Knowing Not Knowing (Alone With the Alone)*

to Eliza Newman-Saul

The ‘interlocuted Same’ is a voice of ‘inner discourse’ (consider Lacan on Judge Schreber) of which we all perhaps partake, a voice interlocuting, circulating or circuiting in Generality. …Or the voice of God talking to Itself (Toufic); the ‘middle’ or ‘neutral’ voice of literary ontology (Blanchot).

Re: your “caring” or “uncaring” in an event of exchange or “communication” between “people”… I’m not sure that what I wish to address through our project is communication per se – whether something is “boring” or “of interest,” “private” / “solipsistic” or “inclusive” / invitational / dialogic. I want to attain the moments everyone should / does care about because it concerns no one in particular – a deepest interior shared in exteriority, a non-numerical thirdness of all entities / “parties”.

It is a genuine withdrawal beyond “performance” -- not experienced because experienced by no one -- that is a call to listen or to silence rendering interest / boredom out-of-the-question (expression or silence as “pure” interest: interest that stays interest?).

So perhaps it shouldn’t matter whether our video has a soundtrack or not: soundtrack should be silent, should evoke a silence, and that silence should be expressive / interesting in this sense and not merely non-invasive (avoiding interference with image-track). It is this silence that is not contingent on “actual” sounds.

Yet all this seems something different from my original proposition and your response. The thing I want to return to is “knowing,” compensations for “knowing” and “not knowing” (should we not also have to compensate for knowing if we should have to for not?).

As a precedent for our collaboration, what comes most readily to mind are David Antin’s transitional works between ‘meditation’ and ‘talk’ in which he and his wife proceed by a series of tape recorded ‘exercises’ by which they defer a unity of narrative intention and conclusive interpretation through conversation (and all that conversation entails in terms of interruption, distraction and circular modes of attending).

Only we may start less determinately and without so much “ironic flair”. To experiment with the consequences of beginning somewhere (anywhere?) in a series of texts, and to relate these texts interpretively to produce knowledge (however elliptical or circular) about them. In compensation for not knowing them we may perhaps come to know something else. A know how of ourselves, of poetics, of thinking itself opening beyond both the drudgery of textual authorities and the interiorities of private fancies and fantasies not nearly interior enough (not so interior that they produce an exteriority in which the different becomes equatable, if not Univocal). An ethics of commons.

*composed Jan '06 to Eliza Newman-Saul towards a series of collaboratve video performances w/ the artist. "Knowing Not Knowing" is a follow up to the post on this blog, "Compensations for not Knowing".

Matter Ark (from Splitting)*

To matter ark split into a few skies lights of birds resourceful interior here

Every split in place the house a banister a stair wainscot a stair split a glare shaved into light light breaking split walls in camera

Document of what split what didn’t happen the light we are seeing it now seeing transfixed a light breaks splits upon the eye

The crescent eye cats eye a wedge of fruit light the crescent light cats eye a wedge of fruit it may be greatest when it breaks

Greatest interior greatest exterior greatest in greatest exterior greatest when any break upon break open or split greatest fruit

A test of relation perspective sudden exterior light breaking breaking upon homes breaking open do you feel at home any longer within this enclosure

Within this line sing it seeks it seeks the end of time the beginning of this line a wedge broken upon determination determination at home in its small frame made of blood



Blood the body can’t hold the body a frame can’t hold the light entirely from outside as it breaks open it breaks open aspect and position

Position position once position once of of this foot this foot on the stairs position once once of this eye on the second story of space jigsawed

Jigsawed the frame frame of the body blood now flows outside now the stairs can be seen from an eternity of no position on the stairs no ascension or descending

The light also zips it jigsaws tsim tsum some songs it also sips it zips jigsaws a racing stripe straight up and straight down tsim tsum breaking the little frame of this world the biggest little song an aneconomic line tsim tsum sing the blood blow light from outside

The house blood flows blood fills outside plentiful it flows it fills anything a light it meets outside its little frame how long did he saw to see how long how long did he carve to invite the biggest slice of light fullest wedge

No description is just but the photograph of the split wedge into eternity no description just a sliver an indefinite wedge splitting into infinity a wedge opening upon



Opening song tsim tsum opening song of the opening line a wedge a wedge a wedge widening expand the width of this line for most

Josephine the biggest little song piping what to do with a shaking frame emotion a motion of this still frame it is split now a song shaking in its tiny frame again

Piping position position on a stage an eternity of stairs eternity of this breaking it seems to take forever to split this photograph is simultaneous

A document piping shaking in its photograph to capture eternity capture no light during a moment it first broke was there ever any first

Breaking any first breaking of the waves creatures mouse folk their tiniest frames house its tiniest frame he breaks eternity up he cuts up the blood as wood and invites that light inside he makes it come

A host of sorts a kind of host a host taken hostage taken hostage by his own blood vertical in this rim tsim tsum



This wedge eternal vertical of this split this photograph is simultaneous only only to cut up space as time only to cut another view through time

Time to come to come to come time to come as if we saw through walls these walls are like mirrors for a time to come time to come in incidents nicks of time in events

This immeasurable distance suddenness of the next room the street below suddenness of the next walls floor below this immeasurable distance sudden perspective

If architecture could be off and on screen cut to off screen split build a house any place that can see through itself

A time to come

A time that wasn’t next the non-succession sentence of these walls windows a place no determinate position of everything seen through




Above or below or below or above or above or below or above or below this sudden succession this purchase of vision see through floors suspension

