#francescacapone

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Primary Source

E-book Download:Primary Source by Francesca Capone

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Primary Source, Francesca Capone

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language / weaving / light, by Kit Schluter

Here is a new piece of writing by Kit Schluter, written as part of an ongoing conversation that we've had about my work. Thank you Kit!

language / weaving / light

for Francesca Capone

Every thought in this absolute silence and pitch black is derived from words. Being, internally, directed. The body becomes a space of postponement, as it waits for light. What it receives gurgles back up through the fountain at the base of the skull: an iridescent flowering in the imaginary blackness of the gap between thoughts.

⁂

Outside, sight never engages anything but surface. The same goes for all the senses: they are epidermic, which is to say skin-deep, only gesturing toward depth. At what angle do these surfaces of the senses intersect? And where do they intersect with thought? Does this intersection have no site? It's a process of being taken under, gaining the willingness to labor on the behalf of receiving light. A willingness toward mining light. Until then, every thought will be derived from words in this absolute silence, this pitch black:

⁂

One surface is black. Light falls on it, and it absorbs the light, which determines its blackness. Or was it the blackness that determined the absorption of the light . . . At first, I was going to tell you that this absorption of light is a form of concealment. I was going to write, “consider this process of absorption a concealment of light.” I was going to use italics to stress the word concealment. But, thinking more about it, I take this surface's absorption of light as generative of its blackness. But I also take the blackness as generative of its absorption. So the blackness of the surface and its absorption of light are two iterations of the same form, and in the shadow of this realization, I think of them as concealments of the surface in itself. But I think of them also as revelations of form.

⁂

There is a second surface, which is a mirror. Light falls upon it, and it reflects the light, which determines its clarity. Or was it the clarity that determined the reflection of the light . . . At first, I was going to tell you that this reflection of light is a form of revelation. I was going to write, “consider this process of reflection a revelation of light.” I was going to use italics to stress the word revelation. But, thinking more about it, I take this surface's reflection of light as generative of its clarity. But I also take the clarity to as generative of its reflection. So the clarity of the surface and its reflection of light are two iterations of the same form, and again, in this light, I think of them as concealments of the surface in itself. Again, I think of them also as revelations of form.

⁂

A black surface speaks light as an animal speaks language: listening to it is like standing at the heart of a wood and hearing the howling of a wolf. Or like sitting at a cafe and overhearing idle chatter in a foreign language, a language that implies a meaning that is inaccessible to us, subterranean but saturated. Or in the same way a facial expression might indicate a mood, unable to, in itself, express why this mood has come about.

⁂

The mirror speaks light in English. The mirror speaks the language we share. Or is itself a grammar, resisting, as best it can, the absorption of light, which is to say, meaning. Its semantics contribute to the illumination of the world around it in a process of perpetual self-evacuation. That is why, even if it lets us fall in love with ourselves, nobody in their right mind would dare call a mirror itself selfish! Sometimes, in a mirror, I forget that what I'm seeing is, after all, a reflection, and not itself a flesh that both absorbs and reflects light.

⁂

I wrote something in my journal while we were talking earlier: “Synthesis as temporally-inverted metaphor.” I don't understand what I meant, but how else to have said it? Such are journals: quickly scribbled traces of curiosity's previous trains of though that, sometimes, we can do no better than, simply, follow . . . A series of notes that leave you with the question, “how else to have said it?”

At times like this, a journal feels like it needs a key, a legend. The legend (Lat., legere: to read) of a map, for instance. A body you can't look at, but through, like a clear sky.

⁂

Any word can be linked to any other by metaphor: This is one of metaphor's favorite and best kept tricks. Take the most disparate terms from a dictionary, to use as examples, following the simple form of a = b. Say the sentence, and let language work its magic. (It will.) No matter which words you choose, a will, in some way, be equal to b. The wholes will not be isomorphic, but will overlap, perhaps only at a certain tangent. They will find congruence, even if partial, in some aspect, significant or not.

I don't have a dictionary with me, so instead I'll take a couple words, randomly picked out of a volume of Francis Ponge: Parler and souvenir: speaking is memory. Obstinée and informe: Obstinancy is formlessness. Blount and toujours plus bas. A door-closer is always lower. See? I'm laughing.

⁂

The possibility of any metaphor's third term pre-existed the copula. Whether or not light had been shed upon it, it was there, waiting for the terms to be combined by some novel play of words. In this sense, creating that third term is a retrospective gesture, in the sense that it allows us access to something that was always already there, or perhaps could have always already been: Pulling a certain book on the bookshelf to cause the shelves to rotate and reveal the hidden chamber. But what lies in that room that none of us has ever seen? It doesn't take much to find out. But it has taken the whole of the hitherto.

⁂

What I mean to say is every metaphor is inherently possible, that its function will carry itself out, but that the result of carrying out any of these possibilities is ludic. It's not the idea of the possibility's possibility that is ludic, but possibility as what is opened up by forming a new combination. So I come to think again of the word “synthesis”. I'm not thinking of synthesis as a process of negation and redemption through union of opposites, but something simpler: the convergence of two terms that are only partially alike: allowing their similarities to converse: encouraging their differences to converse. Or maybe it's simpler yet The synthesis of colors. The mixing of blue and yellow, for example, to synthesize green. But it's not so simple as mixing primary colors to find their compounds. Form is not color, intrinsically. I couldn't, for the life of me, know what shade of green will come to my mind when I look at the blue of my blood in a vacuum and the yellow of my bile.

⁂

Metaphor draws us to look backward toward the relationships that were always already present between forms which we simply haven't yet noted. Synthesis is the other end of that process, the moment when these relationships between these newly related terms have become fundamental to our understanding of the world. Synthesis, then, is what the metaphor allows us to dream. Not present in either of its two generative terms until its event, it then flows through them like blood. Invisibly, it had already circumscribed their outer limits and housed the both of them. It is a child who has raised his parents from birth and works a full-time job to pay for their housing, their food.