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...

My whole thing with writing is not that I do it, but that I get to it, pause on the edge of it, and just dwell there. I think about the mystical “how” to do it. Which then makes me think of the “how” in painting, and the way that this “how” gets pulled through the entire painting process for me. (Heavy air quotes should be added to “process,” since using the word seems to imply more knowledge about what’s going on than I have.) The painting “how” (How do you make a painting?) is not a how that I jump off of or let go of as I get started, but is a question that sticks around even as some vague semblance of an answer gets formed. (How much is the “answer” that gets formed always just a guess?) Also: What happens when you bring a question right up to and then into a possible answer? What does the space of question and answer overlap look like? And, what is an answer that still asks the question that prompted it? Fallen flower and receipt paper touch ever so slightly Thinking about “how t...

I have been realizing, or maybe just noticing, how much the things I see guide me through the day. Actually pull me through it. (They are what makes time pass at all--they feel like minutes?) And I was thinking of compiling a few of these things as I had done a little in Post 28 . There’s something about the casualness of this act that brings me pleasure, and it's a casualness that I have not felt in my recent posts, though is a quality I’ve been craving more of. Presenting these sightings feels reminiscent of jotting something down in a notebook. Though, I'm not sure if it's just the documentation here that feels like jotting something down, because it may actually be that the presences of these innocuous scenes already exist as the jotting down. I guess it comes down to how much I think of these things as photos I create that write the story of my own walking around, or objects within the city's notebook that I cannot help but read as I walk. Anyway, I spread out a de...