To a car on the street below a parked car in any succession of vision there is only suddenness a suddenness or perspective impossible movement inside an inside an outside produced by movement inside a vision

A vision of outside of these outsides inside blood flowing moving inside the outside of the frame a wildness of vision willed dissymetry of the seen in the saw jigsaw a seer

See and saw see and see

This will be occurring when a plan folds over the flight of the walls of the house the doors fly open because they no longer can disappear

Neither the mind or the eye can any longer appear neither position on the stairs not any this is an architecture anarche texture




Texture without beginning i.e. the there of a plan jigsaw a plan to begin again in this frame to produce an outside moving within

I’ll take this time to keep moving the mind the eyes forever without beginning or a way to see through to the street below

This occupation without beginning this moving among the rooms forever of a building which will be torn down again

Ephemeral perfectly ephemeral and necessary this matter ark this matter arcs within a movement of its own outside many positions splitting the house from without

From within house of those eyes house house of the mind the mind’s intention to follow floors and doors in habit

Splitting inside splitting splitting inside the houses of your best intention your best attention an attention to cutting who will see the outside moving inside cities beyond those interiors rushing blood inside inside

A house that can see through its builders intentions a house that can see through itself we have many times inside




Many times inside the light breaking in this is simply one line

Many times inside the eyes of that house breaking-up breaking-up a time inside a being at home no longer

No longer are there windows to simply see out of

Must being have an above or below

The house of being the street the sky I may see a car passing inside the holes of a house

Photograph to preserve the abandonment of that moving inside photograph preserve ephemeral necessity of decreating

No longer need we open doors to become a new interior to become a new interior to become exterior inside the house of being splitting publicly produce a private scene of being




Of being of no longer being in the house of being of being no longer split us into everything we can be as sudden movements surprise us

Photograph to mark what we are being what we are not being in the house what movement can be in the house what movement can be in the house no longer being being split photograph to mark such ephemeral necessity the condition of movement

To keep moving the mind without a home within a home that is not a home the eyes as windows not only to see out of to keep moving within them one must move within sudden space

The simultaneous planes the folds how many floors does being have not merely interior these windows is there an above or is there below

Are you in or are you out these floors floors of a saw seen mark where anything can be a place our feet can no longer cross over planes neither ascending or descending depth of field in an expanding errand

Errand an errand cut such vital lines ovular ocular of the blood flowing outside down to the street up to the sky above or below skies lights resourceful floors




Resourceful birds internal movement internal movements of exteriors an errand of seeing

An errand cut can be a place to be without position above or below abeyance without obedience without frames a sudden lightness of blood drift

Of blood too and blood one of blood of blood of blood too and blood one one blood one blood of too much sing of too much sing this light too much to see all at once this simultaneous blood circulating

In an errand of blood of blood tsim tsum Josephine mouse sing this tiny frame be abeyant house sing the sudden light photograph a voice too high

Not above or below but too high an ephemeral necessity of the errant why must we seem to move in space and not in time time of our simultaneous blood

Not above

Resonant



The skies light not above the sunlight daylight breaking in into the domestic a private life holds in abeyance one heart

Not below

The daylight we need the sunlight we need a jigsaw seen in this new light don’t merely hope for song

Structure shake a voice at dawn so long for so long sawing to see no plan fold every day

Daylight every daylight not above or below the plan of any seen moving in any scene soon

Simultaneously an errand for eyes simultaneous shake structure frames simultaneous outside inside a big little light breaks move within this public sky

Disappear to appear move within this private skies light inside this breaking light our ground splits

Ground ground of our being away our being away in other doors in other floors of being neither above or below skies light too high



Moving to see the simultaneous saw too much

Too high moving to see the simultaneous instrument of spirit an aperture an aperture in song too high to see simultaneous blood moving outside within

A way a plane a floor or a door to sing an aperture in song her shaking frame for mouse

Errant cut a way display a floor or a door for the entire house of being to be moving

For spirit to move errant cut a way wave of the saw motion once

Once out of its song its frame once out once inside the outside of light who is it for

What did he want to destroy what did he want to explain a way in the flood what did he in fact preserve




For time once out of this frame

For simultaneously only

Planes to outfit light

Blood swell cut planes to outfit light depths of field he preserves a simultaneity of movement time elapse space

Time once for time once out of this frame presupposing any form cutting to fold template

To fold plans what he wanted to reveal what he wanted to destroy forms of interiority interiority as preformed

Move many times move many times move many times move the eyes in a strange errand

Errand a precise cut into space to time this flight inside the eyes move over whole beams holes in preformed frames

This is a proposition for public space also call me anytime I am anywhere but here

This is a proposition to fold plans to destroy only preserve the breaking the splitting of that light

Open a window there are no longer any determinate windows this is a proposition for a form of production from which the eyes can stray

The mind wanders to cut a tunnel a door or a floor in uncertain focus time elapse in ovals each time split eclipse

This is a proposition for no position neither above or below a form

*composed Winter '05. An offline version of "Matter Ark" and an accompanying essay on Gordon Matta-Clark will appear in the forthcoming issue of Sarah Campbell's journal, P-Que.

"Superficial Engagement" (Cont'd)

3.
Or the particular / the particularization / of conflicts / in their generality / specificity or uniqueness / of bodies lost or mutilated / defaced beyond recognition / or twisted / disappeared (in total appearance) / dehumanized by a Western / specificity to lose specificity / in violent diffusions (a “mass / media” imaginary) / lacking what we always have of course / this violence / and the ambivalent / an all-important ambivalence / of artworks may be the only / means to show the mess we are in / clearly / the noise that should yet effect clarity.

