. :: Do not add up
 
 
 
 
90.
 
At some point in my education I got it into my head that it was wrong to be bored, sort of morally wrong, like if you were bored you were a boring person. For some reason I like this neurosis -- it makes me need to be intellectually and experientially stimulated. I hope that everyone suffers from this neurosis at least in a mild form.
 
 
91.
    There is memory because
    I have said something yesterday
    that I claim,
    but those words do not
    exist in their natural form.
    I tolerate deviation in your face,
    the trace of all words to come and go.
 
92.
    I am dancing with Rilke, he stains my pen.
    I wonder if he really danced
    or did he sit in smoky rooms
    and lonely write of dancing in fields?
     
    The women came to him and young poets wrote
    as I would've. But did his pen stain
    his every waking pore? Maybe he was
    mad in an asylum of words,
     
    Unable to kiss with lavender hues,
    as the sun kisses the land like that
    in morning dew. I attempt to kiss you
    with lips and poems, with cum between your breasts.
     
    A god can live in metaphor. A man can live in body.
    May we stay dangerously in between
    and find a twig that does not need
    sincere but naive Orpheus to invoke its existence.
 
93.
    Rilke proposes that it was he who
    singing, created the forest of subtle
    shades of green. The sky is gray.
    I invite you to dance the sculpture of clouds.
     
    Dumb rain on feet. Rain is a symbol
    or a cold object. Do we live the way we live
    because of the taste of apples or
    because of the metaphor that they leave in us?
     
    My love, we are both the tangled sweat
    and the poetic god between our words.
    We could create trees -- the small infinity of leaf.
    In between you and I there is a proposal
     
    for music, sometimes the awful frustrated pain
    creates a storm, sometimes we live to create
    the easy shapes of clouds as we sit on hills dancing,
    and the more difficult shapes of abstract thought in stone pen.
 
94.
 
I have erased ten other sentences that have been in this position. No, that is a lie.
 
I am at that point in writing when I scratch everything out, scared of beginning.
 
It's strange, when you draw a circle you begin at a discrete point, but when you observe a circle there is no way you could know where that circle begins.
 
The observer never sees the stages of incompleteness in each stage of composition. The organic form has no stage which is incomplete. Once a composition reaches a certain critical point of completeness the observer's eye completes the rest. I'd like to describe things with words and paint to a little less than that point. Maybe the way to do that is to describe two or more mutually exclusive "stories" within one work.
 
 
95.
 
I like to see a pencil strewn somewhere around my room... It reminds me of the possibility in the act of writing on a single sheet of paper. When I need that reminder most the pencil looks like something that I have to pick up if I want my room to be clean.
 
 
96.
    Possess the meaning that you do when you do.
    Firstly, would this meaning be the meaning of the act of whatever you are doing or the meaning of the act of meaning?
    My trembling acquisition of the ability to mean something other.
    Something other is in a word.
    Is there something other in my existence?
    Do I mean something else by simply being?
    I mean, do I mean something other than being in my entire life?
    My life must be the act of meaning, what a long act, it seems to take my entire life to complete the action of meaning.
    A word ipso facto means something else.
    But can an action also mean something else?
    A word corresponds to something else.
    But an entire life? There is our difficulty.
    It seem that an entire life can only correspond to that same entire life,
    There must be too many words in that life --
    Too many experiences which do not fit within
    What we wish our life to correspond to.
    I want my life to correspond to two words: "Writing" and "Loving"
    But there are many things which I do which do not fit into either one of those categories.
    I may either throw those things out or deal with them.
    There are many experiences that do not fit within any system --
    It makes a philosophy difficult, it also makes a correspondence within a life very difficult.
 
97.
 
A word may correspond and we may even be able to say that a sentence corresponds, but an entire novel, painting or poem? An entire novel or poem corresponds to nothing but itself -- some of the images in a poem may correspond to other things, but the entire poem? There is always something in a whole work of art which does not correspond, each of the pieces may correspond to other things, but the work as a whole must correspond to only itself. For this reason I have always felt awful about trying to guess at the "main idea" or "theme" of a piece of art -- the theme of a piece of art is always just that piece of art. This feeling must be where the idea of 'latent content' comes from.
 
 
98.
    If a piece of writing is evidence of thought
    then I must be thinking
    about what I am writing.
    I do not know exactly what I will write next.
    It is sort of an improvisation that I am doing.
    I do sort of know what ideas I want to express.
    This must be the evidence of those thoughts.
    What thoughts?
    I was thinking that
    a piece of writing is evidence of thought.
 
