People I have known: I
Tuesday, November 26, 2002
So I set out on 11/13 with a dark pink vertical rectangle and a very vague goal of writing a little bit per day about some of the things I take into account when looking at paintings, especially abstract paintings, expecially those that appear to be quite minimal and without much value.
My vague goal had to do with writing about the many factors that are considered when making a painting, and how much these many factors are actually part of the content of the painting, that these details tell you a lot about the artist's thinking and process, that there are many narratives to reading a painting, and that these many factors (narrative threads) add up to some kind of whole, and that to see the whole one has to read the parts, to be literate in this language, to understand the parts that go into finding meaning in the parts of the whole and in the whole. I really wanted to write about how the whole is much more than it appears to be, and that it has a learnable language, some of which can be very easy to observe and talk about.
I wanted to elevate these factors from a status of being taken for granted in a culture that is image-driven, non-contemplative, time-starved, a culture that is not good at using the mind and eyes with a sensitive use of ordinary knowledge to see content in non-representational images.
I did not start from an outline. I just wrote a paragraph each day and waited to see what it led to next, which became the next day's paragraph. I did not know how long this would take. The first day I started with a pink rectangle (bgcolor="#CC00CC") a single cell table with a width="150" and height="350", which I reduced in proportion each day, and I wanted to write until the rectangle became width="6" and height="14" and then end in a final pink period (.). As of Sunday I had seven more days to go, and I knew I had plenty to write about during those last seven days.
I also knew that in the next few days I was going to get into writing about much less tangible things like touch, gesture, balance of the many factors being considered, and how they become a whole. And since I'm also feeling the pull of a number of other things right now and knew I was going to be short of time and brains to do that writing, for now at least, that was going to be hard for me to write about. It would be hard to even talk about. I can think of two or three people I personally know that I could see or call on the phone with whom I could talk about this without worrying too much because we have spent a lot of time learning the same language. One of those people I'm married to. There are lots of other people out there who know the langugage, of course, but I'm only in touch right now with a few. And even among those who know the language, there is of course the challenge of dialects. When we say red, or plane, or gesture, or scale, do we all mean the same things?
I thought that the language, if written, to get at what I'm really thinking, would have to turn into poetry, and to be pretty abstract, and that it wouldn't necessarily be conventions-obeying English. As an example of what I'm talking about, see "IV. 123 A Being Consider." Or the series "Nine." These are seemingly indirect ways (well, they seem pretty direct to me) of talking about this imagery issue, but it would be a completely different tone than what I'd written under that pink rectangle for eleven days, and I wasn't sure how to resolve that, or how to just continue without even worrrying about resolution.
But mostly, I just felt myself running out of steam from a number of different seams. Steam from the thesis seam. Steam pffting from the work seam. There's relationship seam and the holiday seam. The seasonal seam. The family seam. The house hunting seam. The bathroom cleaning seam. The grocery store seam. The sore neck and shoulder seam. The how-can-I-keep-a-clear-thought-in-my-head seam. Lots of steaming seams.
So yesterday, I decided to take a break from the series, and when I feel like it maybe I'll finish what I started. For now, time out. Regular readers, all two of you, will catch it when I return to it. With this weblog business there is no way of know when something will return and live on, or when it will fade and die.
After eleven days of writing, you can read how far I got.
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On November 26, 1942, Casablanca was released. Catherine, have you seen seen it yet? There must be a perfect holiday-viewing copy sitting on the video store shelf with its eye out for you.
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