This violence / the occupation of Iraq / and of “the world” by the United States / or last gasps of empire / the general “human war” / engagements like contracts / are often violent / “en-“ a prefix of war? / to engage or put into relation / albeit violent / it turns the stomach / (it twists) / the face turns / (it untwists) / to hear / to turn to God in the human / animal / one must listen to see / accretion / the conflicted / messages of someone / existing in it (our “mass media” / imaginary) / if to see is to have at a distance.

If I use / the prose / or conflicted forms / of / a constructivist / it is because / I am the unassimilating yet / in-formed mirror / of Thomas Hirschhorn / whose newest “public monument” / or "installation" / at Barbara Gladstone / gallery in Chelsea / presents a new challenge / to an ever growing / resurgence of "meditational"-"fantastic"-"psychadelic"-"imaginative"-"hallucinagetic" works currently fashionable.

For a few years now / I have imagined making / a longer / poem / using Paul / Sharits’s film / *Piece Mandala End War* / as a formal analogy / this longish poem / as I have conceived of it so far / would have / for its number of words (and/or lines) / the same number / of frames / from Sharits’s film / (something like 1,275) / only instead of individual colored frames / the poem would employ / words for their tonal values / certain words / replacing / the pictorial content of the couple / from the film / engaged in sexual intercourse.

These later words / I had always imagined / as having a “violent” / “shocking” / or sublimating effect / interdispersed / among the tonal words / an effect / that would cut / utterly against / the meditational inwardness / of the tonal words in pseudo-numerical arrangement / and / however simplistic / I have long-thought of this / unfinished project / as one possible solution / to the problem of effectively conveying / radical social-political contents / through forms which may be said / to be ethical / insofar as they instance / divine verticality / and spiritual inwardness.

It would be / I have always hoped / an ambivalent negotiation / of spiritual necessity and socio-political exigency / agit. prop. didacticism / and ecstatic mystical practice.

What reminded me of this / abandoned (or hopefully deferred) / project this past weekend / were Hirschhorn’s juxtapositions of photo print-outs/ of mutilated corpses / (low res. however / graphic / to the point of being revolting / making this / viewer at least / turn away) / with a variety of geometric / color pencil drawings/ and kinetic paintings (also low res. photo print outs).

Hirshhorn’s juxtaposition / of drawings by / Swiss Theosophist / & artist Emma Kunz / and images from the synaesthetic instruments of / Richard Land with images / from the ongoing American- / Imperial “engagement” / in Iraq / and ubiquitous and stealthy / “war on terrorism” / dramatizes a central ambivalence about / artistic response to / geopolitical violence / where currently the “art / world” turns inwardly / towards a spiritualist imagination and an imagination of / popular media / counter to the materialist urgencies / of more direct critique / and intervention.

So perhaps / what we must value / in Hishchorn is / his ability to show this ambivalence / thru / the determined / messy-ness of his installations / where conflict / reigns over resolution / and where messages (headlines in / this case / like “immaterial witness”) contend for the viewer’s attention / among a host of other / cathective points / mannequins with / screws driven into them / CD’s with jewel case covers made by kid's “spiral art” kits / large pine coffins / covered by ironic messages / of mourning and / “cheesey” de-cals.

As if all of the current art trends / "art data" if you will / were swept / into Hirschhorn’s angelic storm of installation-work/ and put face-to-face / the very urgent / and yet incomprehensible or unpresentably / present data of war / an "engagement" the artist might like/ to particularize / to make "specific" / but which becomes obfuscated / by an unmitigating rhetoric of headlines / and the repetition of violent facts.

Walking Chelsea this past / weekend / among so much art / lacking both necessity / and rigor / I could think of no work more necessary / for our current moment / in its mode of presentation / a mode as indeterminate as it is urgent / as monumental / as it is ephemeral / as noisy as it is clarifying / in its ambivalences.

Hirschhorn’s “Superficial Engagement”

1.
If installation was environment
And environment public monument
And monument non-
monumental
And the non-monumental
the nearest
Approximation to the realities
of culture
Subsumed by superstructures and the horizontally
Striated the gallery
walls wouldn’t appear
To build themselves white and formed
eternally Out of air
we would tend to be heir to These histories
of malice
and violence incalculable.

As human nature is
to the animal, the Mind (human
mind
or immanently
creative force) within
nature
is to culture, culture
which can only eventually surpass
what it is to be human
animal and animal.

2.
Beauty – that is presentable – and Beauty un-presentable – a veil – like trauma – patina of pain - do us the pleasure (where pleasure is horrifying) – to not unshow these bodies - repulsive bodies Beauty – that is also un-presentable – and from which one must turn - away compelled taken aback or flung

By Beauty – or a legible – noise pervasive – written large again – on the coffin lids – of culture written – large again – on these makeshift walls – the constructivist mutilations - constructions always in reverse - of what can not be shown – and yet must

What must – be legible also to not unshow – the also presentable – patterns of our overwhelming numericity – number our overwhelmingly flung patterns of blood – weaving the repeated wounds screws - mutilations which are never not images only

Not fictions entirely not of flesh – the mannequin flesh and color music – unsubstitutable for soldiers – “civilian” victims – of the image bio-dynamic – energy to rest time to oscillate – with time mutilated – and time harmonious – rested a geometry
a – healing geometry – her Theosophy of rock – weave of Kunz’s forms

Or Land’s synths – in flickering – contrasts how can there be – rest how can there be – rest for the motion of Spinozan bodies – shapes all com-passionate pattern against - and yet partaking of this particular war – the human war in general – infinitely unjust

The shape of this war – this particular – war and these particular images – of corpses images – of the dead no one – can show them all – no one cover – the unique particulars – no one can show – the unmutilated – universal yet we must to rest – to act within this war – to partake of human nature as culture – inaesthethic presentables

Devotion I & IV*

Devotion I.
Reich (brief intial)








Slow the birds showing pulse flocks

Locus of power but reversed

The name we share a dispersion
to what effect.

