FROM THE ARCHIVES - Letters Through Time
The Letters Through Time Project is a painting project whereby I am attempting to achieve the art of Writing-Without-Writing, or WWW. The theory behind this has to do with what goes on neurobiologically during the pure act of writing. But there never is a truly “pure” act of writing. We are always writing “about” something, “trying to elaborate” something, etc. A purely “naked” act of writing would have to be making a “mark”. What is the mark, is it like the brushstroke in painting? Is the mark part of an image or part of a text? What is the ratio in size between the mark and the full text? The ratio between the lines and the marks, the marks and the pages, the lines and the pages? A vaccuous, aimless writing. The ethic of the graffiti or scribble. To write is to form a character, a letter, or a word on a given surface. The tabulation mark on a scoreboard is an act of writing.
Musical notes on a score, is an act of writing. But pure jibberish on a page, is that writing? When does nonsense start making sense? When are we writing-without-writing? Or when are we just plain writing? Consciousness of one’s aim and intention during the act of writing is commomplace. Consciousness of another aim than writing while writing is genius. The aim of writing is not the aim of writing. The aim is making marks, the means is writing, the end is an image that feigns a text seen at-a-distance.
We are playing with legibility, distance, and partial erasure. Also we are falsifying ancient stone tablets, medieval “illuminated” documents. We are falsifying old textual modes. This is the Textbook of English Grammar. The Textbook of Writing Forms. The Alphabetic Tabulation Rites of the English Language. The Encyclopedia of Grammatology.
This spring equinox is stronger than words. I am restless, in a feverish craze. I want to dominate the world with my innate personal power. I want to vibrate with electric energy. Itis the birth of the engineer. Can’t you see it, it’s in plain writing before your eyes?
The writing on the wall can be seen in plain view. Is it jibberish or does it make sense? Is it a historical chronicle, a fable, or a personal narrative? Who is it put these phone numbers in the public bathroom written all over the walls? The invisible, erased writer. The author of words or word-formations.
From the primordial ooze, the primeval soup from which life sprang, come the words of my philosophical journal. We are the erased authors of postcolonialism. We are the postcolonially repentant. We walk in the pageant of repentance. We write the words on the walls. We are the naked, tamed beasts of burden. This is the spring equinox.
The moon is absent on this day. I can feel a surge of biomagnetism in my body, in my brain. The truth is mine to bear. To bear witness to. I am the avatar of his lordship’s grace. I gratify myself under the shield of the black moon. I am the aviator Benny Jezebel, old Jesse Jezebel. I write black as night across the sky, in invisible ink, the words of my personal anthem or motto: I believe. Credo.
Tactics: syntax and taxidermy. My new paintings are stuffed animals. I am slowly painting Noah’s ark and all its inhabitants. Two of each kind, male and female, my taxidermist’s shop is being filled with the naked beasts of wonder and awe. The naked beasts of expressivity in the transmission of the genetic code.
Biotic code, code of life. Coat of arms. Armored code, battalion of the aegis of Time! Temporal markers, the passage of the cycling of the moon. Man has a biochemical need to express himself, his knowledge, his experience. Artistic expression is always one kind of writing or another. Poetry, painting, both are ciphers marked down on a surface. Music’s surface is the inner coil of the ear. It is empty space. Like sculpture, too, which embodies empty space. Qualifies it.
Man was born to write. But it’s not the content that matters, it’s the intonations. The balance lies in accidents. Accents, punctuation, the circumstantial. The rhythm and rhyme of the lines, the tracks marked down. The trace. History remembered. The object’s trace in the memory of the mind. Representational space. The space of thought. Metaphysical space.
The writing surface. The body? The mind itself? The inner turmoil of emotion. The embodiment of emotion in painted surfaces. Think of a landscape. It is made up of, say, one thousand and five hundred brushstrokes. Now take these one thousand and five hundred brushstrokes and mix them up. The landscape is gone, but the same brushstrokes exist.
Now take a text. Reorder the words: a new text. Take out all the words and just leave the blank spaces with punctuation: you are closer already to the real text. The body of the text can be said to still be there. What is the body of a painting? Of a landscape? It exists in the in-between space between artist, work, and spectator. It is controlled. You cannot have access to the image, not immediate access, or your mind would fend in half.
The experiential “track” of life, like a soundtrack. A personal anthem. A kind of private scribbling form of writing, or a graffiti. Iconic graffiti, automatic pistols of senselessness.We brandish steely knives of senselessness, pockmarked sense, old sense, Old Spice scents.
The body of the textual image, the textured image. The text, a.k.a. word-image. Time-image, space-image, image-image. The lines of sense. The decrypted signifying sense. The received native sense. The cultural iconography of sense. Manmade sense, human sense, simian sense. Primeval sense. Sense of the stars. Sound of the stars. The spring equinox. The body, my body, of the world. The space on which the world is mirrored. On which surface the world echos. The body of perception, proprioceptively sensing itself in space, localized on that very spot that here-now I wakenly slave over time-perception-of.
