Resolve:

Post the unlikeable, the failures, and all the pathos that overfillls silence.

What It Was

Being awake is so very unlike sleep, this constancy of faces, warm pressures, open streets, and insistent calls for attention wear me down each day. Each day my effort is for a silence and solitude in this constant intercourse that I walk into. In the day I operate on versions of programs I’ve written, that secure, propel, and insulate me from the masks that folk don each day. I can wonder tonight who was it that I talked to, what they meant by; and dream how they are. But, today I have little time to pause, and ask the why, and what it was; there is more to be done. 

I reason that

because monuments slowly dissolve,

a catastrophe is a evil boon


which we don't want to,

but do hope for.

On Sentences — An Urge to Silence




a kind of writing noesis 

the punctuated sentence a noeme 


having the presence of paper


having the pressure of a thought spoken

the doubt of halted speech

the burden to speak
at all.


a kind of writing that urges towards silence

the burden to speak 

double halted speech

the pressure of a thought spoken

at all

can thinking be punctuated

at all

except by the pen

I feel as if I should shutdown every idea of the world, and that being my only possible idea; the impossibility of thought, compel you to listening, to the reasonableness of my proposition.

Nightwalks, 2013

Is there truth in a photograph?

No, a photograph is a fragment of an experience with richly intertwining aural, spacial, and temporal elements that are flattened and or eliminated when they are lain down in two dimensions either as emulsion on paper or pixels in a jpeg. We are left with the visual artifact of an event or place which offers an impenetrable surface, beyond which we can only speculate. There is no truth in a photograph, there isn't even a story, we the viewers bring truth and stories with us and project them onto the photograph.

How important is understanding artists' intentions when encountering art?

If I am privy to the intentions of an artist in making a particular work, which doesn't often happen, my enjoyment and appraisal of the work will be restricted to a judgement I'd rather not make. Namely, whether this work a successful realization of the artist's intention, which is a closed system. I'd rather imagine the work as an animal that is complete, alive, and quite unable to make answer to any clever questions. So, no, although I do find it helpful to know a few basic biographical details about the artist.

Children: What is more natural, to banish ones fears than to live on delegated powers? and what does the whole growing up period signify if not the giving over of ones life project?

This does seem to be a process all human children go through as they become adults, that is putting your causa sui project on the shelf to accommodate the responsibilities attendant to adulthood. 

As to which is more natural, "to banish ones fears" or "to live on delegated powers" I'd say that the latter is more natural (to humans). Fear is man's best friend, it alone allows us to protect ourselves from danger, fear is a vital part of human life. Almost every person seeks to be delegated powers from those in authority which is the safest course and integrates the person smoothly into their society, but those who take power or create power for themselves de facto will find many enemies around to challenge their authority. Acting like Alexander the Great or Napoleon seems to be the natural expression of a highly developed ego which only seeks to continue to create itself, like the teleology that Friedrich Nietzsche uses in Thus Spake Zarathustra with his Superman, yet this approach is fundamentally antagonistic to general peace, well being, and happiness.

The State Of Art

Doing it like you don't know how, talking like you don't read books, playing dumb. I believe the pretension of being an anti-intellectual is a global trend in art. I think this may be a knee-jerk response to the overwhelming onslaught of information constantly available to us, and a withdrawal, (whether sincere or not) and a biding of time, so that artists can figure a few things out.

An Excuse

I make art firstly for myself, secondly for the art public. Making art and looking and thinking about my art makes me happy. Doesn't everyone want their work to be something they enjoy? As for the audience, my work is made with a specialist art audience in mind, that is to say for the art world, not the general public, but a specific public. I associate my art practice with the art world because I think that new ways of understanding our current conditions are invented there. The art world is full of failed experiments in thought, and because of the low stakes of getting something completely wrong, artists have the licence to embark on wild tangents that stretch whole lifetimes. This is the precious privilege of irresponsible thought that the world has delegated to its artists.

Walking Noesis

You can't really deny your self, your presence when your walking up hill. Your feet on the ground come into view, your legs tell you in their way they are there too and working hard. Landscape shapes our perception in the least romantic ways, what is a sex life in the rain?

I want melody
Winds and whispers
Smells and sensations,
Poetry like prose,
Prose like poetry
Days like dreams,
Dreams like years,
and nights like days.

I want to move into and out of words.

Writing

Writing

Sleep can look so much like death, Barthes might have recommended to put the author to sleep instead of to death. Sleep only has the surface appearance of death.


