Things and not-things

It’s interesting that writing about painting sets up a relationship between writing and painting. That to write about a painting is to connect this verb (writing) with this object of the preposition (painting). If writing and painting are two separate domains (are they? aren’t they?), then to write about painting is to draw a line from one domain to the other. Like this: At least, that’s what writing feels like. Line drawing. Though, what does a line mean? As this diagram shows, writing about painting (if that was the title of the diagram) situates painting in space. Writing grounds painting--creates what seems to be an accessible path to it--by putting it in connection to another thing (in this case, to itself: to words). There’s a trickiness here--to the pursuit of writing about painting--because in this diagram, in this conception I have of the project that is writing about painting, writing is both the thing painting is in relationship to, and the act that creates the relationsh...

Here is(are) the aforementioned stripe(s). The "what": What if this title was instead the first line? (If it was right over there instead of where the question about it is.) Or also the first line. What if that? How closely placed is an answer to its question? As an addition (an addition before there is even much of a beginning), I want to mention that I recently listened to Anne Carson give a talk called "Beware the man whose handwriting sways like a reed in the wind." She more or less started with, and continued to return to, a question Roland Barthes wrote in an essay about the painter Cy Twombly: "How to make a line that is not stupid?" I’m pleased by the path this question takes up. The movement it in turn takes on. It has a very specific direction: How do you move away from stupid? A "how do you leave somewhere?" instead of "how do you get somewhere?" Curiously, I hear the rhythm of this question in a similar way to how I hear t...