The name we share





Slow the birds showing pulse flocks

Owe or words shower else

Lower aria poll flows

Over-head, low how pulse shook





Owe less stock
Owe ease shock
Vase sh
As
We risk address
We re-stack
Windows
Tow to endow





Slowed hold hold hold flocks of
flocks of slowed hold hold
hold hold slow birds of flocks
of

cathect




Registration drive this most simple
division

the motor of the heart of the motor










Devotion IV.







Duration that began her life-work.

To presence what is happening each book.

The not so voluptuous silence and the blank voluptuous – both imaginary.

Make evident the shape of interest formal appearing when there is an active famine or whether.

Ethics is sometimes thinkable place sometimes written.

Duration. That began








composed Fall and Winter '02, and Fall '04.

Devotion II & III*

Devotion II.


To know
if you can know

the flat portraiture
rectangle necessary

irrevocable memoir
of when we were not separable





Windmills stalk flat flat flat flat

all wind blown at wind push weather

push all mill wind through color the wash

the reeds of a plain and

flat the wind pushed through them





Towering in its gesture
their simple relay
like machines do

The wind conveyed
by points that flutter
drawn by wash












Flat cross assymetric make aerial

make conveyance make
courses through winds graves

flat cross
the mark from an aerial
my sole blank bird

be flat vanished arrow
by cursor pushing which way




What more endemic but wind?

weeds
reeds weeds reeds
weeds reeds
weeds

blank of a cross
pure reed simple move

smooth cloth
smooth cloth
cloth smoothed




What the child looks at while it has vision
of having a flower before its mind

and the flower
the flower holding her
face and breast

mute the start.
The child gazing beyond
the colors of the flower

vibration and eyes deep









If we were young child and
the face young and honest

depersonalized upon
a fold of your hand
clasping
some object

the brushstrokes would show this




With flesh contact

canvas gaze at

a slight bend over which we call landscape

not flatness, not merely time

to the horizon

world
where it begins and ends




Slight bud and bend swell
and blood obsess

alabaster, spirits
equation for making weather
sound as weather does

expansion through it and without
to a cold stretch of green gray land

the cheek to show me my own soft watch



Devotion III.
Ghost Riding




Being beside
others days humans

separate the flesh mass

thunder being beside
suddenly this fence




Sand
an impossible
waterway line

instinct
move for
phenomenal tuft

indiscriminate
a point to
a distance ahead

a distance ahead
a way




On the backs points and
desert tongue

reel from sweet music
memory of orgy

artillery in a distance
without history

madness
without joyful test





Test of truth
league of wish
for infinity
site of flight

savagery
from the photograph of work

there the ink

the screen my thought of it
while it is spilling

would be dark




We cried in games
bad air pact
bird in sub-state (substrates)
places where none march straight

we beat the graves
and covered earth with sound
of the real like a dark stone
between two dark stones





Pray for me too...

from nothing but distance
is each night born

where a mile is not a mile
where a sun’s not a sun

capitalize this refusal











Not the kids
the wrap-around dead

pushed up by car
to ladder

to him





Pushed up put guns
down words
hostage to light

dear deer above
scrape the dust

(more often the place we return to)

... small machines
deer redeemed from context

caption:
to none aimed in fog






Near enough to nearly touch
their fingers, their lapels

women and men in black
sign and small world
preposition is our silence













The eye in the cat’s body

flashes

the face
an animal’s intention

if sickness were grace




Where vision is removed the human

Where vision is replaced our thoughts tend

*composed Fall / Winter '02

"fire is not clay thus not only each" (coda)

in grace the center that is
is grace the center of our soon-to-be
innocence in grace the center that is

in grace grace the center that is is grace
the center of our soon-to-be
fire is not clay thus not only each

grace is the center
center of infinity or zero not being
only one not only itself alone with the earth
the center that is

is grace the center of our soon-to-be
fire the movement that neither amounts
to one we are either zero or infinite

in a concave scene concave our being
concave our being in a concave scene
fire is not clay thus not only each
the center of our soon-to-be innocence

Ozu*

1.
It is her face lit by that light
Contemplative light
Contemplative mask
Of a face
Lit by that light
That beats like a drum
Dwindling in his heart

It is her
Face lit by that light
Capable of being
Covered
Being covered
By hands
Being covered by light
Covering conclusive tears

That beats like a drum
Dwindling


2.
Augment the mask, mask of
Her face
The lighting design
Augments time

The camera which stays
All trains
As they pass
Not quite upon these lines

Augment the white, of shirts
On a line
For all time, for all
Designs

Show time finally
The covered face of
Her tears
Smoke cuts away.


3.
Lit by that light
Bright light direct light
That beats like a drum
Dwindling in his heart

This is the time for this
Incense whisking
Frames away –
Fragile shades

This, the time for this
Who knows no time
When you leave,
Incense whisking

Little boats away
Down stream,
Attenuating
Rates per frame

That know no schedule -
Light which covers
The covered face
No heart can dwindle.

