Where It Stops Making Sense

As I open my notebook, a phrase from Major Ragain comes to mind, "the darkness is deep enough to wear." Lines from jolie laide also invite themselves in: "I'm in the kitchen of the community room in yet another worn down neighborhood. It smells like all community room kitchens, like transit terminal grade disinfectant and elementary school-grade bologna. I have the job offer tucked into my bag."

If I could see in sculpture the power of taking away, as I see it, feel it, breathe it in the written word, the atomic moment, I'd fight for statues. But sculpture is not that, or not in a way I grasp. It is instead a bringing, delivery into relief from the formless, a fusion of material properties and the need in the artist's mind to see things for himself. It is relief in the aspects of dimension and of revelation.

Only in writing does the creator assemble in one sense and subtract in another, at the same time. What is not made plain becomes the property of the reader's imagination, subject only to his experience, his emotional curves, his own creation. But the frame on which that solitary experience hangs is something all readers can agree to. It is almost as if, ridiculous as it sounds, that they all could be said to have read the same thing.

I want that rich jacket that extends into darkness, the layer between me and nothing both real and infinite, just as it really and infinitely is. I want to feel that space between that entrenched odor of grinding generations in existence, and some freshly papered contract. The sound of her heels, for one. What does it sound like to walk through that living smell over one sheet of paper? I believe that room should ring a hollow report in every corner, a desolated echo. Only the scurf of the day wants to rest there. She told me it was in truth a church hall. I still won't believe it.

Comments

GETkristiLOVE said…
One of my art teachers in college gave me a block of wood and told me to carve away anything that wasn't a duck. I shit you not.
Unknown said…
Oh I bet that instruction will live on forever, since Michelangelo's the one credited for describing sculpture that way. The 12-15 people who read my blog will know better.
vikkitikkitavi said…
I suck at carving. I cannot make anything by taking away. Make of that what you will.