week seven

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Day seventy-two: sun full high in the trees, exhaustion at bay if only for the moment, this moment, when the sun is on my lashes and the trains are wailing in the open windows. My wrists and upper back ache and stiffen with holding the typist's position. I've had a monk's voice in my ears over the last few days, his slow stumbling English running over, rewinding, replaying the voice in his ears: a nun's flowing French as she reads to him from her pages, marking footnotes, quotations, subtitles, sections: thus in one-way conversation one halting word at a time, from her through him the book arrives with me, in my hands, at my fingertips.

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He laughs when he can't think of the right word, the best way to put things.

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More from the transcription/translation work:

Placing to hide in darkness [Positioning in darkness?]: annihilation

Every choice implies that everything that is chosen be highlighted and that what is rejected be left outside, because choice is preference and sacrifice: choosing one demands sacrificing the other. We can therefore describe artistic choice either as a procedure which shows forth the essential element or as a process which destroys, according as we insist on one or the other of its aspects: “the one who wants to be a creator in the good and the bad,” Nietzsche says, “must first be a destroyer and a breaker of values.”

Destruction can have a great force of seduction and of fascination. Certain artists push it to the extreme while desiring to attain an even greater creative purity. Many modern artists feel this character of artistic choice very keenly. Let us cite this very evocative passage by George Poulet with regard to Mallarmé:

An act of creation which is wrapped in negation and silence both before it and behind it like a poem which is written on a white piece of paper which is at the same time initial and final. For that poem is left only to be dissolved in order to authenticate the silence. Such is Igitur, the perfect example of a philosophical suicide.

A philosophical suicide is the only possible operation. And since it is only a philosophical” suicide it can always be repeated. It is the act of negation by which in any moment and only for that moment one can found his existence and his thought…

You need to be able to feel all of the parallels which Mallarmé himself had to make between the Cartesian act of consciousness by which existence is based upon thought, and the act of consciousness, properly Mallarméan, in which thought creates existence. On both sides everything begins with fiction, that is by a hyperbolic doubting at the end of which we finish by abolishing reality and thus make in ourselves and around ourselves [I can’t translate that]. There’s a doubt which becomes a negation, but a negation which we desire and will. “I want to think that everything is false.” And by this act of negation and elimination, everything else is reduced to this sole will, and it is in this act of will that Cartesian being is discovered to be at the same time to be thinking and by consequence, existing. Its existence, therefore is detached from the act of will by which he wants to annihilate everything, and he wants so to speak to make its positive presence surge forth upon a total act of negation. You only have to push that a little bit further, as does Mallarmé, in order to get to say something like this: “by an act of the will which gives life, I arrive at an act of the will which creates.”

In order to create his dream, the poet acted as God does. He began by making the void.

--M.-D. Philippe, Philosopy of Art, "Artistic Choice"


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The book rests while I rest, in consolation, in present tense. In between. I feel patient. The space between them, between angel and mother, where the eye is pulled as if to a puzzling blank, is the painting, I see that now, what Warhol detailed in his garish, infinitely reproducible prints as playfully sinister, a garden of sculpted trees, a horizon, the end of empiricism, here between them, and the end of matter, where the body is already corpse, already sepulcher on the other side of will, a future tense, where touch--most precious--is mediated away in a messenger after all, a daemon in the ears, an image in the eyes. Seeing and hearing things: even everyone knows that's possible. The paint, could you touch it--ground minerals, linseed--dirt and oil. Ink, a tainted water.

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week six

Let me explain: I'm happy. Very very happy.

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what what
my father, king
what is your will
i'll go and bring

my will is filled
to the brim and more
go on and bring me
an empty thing

an empty vessel
my will to keep,
and keep the more
so I will empty, sleep;


--Zali Gurevitch


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week five

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week four

Consolation: I can't be bothered enough to tell you my complaints, the office in disarray, the dirty floors, not even the draft around my shins, the cold creeping into my fingers and making them stiff. You know these things. I do too, and too often. There are other things to know--we talked about this today--other things put aside for later when they might be taken down from their walls and put to real use. Sensible use. A spoon, say: a gorgeous instrument for the mouth.

The bare tree outside the office window wags its head, both a nod and a shake, simultaneously, which is appropriate because I can't make up my mind about it. In its foreground against the clouds, the clouds being topped off by the wind, the clock tower looking quiet:



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Holy Thursday

Thou.


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Wind. Gusts up to 50 miles per hour. And with it, temperatures into the 20s. Oh I know better by now than to hope spring will be spring. You hear it from me every year. But here I am again with the bins of summer clothes thrown open and the wool coat coming out of storage where it and I decided just days ago it belonged again. And here I am again recalling every Easter a new dress, something ruffled and sleeveless in yellow or baby blue. That's the weather gauge in my head telling me something's wrong. You South Texas dwellers understand me.

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Shelley: belief is passive, not an act of volition, and therefore not criminal.

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Off on retreat again this weekend. Tomorrow's the day. Send good vibes my way, would you?

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week three

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It is after all possible to drive from Colorado Springs to Denver, to have two connecting flights between Denver and Peoria--Kansas City, Chicago--and to drive from Peoria to Galesburg in a day. But it does take all day. Just so you know. If you happen to settle for the flight your purchaser recommended.

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Just arrived at O'Hare where the plane miraculously has only just arrived--delayed, as I was, for the last few hours. It is 11:41 p.m. I nearly wrote to my students to cancel class when it looked as though I'd not leave Kansas City tonight. Now an hour away from Peoria and another from Galesburg. But I'm teaching two classes tomorrow if all goes as it ought and that's no small thing. Joy somewhere there.

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