*composed Summer '05

"in a marionette or in a God"

“But, as the intersections of two lines, from the one side of a point, after passing through the infinite, returns suddenly to the other side; or, the image of a concave mirror after moving into the infinite appears suddenly again, near or before us; so, when Knowledge has gone, so to speak, through the infinite, Grace returns again, appearing at the same time, most purely, in the structure of a body which has either no knowledge, or an infinite knowledge, to wit: in a marionette or in a God.”
--Kleist

I Love Poets (review)

1. Richard Tuttle is an artist’s artist. 2. Richard Tuttle is a poet's artist. 3. Richard Tuttle is an artist's poet. 4. Richard Tuttle is a poet's poet.... There is a need for logical confusion of the terms of naming. Yet, beyond any confusion, the poets and artists who read for Tuttle this past Thursday, January 26th at The Whitney attest to the affinity and company the artist shares with poets. And mainly to the force of Tuttle’s most unforceful and gracious practice.

What struck me especially during the event, I Love Poets, was a certain trend in the reading selections. These selections may be said, whether they were written directly in collaboration with Tuttle (as in the case of works by Charles Bernstein, Barbara Guest and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge) or not, to be works enacting a vital ontology *after* and (perhaps more accurately) *with* Tuttle’s own works. Charles Bernstein probably highlighted this phenomena best as he (half-)joked that the works he was to read were not ekphrastic, not poems *to* or *for* paintings, so much as texts reciting what the work of art might say if it could only speak. The work then is what it says by showing. What it does or enacts *with* its viewer.

This “withness” of poetry, its adjacency to and participation with the being of the work of art, I felt particularly in the readings by Jonathan Skinner (reading for Anne-Marie Albiach Keith Waldrop’s elegant translation of a recent longer poem forthcoming from Post-Apollo Press), Leslie Scalapino, Larry Fagin, Berssenbrugge, Bernstein, and Tuttle himself reading from a collaboration with Guest. And such withness may be necessary in the face of Tuttle’s body of work, a body which consitstently em-bodies the subtleties of essentials made sensible, and makes apparent a grace of discrete and multiplicitous materials “hanging together,” suspended seemingly in a force-field by gracefulness alone. So it is likely in a Kleistian gracefulness where the artist, at a point zeroed or made infinitely light, finds mobile center.

However different their responses, each reader presented a means of expressing in poetic language the certain forces of Tuttle’s work as the responsive forces of grace. Skinner did so by way of his well-measured French which, despite his apology to the contrary, to my ears successfully sounded the immense silences and resonance of Albiach’s spacious pages, and Scalapino by her signature forays into the temporalities of meditational interiority. Fagin, especially through a pairing of poems he had composed for the occasion, "Loosey" and "Lacey," conveyed many of the revelatory qualities of Tuttle’s installed works by concise word-choice, and by pivotting radiantly upon prepositions, articles and pronouns. Bernstein’s poem in thirteen parts, “In Parts,” (from a collaboration with Tuttle called *Reading Red*) continued where Bernstein seems to leave off in his “thought opera” for Walter Benjamin, *Shadowtime*, activating the promise of the work of art to confuse the sensible and the emotional, and to extend emotions into thoughts in a present of aesthethic encounter -- what Bernstein may call in "In Parts" "the middle of the middle". In Bernstein's selection I could also not help but overhear the refrains of *Shadowtime*’s final libretto where the poet incants “now time” invoking thinking itself as an instantaneous and emergent making, the productions of attendence beyond comprehensibility or assimilation. Mei-mei Bersenbrugge’s text, *Hiddenness* (also in collaboration with Tuttle), presented a measured meditation seemingly about her daily contacts with the artist’s person and work, the notion of *hiddenness* taking on a “psychic” (if not also biological) air of the possibility of sharing interior and exterior "lives" - what William James in his late-philosophical works called the problem of two minds knowing the same thing. The notion of hiddenness also recalled to me my own encounters with Tuttle’s work wherein many of his objects appear on the brink of an occultation, with one foot in “this” world, in actualities, and one in another – in a world presupposing a need for perceptual exegesis. Finally, Tuttle’s own reading of his collaboration with Guest, *Durer in the Window*, proved himself a thoughtful and deliberate reader of poetry as he gave Guest’s words their well-deserved space and measure. Demonstrating unequivocally his *love* for poets.

2 after Alexander Sokurov*

Whispering Pages / Spiritual Voices


The weightless will.

We laugh, we all
fall down.

Twisting
to rest
in senseless sleep.


*

The fallen faces.
I will pretend. They will fall
To water a reflection
Of water at least.


*

And that they could
fall

in reverse it is a matter

of how we find our way around

the pogramed city

convinced we
are still dreaming.


*

There is a sense
of magnitude in boots.

Boots made Infinite in
hovering.

The dead do not
intend anything,
do they?


*

While birds, seemingly matted, cross the screen, the screen, as though flip pages.

While birds, birds too heavy to be real birds, play at gravity.

A Russian novel per frame.


2.
Black cataracts
the sun
goes down in my eyes

*

Dear Afghanistan,

we see
with sepia the past
as though the same war
wasn’t always
being fought
under the same
desert sun.

Dear Russia,

a soldier sleeps
on sunless days
dreaming the milky
black of both pictures,

everything changes
because the eye persists.


*

The dust / in their eyes
profile / of a mountain / side
flat, incisive / sublime
arriving / in slow-motion
whatever “real / time” is.

*

Like icons these soldiers
the clouds which move
as they move
not above them

but as synchronous
surfaces,
angels twisted
in earthbound sleep.

