The prospect of getting lost, physically or otherwise, has always terrified me. But I am coming to see that there is power in being lost. There is power in existing in a state of not-knowing, of having no answers, no foregone conclusions, no assurances, and no real sense of the outcome. I have stopped fighting it, and have instead decided to explore it, to feel its textures, and see what it has to offer. And I find that I’m enjoying the drift, the sense that all possibilities are open and that I don’t yet know what is unfolding for me creatively, only that something is.
In praise of silent transformations
What I love about this idea of “silent” transformation is its gentleness, its freedom from drama. It does not hysterically shriek that time is passing and that we need to do something before it is too late: instead it quietly solicits our attentiveness, asking us to look to the subtle and labile nature of the multiple changes that are already in process. [François] Jullien spends a good deal of time talking about what he calls—against Badiou—the ‘mythology’ of the event. There is a certain strain within continental philosophy that is obsessed with the idea of the ‘event’ as a break with the existing order of things, a kind of rupture that is necessary for something new to happen: because without some kind of break in the order of things, so the story goes, there could be nothing of newness in the world. Events of this kind—events that seem to be a break with the existing order of things—could be called noisy transformations: like the events of the nightly news, they monopolise our attention, so that we don’t notice those quieter transformations that are happening all the time. And I can’t help wondering if the very drama of these noisy transformations blinds us to the fact that even these events are not really such a break in the order of things at all (hence Jullien’s ‘mythology’ of the event): instead—but only if we ignore the noisiness and the drama and look a bit more patiently and calmly—we can see, in retrospect, that the seeds of these transformations had been growing for a long time.
(Be sure to read the comments thread as well as the post.)
Downer
[The old man brought porridge and nothing else.
The swan, in little hopes about down,
got £60 for her neck and lodgings in the field
and would not give bedding like a fool.]
Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Wednesday 1 February 1659/60.
Remainder
Where is he now, the boy
in our fourth grade class
whose mother went missing
for days until they traced
a stench to a shipping
carton shoved underneath
the bed? Her body, hacked
to bits by a disgruntled
client: found wrapped
in old newspapers and stuffed
into a box that might have once
transported milk and dairy
products— I’ve forgotten
the specifics, but after
the funeral, we saw
how he went on, came
to school and met what each
day required with no small
dignity. And I remember
the collection taken up
in church for the family:
how, as the baskets
went around, all of us
wanted to empty our pockets
of change— still stunned,
as they filled, at how a body
could be so rashly divided
into parts and tucked, ear
by finger or hip by joint, bones
loosed from the purse that held them.
In response to Via Negativa: Changeless.
Changeless
[In a barrel of soap, a pot of ale,
a bag in another bag—
where will God fit if his own purse
could have no change?]
Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Tuesday 31 January 1659/60.
My Kundiman
(after Patrick Rosal)
My kundiman is no swan song,
not yet. It has spoken, and decided:
this will be the year of the mother
and child reunion. I woke at dawn
just after the new year and thought,
no savings be damned: ten, fourteen
years and two continents make too long
a separation. And that song playing in my ear
goaded me on, pitched itself higher: Why not?
after all, you can’t take any of it with you when you go.
And so my kundiman took it apart for me, syllable
by syllable: Kung:: if di:: not man:: n/ever.
My kundiman asks: Do you get it yet? We don’t leave anyone
behind. It knows what any real lover knows: that No is never
an acceptable answer; that as long as the beloved hungers
or thirsts, the heart is a ghost moon above fields
of unharvested grain, is the lit end of a cigar
burning its prayer into the roof of the mouth.
In response to Via Negativa: The day the music died.
Archives and the origins of creativity
Rick Prelinger, On the Virtues of Preexisting Material:
My partner Megan and I run a research library in San Francisco that we built around our personal book, periodical, and ephemera collections. At some point it got a life of its own and started growing like mushrooms in Mendocino. We joke about how it’s a library full of bad ideas; I characterize it as 98% false consciousness. It’s full of outdated information, extinct procedures, self-serving explanations, ideas that never passed the smell test, and lies. And yet that’s where you find the truth. You can’t judge the past at its best, you need to confront its imperfections. And of course that’s true for the present as well.
[…]
A couple of years ago I was walking down the street with a professor who was telling me how she’d tried to get her Cinema Studies students interested in archives, but they didn’t care. I asked why, and she said “I guess they felt archives were the end of it all, the place where films go to die.” This was a big a-ha moment for me, because I realized we’d all got things completely backwards. I thought, what if we reconceive the archive as a point of origin, as a birthplace for new works and a rebirthing venue for old works? If we think of the archive as an incubation point, suddenly a cloak of bad ideas starts to slip away.
Archives promise the possibility of a return to original, unmediated documents. I think this is part of their attraction to artists—the idea that we can touch and appropriate records without also having to inherit the corrupting crust that they’ve accreted over time. This is an Edenic fantasy, but it can also be a productive point of origin.
The day the music died
[My song died,
a note gone to ash.
My flageolette got an ague.
My shot harp sat
in a bed of nails.]
Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Monday 30 January 1659/60.
In fallow season
In fallow season, on blasted ground
I did not know I grew my love—
How often I keened, blind knife
thrashing in the belly of the rain
before I came to know what kindness
wound like fog through every branch—
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Post-epithalamion
So long ago I crossed the threshold,
stepped through the gate and felt
unsure of what I’d chosen—
The neighbor’s wife had given me
a spray of white cattleya:
I could not see nor hear
the speckled warnings
crimsoning their throats
(like sex, unfurling)—
As with all things, it takes
a passing through to come
to any understanding; now
it seems possible that fear
can be undone, when finally it
turns into a kind of discerning—
In response to Via Negativa: Under the gun.