small stone

                                  Assume this is indeed a stone set apart from all others. (Lawrence Fixel)

     Imagine you’re holding a small stone in your hand. Imagination being fertile, you start having some thoughts. You come up with the following.

Like this small stone in the hand

holding secrets, you imagine

just a cold object, uselessly

lying around, this faceless sea.

     You hesitate about those commas, and the capital letter at the beginning, and the period at the end, elements that contribute to the idea that this is a sentence, which is true, and have the advantage of suggesting circularity and closure. But you want to replicate the act of imagining, and the kind of ambiguities it creates, for your reader, and to put the reader in the same bind that you find yourself in. So you do away with the comma, and relax the bond of syntax by putting spaces around the lines. Thus,

Like this small stone in the hand

holding secrets you imagine

just a cold object uselessly

lying around this faceless sea.

     Not content, feeling the syntax is still too strong that the ambiguities you wanted might not come off very well, you decide to get rid of this line altogether, and say:

Like this

small stone 

in the hand

holding secrets 

you imagine

just a cold object

uselessly

lying around

this faceless sea.

     You also think of running a permutation of this series to dramatize the irresolvable dialectic you were imagining, pushing the eye around so that it won’t settle in a fulcrum, or find an Archimedean point of reading. However, this is feeding everything to the fish, and it would have been probably better to let the syntax of a first glance dominate, and hope that succeeding glances would loosen the bonds, but at the same time, entrap the eye deeper and deeper into the Endless Bind, with or without the presence of syntax. (Or, probably it’s even enough just to say, “This faceless sea.”) 

     At any rate, that’s how you imagine it would be like.

?context, 2

"I've come to the conclusion that it's very hard to write a gesture completely devoid of meaning or to write a gesture that's completely filled with meaning." -- Michael Jacobson, asemic artist


This tension between meaningfulness and meaninglessness probably defines what language is all about. It is like being caught in the middle of two opposing traffic. This is not so different from the concept of reason. If you insist too much on the rationality of an idea, you will end up being irrational. Voltaire's Candide is a very good illustration. Humor, too, can easily degenerate into other things without a certain balancing act.

It is not, however, a simple binarism. If you move beyond a certain point towards one end, you will find yourself at the other end, and so on. Thus, what we actually have is an endless swing toward both ends, never really defining for us the pure state of meaningfulness and meaninglessness.

These two terms are not axiomatic givens, as if we knew what they were ahead of time. In any process that involves scripts, images, symbols, or signs, that is, any language game, everything seems to be moving by positing positive and negative values, or units and gaps, along the way. It is as if the very act of walking was creating the road itself, instead of walking over a prior constructed path. Each action creates its own space, or weaves its own path, instantaneously assigning poles of meaningfulness and meaninglessness as constitutive horizons that do not have absolute positions, nor absolute values.

The uncertainty of the real value of these poles even renders them mysterious. It is for a system or a game to decide which is which to set itself up. When that happens, a certain threshold is reached. Everything solidifies into a dogma, and becomes too signifying, too obvious. What was previously dismissed as meaningless starts making more sense.

What is interesting, from the point of view of literature, is to see many texts that play on these tensions through the use of different techniques (Ray di Palma's super-efficient syntax, for example, or Peter Ganick's voiceless, subjectless, objectless flux).

extract, 2

supported based on gradual allotropic
remote deniable adverbial stimuli
single barred other assortment

initial headcount film transaction
triple section of repetitive complex
processions dictate filial status

convey all occlusion max
ration recalling dispelled ejecta
basic lent boundary advice

limits failure of blanket proponent
summation pin altered nominated
station noeta over surface

anaphoric wear a potential sealant
detection emotive appeal essence
retains active set direction

adding imaginary control of terminal delay
ending descent into split range
sampling operations pass unity

demand leading to solely patterned
tendency end register possessive  
motions trading attention spills


...

?context, 1

It is not easy to speak too generally, without referring to particular pieces as examples. Then again, the example is not easy to explain in terms of an obvious proof or evidence or as a paradigm, as if there was an easy bridge between the explication and the object so-called being explained. It is a tricky dance, and pursuing it in itself can become an objective illusion.

To simplify to a ridiculous level, to write something is first of all to raise a question, fundamental perhaps, on the nature of relationships with scripts.

The working relationship that I pretend to project is not towards the exemplification or creation of semantic, aesthetic or scriptural models. The organic phantasm I would like to deploy--if vertigo can be paused, involves the temporal suspension of knowing that I am pretending, so that something could arise: scripted or not, marginal or central, in letter or in spirit. Whatever arrives, it would carry traits that destabilize so many times that--far from leading to a thematics or a message--would seem to take on these very functions by default: short-circuited, delayed, suspended, lost, blocked, interrupted, altered, rerouted, split, disrupted, etc.

Definitely, or maybe definitely, one procedure cannot be used forever; that is, it can only be pursued so long, since it would eventually satisfy its own stylistic inertia, even if it may be torn within by its own syntactic and logical contradictions. One solution can delay this by inserting a circle of instability into a bigger circle of instability.

At any rate, that can probably sum up the whole idea of contexts for me.

Indeed, it has become a big question why a text like that needs to be produced at all, when we have so many approaches already around explored by many brilliant individuals, some subsumed under "nonlinear" writing, an idea which in itself is not a given, but another question. (Or, any idea is already a question.)

So there you go: to make these texts is probably closer to a form of asking a question, than to a form of giving an answer, or an example. It is not so different from asking What is a human being? or What is love? and getting tragedy or sonnets.

Finally, if you ask me what a text is, then probably you would hear something like: at the moment we don't know what it is, sorry. But are you any better asking what time it is?

...