*

The world,
the green
world is a tableaux

vivante or a Turner

where the clouds
break

the sun still won’t appear.

We hover above the cameras of this earth.

*composed October, '05.

For Richard Tuttle

"It is not in the premise that reality
Is a solid. It may be a shade that traverses
A dust, a force that traverses a shade."
-Wallace Stevens

As you say - no thing
should be thought
at first
not this first
line - the line
or words
but don’t you mean
first thought
best thought
or do you
that emotions extend
into thoughts with force

Like efforts

The efforts – of consciousness
as you say no thing – leads
thought back – to the way it was
not the second
line or thereafter –
what we call marks and
not lines – which could also mean
the signs
of language – that language
is now - and not was
or will be
don’t you think
lines thicken with thought
intensified by our shadowy
attendence –
our silence before them –
like causes unforced

Like effects

The effects of shadows as they cross
shadows or now – as you say
no thing – no single
shade
or gesture – no
matter how immaterial -
matter hangs together
leads thought
back to its first
movement – not any
other here
and now as what we call
attending – not thoughts
per se
as thought grasps ideas –
intends instead
of extending – as attendance
makes a shade
for the ears and the sun sets over
our speculations
and crosses
the mind – signs that we
are taking place – the edge
of an edge
or a wire without
a frame -
the centers of the world
of perfect force and
the unforced

Consequently grace

False Generations: Lynch’s *The Grandmother* (Notes / Discursus)

For falsehood, falsehoods of generation, and corruption, the perfect inorganic (Nietzsche), the imperfect organic, who rise from colors, the colors of the false, who rise bed-ridden, false seed relation, of generation and false corruption, the non- corrupt, the renewed innocent...

Men then bear their own fathers… But it is not so simple as Kierkegaard would make out, in all of his paradox and contradiction -- his standstills; since Kierkegaard’s generations still rest on an Aristotilean genealogy, on “family trees” and re-productive “organicisms”. Men then bear their fathers, but they only resurrect themselves once (as Deleuze’s points out in *Logic of Sense)*; Kierkegaard is prey to Abrahamism as an (onto)logical paradox of heredity and generation. That one bears their own father, but also that one sacrifices the created to continue living.

There is something peculiar, something "out-of-joint," about David Lynch’s animated seed beds throughout his early shorter film, *The Grandmother*, from which "human beings" behaving as dogs apparently sprout: that trees typically give birth in linear, bifurcating generations (the “family tree”), but do so non-linerally (and thus falsely?) in Lynch’s third short film. Is *The Grandmother* then not a film concerning rhizomatic generations? A nomadology of seedlings? “The wisdom of the plants: even when they have roots, there is always an outside where they form a rhizome with something else – with the wind, an animal, human beings. … Follow the plants: you start by delimiting a first line consisting of circles of convergence around successive singularities; then you see whether inside that line new circles of convergence establish themselves, with new points located outside the limits and in other directions.(*A Thousand Plateaus*, 11)”

Perhaps. But then Lynch’s world in *The Grandmother* seems archetypal, “preformalist,” and atomistic more than anything else. Lynch says of his first film that he came about it in an attempt to make his paintings "move," that is to animate them. What is animation but a truer limit of cinema as false generation of movement (Bergson), or as an atomization of time by frame rate? False time, false motion, false generation. *The Grandmother* is the second of two films that move from the pure animation of his first, *Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times)*, towards a complex (however much intuited and post-"psychadelic") blend of diegetic elements with extra-diagetic and animation techniques.

The fact of tree / seed growth belies an inorganicism or organicism of the falsely generated, non-linear and preformalist. And we can oppose the false generations (the immaculate conceptions?) of Lynch’s films to the inorganicism of the “crystal images” of *Cinema 2*, by which images are generated in a duality constitutive of the "falseness" of actuality in relation to the "phantasmic" opacities of the virtual. This "falseness" of crystallic-virtualism – a virtualism which rests on Bergson’s crucial distinction between the dyadic terms *real* / *possible* and *actual* / *virtual* – we should distinguish from preformalist (in-)organism. Where crystallic-virtuality presupposes Bergson’s method of “philosophical intuition” – creative evolutions within tendential forms - preformalism assumes organicity as a consequence of the realization of existing potential forms. That is, realized organisms are the copies of possible forms. Such a view of creation may assume, following Jalal Toufic’s own atomistic view of cinema in his essay, “Before thy Gaze Returns to Thee,” that creation is non-continuous or *renewed* during each "subsequent" instance.

Non-continuous creations, like Lynch’s “seed,” know no continuous generationality. Rather, a seed remains a “person” in potentia until planted in the ground and watered; therefore, the generations between seeds remain horizontal, discrete, and non-chronological / non-linear. However a vertical dimension does assert itself in the set and animation segments of *The Grandmother*: initially, in order to abscond from his belligerent "father," the "grandson" / boy acsends upwards from his sprout-bed; also, throughout the film, the "grandson" / boy negotiates what appear three stories of a house: a bottom floor in which his demonic-animalistic parents sit around a kitchen table performing common household activities; a second floor, where the grandson's bedroom is and where periodically he is punished for wetting his bed with a Day-Glo orange substance; and a third in which he “grows” “the” / his grandmother, and he and the grandmother subsequently visit with one another.

