of it.
a man with time on his hands and blood in his ticker
the sun in his eyes and a fire in his belly
uncertainty principles his wounded psyche
and runs ahead a pace
synchronicity - like a levitation over a pool - the things we try to make language do - the passing of what I might be saying behind what is heard where meaning slips in a gap, a parallax, like the libration of the moon, at once disclosing more than all available surface while holding back ... something unknown unknowable.
filling in the blanks from memory: the past suffers being reshuffled, reimagined, reorchestrated - perhaps because memory, which seems so absolute, is more a sieve, a net through which passes the small trifles composing actuality, leaving us a semblance, the odd things caught in the net, which having lost their trifling context, can no longer adequately explain each other or themselves.
cars abandoned in the yard - eternally "being worked on" - symbolize something more at large among people - a kind of collected mechanical inertia. They all await an impetus, that great collision of fuel and spark that activates and directs force in a necessary direction. People can be like that and we may judge them, projecting our own inertial drives onto them, or we may help them.
a private joke I've had since we lived in Durham was a fictitious memory of a Food Lion add from the 70s, where a man in a poorly made lion costume, visible stitching, undersized head, would punctuate his spiel with a half-hearted "ROHRRRR" and a punchless punch of an arm across his chest. Of course, no such commercial exists, but I seem to have a memory of something like it.
sometimes, when I'm drawing, I'll start falling asleep, which is annoying - I think to myself, "who falls asleep while they're drawing? It's embarrassing, unheard of." Sometimes I will have done part of a figure in a tiny, 1/8th inch square. Like when I'm falling asleep, I'm actually getting smaller. Such that the act of sleep is falling through the quantum fabric, leaving behind the tiniest of signs.
In 2006, when I had a show at Sycamore Place, a woman came in and, looking at my work, said, "you seem to be in a lot of pain." I assured her that that was no longer the case.
Deleuze recommends being an experimenter, rather than a critic or judge - for the sake of creativity, to make connections, to speed the line of flight. The judge is the fascist. But what to do when people are addicted to judging, to criticizing, to disconnecting? Be the change. The line of flight across the plane of immanence.
Jung writes that other people's solutions to problems, while perhaps correct, are not therapeutic - we need to discover our own answers and ways of answering. For instance, as a chaplain, people don't want you to solve their grief (doing so takes even the reality of their grief from them) - what is sought is some affirmation of humanity, some kindness, some presence.
I bought Blanchot's book Infinite Conversation to keep me company, now right now, I have ready at my finger tips, an infinite conversation, and what a genuine blessing it is. I don't know if Blanchot would have liked me, but I feel that there would have been plenty of time.
nothing is easy. Blanchot writes that the answer is the question's adversity. A quote I have seen reading Bion on group dynamics - where he translated the sentence as the question's disease. No matter: put it that the question (existence, purpose, where are the keys) becomes questionable when provided with an answer. Not that we live in a world without answers, just not very good ones.
No comments:
Post a Comment