99.
    "Does it work?"
    "Well, it's sort of faulty, actually."
    "It is not."
    "It does not do the trick."
    "The trick is in a single name."
    "No, I think that the trick lays somewhere in which that name comes into contact with another name."
    "Ahh yes, that's very good, that makes me unable to complete sentences."
    "You just completed a sentence."
    "So I did. It is only good to complete sentences when they tell you that you cannot complete sentences."
 
100.
 
You are having trouble figuring out what your day was like. You are having trouble saying what you did. You can tell me the actions, but you can't tell me what it actually was like. The only way for you to actually tell me what your day was like is to take me along with you on that day. So once the day has occurred you can't really ever tell me how that actual day was. A day really rots unless you were there, and if you were there a portion of it stays continually fresh.
 
 
101.
 
"It looks like rain."
Does that mean that it is raining or that it looks like it might rain? Right now it's not raining but maybe when I made the statement it was raining or else it looked like it might rain in the future. But now is the future of that statement and it is not raining right now, do you see the problem?
 
 
102.
 
"Now and only now. You cannot know all of this because you are reading this later. I am writing this now and you are reading this later, but to you, you are reading this now, isn't that strange? Every now of the writer is mapped onto a later now of the reader."
Jackson Domain
from "Reading and Set Theory"
 
 
103.
 
I remember hearing a story in East Asian history class about why Confucius' Analects don't seem to be in order. They don't exactly seem to make up a book. They seem to make up sections of a book, but since they are out of order the concept of a book doesn't really emerge. Well, the story that I made up about the guy who told the story about the Analects was: he said that the Analects were written on blinds tied together with string. Once the string rotted, the blinds fell down in a scattered manner, all mixed up. Each piece of writing (on a blind) must have had to have been so complete and separate from the next piece of writing (on a blind) that the blinds did not function as a puzzle putting together the meaning of the entirety. It wouldn't have gotten mixed up if the blinds each contained only pieces of sentences, or even whole sentences -- we would have still been able to reconstruct them into a whole, into an order. I wonder at what point language gets so chunky that you cannot logically figure out its placement in relation to equally chunky pieces of language?
 
 
104.
 
In an artwork there are always portions which the artist intends, but there are also always spaces between these intentions which are left for talented receivers to fill in with their own messy crayons.
 
 
105.
 
Basically, I am just writing out a set of notes to tell myself what I should really write.
 
 
106.
    New Word:
     
    COMMUN(ity)ICATION
 
107.
 
Five major things have happened to me in my life. I am 21. I wonder if this number of important events grows larger and larger or does it stay roughly constant -- reclassifying events as more or less important as time goes by.
 
 
108.
 
I walked the mile and a half to the nearest bookstore, which is a Barnes and Noble. Searching through the shelves that held multitudes of books I thought about the fact that there were the thoughts, ideas, visions, etc., expressed in the book and then there was the package of the book. I wondered if the thoughts in the book set the foundations of the package or if the package sets the foundations for the ideas in the book. I thought about how the marketing of a book influences my decision to look at it. The knowledge of marketing techniques has led me to love New Directions Paperbooks, which have simple, beautiful, black and white covers.
 
 
109.
 
Could the difference between mainstream and avante-garde art be in the way in which I market it?
 
(Castelli vs. Stiegletz)
 
 
110.
 
After I began writing I knew that I could no longer be one person. I was ruined to search in every direction, addicted to expression, addicted to finding the reason for the glimmer in each pair of eyes, addicted to the act of discovery.
 
 
111.
 
We need new subtle ways of signifying ourselves which cannot be turned against us.
 
 
112.
    There are hidden things within a drum,
    The sounds that do not exist --
    All that is when the drum is resting,
    All that is potential, all that is the perfect seed.
 
113.
 
If I were standing over your shoulder while you were reading this, then maybe you would feel different about the quality of what you were reading.
 
 
114.
 
Subvert your criticism:
 
As a person with free will, you may now decide what others will criticize about you. This means that you may work on and develop what you are working upon.
 
(examples: Sun Ra made everybody believe that he thought that he was an alien. Duchamp made everybody believe that he ceased artistic activity in order to play chess.)
 
 
115.
    Subvert your criticism by wearing strange things.
 
116.
    A couple of questions for you:
     
    Can you learn to sculpt through language?
    Can color be articulated?
     
    A metaquestion for you:
     
    Do you see how the above questions are related?
 
 

Do not add up :: =