In ascending and descending the stairs of Lynch’s set, the "grandson" / boy presents a primordial movement from Imamology / Angelology, the stairs presenting degrees of being: the higher being the subtlest / least sensual and thus more perfect, the lower the most sensual, and therefore most demonic-animalistic… The shock of Lynch’s false generationalities is heightened by a kiss shared by grandmother and grandson, as well as by a high-pitched whistling sound produced by the grandmother reminiscent of the sirens from Lynch’s first film, *Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times)*, and premonitory of his first feature-length film, *Eraserhead*, in whose soundtrack many have claimed to hear super- or sub-audible (paradisical? imaginal?) pitches.

That animated / extra-diegetic film techniques redouble *The Grandmother*’s contents (seed conception of a / "the" grandmother by her / "the" grandson) may finally provide a key to later Lynch films, especially his most recent ones (*Lost Highway*, *Mulholland Drive*, and *Rabbits*) in which one encounters countless conundrums of narrative temporality… How, for instance, the protagonists of both *Lost Highway* and *Mulholland* are bifurcated by identities indicative of multiple temporal universes (and Toufic seems to get to this idea through his concept of *radical closure*); likewise how the "rabbits" of *Rabbits* occupy the same “space” / set however speak “distantly” (as though from different points in time) the lines of a mock (and most Beckett-like) situation comedy. That they are rabbits, those uncannily prolific creatures, who constitute the ostensible subject of one of Lynch’s most recent films, points to the ongoing problematic of generationality in his work. Generations uncanny, false, “unnatural”.

The Devouring and the Convivial (For a Radical Interiority)

We can distinguish two kinds of interiorizing: the Devouring and the Convivial. The former is characteristic of the solitary ego regarding the world as alien and external. Its approach to the world is confrontational and defensive. This ego imagines that its imagination of what constitutes the literal is the one and only truth. It is monolithic in style because the Other is threatening and must be denied autonomy. The characteristic approach to the Other is objective Understanding – whether dogmatically nonrational (religion) or dogmatically rational (science). In either case the goal is to know, because what I know is no longer Other, it is part of Me. This drive to know, to dominate and deny the autonomy of the Other, to Devour the world, is insatiable. And this for two reasons: it is based on Fear and so can never rest; and, all this devouring gives no sustenance because there is no sympatheia, no connection to the source of nourishment, no possibility of feeding the soul from the soul of the world. The devouring ego drains everything it touches, and, closed in upon itself, it never empties, holding desperately onto its own waste, trying hopelessly to eat the universe. Its mode of growth is, of course, inflation.

But there is another kind of interiorizing, and it is this to which Corbin points. A turn to the imaginal need not be experienced as a retreat inward, into the interior, to what belongs to me. Psyche is not private. But neither is it “public” in the sense of impersonal, objective, soulless. Psyche is communal. But true community transcends any boundaries between the inner and the outer, the public and the private. Community only exists among persons, and persons can only be perceived, perhaps they can only exist when the walls dividing the inner from the outer begin to crumble. Only when we begin to hear the voices inside can we begin to listen to the voices outside. Then the boundary between what is mine and inside, and what is Other and outside grows ambiguous and unclear. We find ourselves immersed in the convivium, in community. We meet the Other as Other, in fear and respect. This experience is open, embodied, and mysterious…
--from Tom Cheetham's *Green Man, Earth Angel*

A Question Concerning Video Games

On the question posed
to me: what do
poetry and video games
share in common...
should I answer:
information? Words,
language forms, as first
informed, the rest,
as Zukofsky notes in his
"A - 12," risk:
"A poetics is informed
and informs -- / Just
informs perhaps --
the rest a risk." What is
the "rest" of "risk"
after informing?
Is it the "recklessness"
(a risk?) of the musician
Zukosfky also speaks of
in Bottom? The master
mastered by music
in virtuosic playing?
To "master"
form form masters you.
We are in-formed,
we are mastered. This is
where "the work,"
the value
of the work comes from.
The work's vitality,
perhaps, also.
To inform: for there
to be "basic" / simple
forms / "structures"
for creation; tendencies of
composition, generation.
"A - 12" is a poem
of generations in touch
or informed of
Stein's own "makings of":
"Or: remember,
G.S. begins / "Making of
Americans" / With
a quote / From Nicomachus'
father -- / With patient
father and Angry son -- /
That she said, 'How can
you know / More than
you do know / And we
are still in the shadow /
Of explanation.'"
From this form, this
in-forming, a lot can happen.
This informing as ultimately
rhythmic, a rhythm
of material, (in)formable
material. A kind of
"tendency" or
"culture" about the poem.
WITHOUT CODE. One
assumes after our
current parlance information
is a code. But what
informs is not
merely binary data; but
the data of what Bergson
may have called
"the intuitive":
the immanence of
composition itself, poetic
or otherwise. Information
makes a form
in which to dwell; it is
this form in which
to dwell and to
extend forms in time.
Being at home - being
"rest"-less - informing in
"rest"-lessness - "reckless-
ness" - "recklessness" re-turning
to basic information -
a kind of "home" or
more familiar (however
alter-able) dwelling:
the real question may then be
how and when
does risk occur?