   In order to begin I speak. I have finished my work today, I am in my chair. I don’t say a word and or barely think a thought. I look straight ahead at motes in the air between my chair and the outside my window. And outside of this staring and around it or beside it I think about my staring out my window and wonder what it is to look through and at and through all at once. And I see my thoughts begin to fold over and over. Each thought acts out it’s role with each other, and each is a different character. Anxiety fights ambition, love humility, evil hunger, and asceticism fights reluctance. An indistinct sense of time flows and ebbs, and it is hard to return to a previous thought without losing my place looking back for some notion I passed on from. I seize on some sounds of the thoughts and begin to rhyme these thoughts into sounds. The tiny phrase I make from this sound back to thought is my seed for a thought with a language. I write the thought out, and begin to be ready to write. Only with silence can writing begin.

   I put my I to sleep, and myself is falling into self is my fall to sleep. My eyes although wide don’t see ahead, I see inside thoughts crossing over to words and whole sentences glide in from a hidden place and meet me in my sleep. My sleep is here before I sleep, it caught up to me. I couldn’t have written awake, so with I. In myself with myself questioning ceases, writing begins. The ink flows freely in my book on my knee in my chair. I am writing in the only way I ever do, I am writing about writing. Each sentence is self conscious, but also not conscious of itself. Just as in sleep I cannot say that I sleep, I disappears in sleep, self in self is the state of affairs. Self in sleep is interior, and everything is self, exterior waking life permits the I to be aware amongst all the other I's. Everything is in myself as writing goes on, I am every character if there were any, every thought.
   Already dreaming begins. Somehow there is a shift into other bodies while mine remains at home, somehow I can look at myself standing next to myself and be both selves at once. It is easy to forget here that all of this is my own creation, yet I have no hand in making this, my I is up to his chin in sleep and only vaguely knows that he is sleeping. He is I, but he doesn’t know himself here in this night sleep has pulled over him. He doesn’t write, he can barely even speak, if he used words at all they would be of the order of that which comes before speech. I write, I write what my sleeping self says, and must translate from the language that comes before language, the language that can recognize itself but can not articulate itself into that waking language with words, grammar, and syntax. And I am awake now, which is to say my writing is finished. 

Signification

Signification is the act of making a relation between a word per se and an object. The word is the signifier of the object and the object is the thing signified, this relation between signifier and signified is called the sign. Signification can only be accomplished by a subject, which is to say by a person. Signs do not occur naturally. The act of signification is the basis of language, and can only exist within language (whether spoken, visual, or otherwise). The study of signs which is semiotics must use language to understand language and as a result has become very cumbersome. In a sense we are trying to come to know ourselves knowing ourselves, and have found that intelligibility beyond language is not within our reach. Julia Kristeva says that we are, “speaking subjects” she equates signifying with speaking, and that this is can be a “capacity for enjoyment.” This is a humbling idea, and seems to complete the discourse of semiotics. If this is the end point of semiotics, then what comes afterwards must be writing, which is the greatest enjoyment one can derive from language.

Writing Myself to Sleep

I am asleep now, even before I found sleep tonight. I feel asleep, my thoughts feel asleep, my eyes feel asleep. The lamp I turned on to write this is waking me up. The refrigerator's noises are pulling me back towards sleep, my eyes burning are evidence I haven't slept at all.

I haven't slept at all. I have been around sleep but I haven't been sure whether I want to sleep. I've been enjoying my fantasies and memories too much to let myself fall to sleep. I am becoming even more awake now. I am starting to feel my exhausted nerves and swollen eyes beat with my pulse. My heartbeat only makes me sure of myself. The tick-tocking of my bedside clock only makes me think of the night. So I can only think right now about myself in the night, myself in my bed, myself next to my lamp. Myself writing to sleep, writing myself to sleep.

Don’t Track Back Me/ And Unmappably Map Me

Don’t track back me, / and unmappably map me.
Don’t keep the collapse / Lastly, track me,
No evermore, lose me / Flash me with flashcards.
Back where you know / Force me to speak
Logically no no / Grab me from behind
Doh, don don / Don’t drag me out
Don’t do that / Don’t do that
Don’t drag me out / Doh, don don
Grab me from behind / Logically no no
Force me to speak / Back where you know
Flash me with flashcards. / No evermore, lose me
Lastly, track me, / Don’t keep the collapse
and unmappably map me. / Don’t track back me,

Regular Words With Broken Geometry

Rereading this stuff feels like sleeping on my dirty sheets. I am daydreamer, I burn away idle hours. I will write out my voice until I get hoarse. I'm writing and struggling to work back, to show myself a few things. I'm getting meaner and I don't really mind. Instruction to follow augments previous instructions, so please let contradictions glide past.