Thinking Cures

The act of thinking became identical with suffering, and suffering with thinking. From this fact, Nietzsche posited the coincidence of thought with suffering, and asked what a thought would be that was deprived of suffering. Thinking suffering, reflecting on past suffering -- as *the impossibility of thinking* -- then came to be experienced by Nietzsche as the highest joy. But does thought really have the power to *actualize itself* without itself suffering, without reconstituting its own suffering? Does thought itself suffer from its own ability to actualize itself? What then is doing the suffering or enjoying? The brain? Can the cerbral organ enjoy the suffereing of the body of which it is a function? Can the body rejoice in the suffereing of its supreme organ?
-- Pierre Klossowski

Beuys --------------------- Nietzsche
Sickness ------------------ Health
Alchemy ----------------- Physics / Biology
Cross --------------------- Circle

Homepathy = contagion = swallowing a little poison goes a long way = migrain = talking cure = drawing cure = thinking cure = impulsive contagions = a semiotics = contagion as information

Or:

STOP FEELING TEACH
A DEAD HARE
TO STOP FEELING AND
PLAY DEAD

Dying to live / Gnostic Holographies

--To Matthew Ronay after Beuys's Codex

What we mean to write and what
We mean

To draw what
We mean by having

Insides and having
Other insides

(The inside
Of inside) is somehow

A matter of sex it is
Somehow

A matter of death.
Or Eros otherwise

A lag
Time of perception

A perceptive
Dark an occultation

Of the eyes
Of the hand

Drawing the eyes
As they don’t see

Fever balloons and
Madness blisters.

They trace
A therapy

A constant therapy
To heal

By writing words
As one might

Draw them
The pressure of this

A pressure
Not unlike

Death bearing
Down

Bearing
Down on an inside.

You will reconstruct
What organs you will

Reconstruct
By drawing

Organs without
Community bereft

Impermeable collective.
Bereft in slipping

The interminable
Slipping

Of affects
From body

To transmutable
Body

Your multiple
Bodies are

A distraction
Instances

Of time themselves
The floating

Organs of a draughtsman.
The sovereign holography

Feverish topology
Of pain and what is

Not quite pain
Not actually

Your organs
Your organs no longer

With outsides
For or

In themselves.
As one must always be

Alert to heal
As trauma

Has no end
Nor beginning

Except in
These occultations

Ex-orcisms /
In-orcisms

Dying in your codex
To live.

Wake Games (Every Name in History)

-- for Catherine Sullivan

"Questioner: Where are you going now?
Reply: Stealing the goats from Hell.
Questioner: Swear that you are.
Reply: I swear that I am."

Convince ourselves
We are not dead
That we are pretending
To be dead
We are
Dead children we are
Dead we play
Dead to be alive
We play dead
To be alive again

Pretend impulses
To act
On impulse
Or
Not act
Re-action
Makes all
The difference
“Swear that you are”
“I swear that I am”

The actor makes
The world wearing
Both masks
Noontide
Of that obscurer
Crystal
That dark night
The burden
Of mirrors
To scratch their tains

A mirror of sorts
The backside
To act
Is a mirror of sorts
For the world to be two
Split in two
And to take you with me
Into “the fire
of our future”
The actor is
An abyss of repetition

The actor played
By impulse
By not acting
On these words
Our words
Are masks
We are masks too
Growing
Out of crystal
Parousia of
Our history

Our impulses
Are the memory
Of time itself
Crosses of
Night over
Night
“where the sun don’t
ever shine”
Crises of mid-
Night
Over the shoulder in
Backward
Motions of the mind

Orpheus-like
Or Eurydice
Or Rachael
Orphans wake to
Mimetic withdrawals
Percept of this
Emotion to act
Out the names
Is to become them

Sovereign emotion
This will take time
The names of events
In time my angel
Of repetition night
Indifferent from light
When one has acted
When one
Has yet to act

To create the world again
The fire of this theater
The bombs
Of this theater the
Threatening gas
To create
This world again
Incendiary an angel says yes
Children play dead

As history falsens
Angels say yes
Say no to say yes
As history falsened
Radiant apparition (Docetic)
Split in this mirror
Inward dwelt and informed
Disassociated by fragments
The fragments of fragments
For the Whole

Split in this mirror
This is the present face and
The present wrist
This is the present split
The repeated gestures of song
Presupposing what the
Actor will say
An hysteric mood
Of their gestures

Empty of foci
To form the dark
Perceptive dark
Of that fork and her water
Speechless speeches
Perceptive emptying
Of mimesis withdrawing
The foci of first words
First gestures
Made for all time
The trade an imminent
Trade in persona

Beyond extension
Beyond any particular
Extensity
Of the hand
Any comprehending
A gesture
The backward
Motion of the hand
As the hand reflects itself
Discontinuously
A continuous motion
Of all time
To be or not to be
To be felt
Singing oneself to sleep
To pose this problem first

Of first-ness this-ness
And parody
Of the hand
The hand
Twisting in parousia
Paradise of history
Your traumas are
For all time
All time trying
To be born again
Pretending to all identities
No one.

Becoming or Understanding

"As rational metaphysics teaches that man becomes all things by understanding them, imginative metaphysics shows that man becomes all things by not understanding them, for when... he does not understand he... becomes them by transforming himself into them."
--Vico
Quoted from Tom Cheetham's *Green Man, Earth Angel*

An End to Nostalgia*

Mirrors are
For hiding in

The light too
Of incubations

Towering
Interiority of our

Mirrors our
Mirrors make

Curves
In the large

Universe this is
Remarkable

They make
Images

An obsession
With image-

Making
Images too

Are to hide
In

A sympathy
Of radiant

Coincidents
Images

They make
Images of

The creator
Occulted not yet

At sympathy
With itself

Nostalgic in this
Sense

A sense for
The creator itself

Absconded
To heal itself

By its created
The passion

And ruin
Of this hearth

This fire for
Coming

Inside inside
What

Dwelling
Will reveal

To Shamim Momim, upon touring Rob Fischer's *Living Will*.