Kashmir (2024)
Inkjet and Watercolor on Hanji Paper.
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The machine is changing. It will never remain static, there are a number of lines that changed it, perhaps the ones about searching for a home still weighing in my mind. The French man left, that was what I wanted to start with, the French man left and I finished the Blanchot, the Blanchot finished with Un coup de des, and it was familiar territory, and then it really finished with a discussion of the public:
"There was once a time when the writer, like the artist, had to do with glory. Glorification was his work, glory was the gift he gave and received. Glory, in the ancient sense, is the shining forth of presence (sacred or sovereign). To glorify, Rilke says, does not mean to make known; glory is the manifestation of being that goes forward in its magnificence of being, freed from what hides it, established in the truth of its revealed presence."
"The act of publishing - publication - becomes the essential thing. We can take this in an obvious sense: the writer is known by the public, he is reputable, he seeks to be valued, because he needs what value is, money. But what awakens the public, what generates value? Publicity. Publicity itself becomes an art, it is the art of all arts, it is what is most important, since it determines the power that determines all the rest."
"To publish is not to cause oneself to be read, or to offer anything at all to be read. What is public does not exactly need to be read; it is already known beforehand, with a knowledge that knows everything and wants to know nothing."
"It is against an indefinite and incessant language - without beginning and without end, against it but also with its help - that the author expresses himself. It is against public interest, against inattentive, vague, universal, and omniscient curiosity, that the reader comes to read, emerging with difficulty from this first reading, a reader who before reading has already read: reading against it but still through it. The reader and author participate, one in a neutral understanding, the other in a neutral language, which they want to suspend for an instant so it may give way to an expression that is better understood."
"The extraordinary turmoil that causes the writer to publish before writing, that causes the public to form and transmit what it does not understand, the critic to judge and define what he does not read, and the reader, finally, to have to read what is not yet written - this movement that confuses, by anticipating them each time, all the various moments of the work's formation, also gathers them together in the search for a new unity. Thus the richness and poverty, the pride and humility, the extreme disclosure and the extreme solitude of our literary work, which has at least the merit of desiring neither power, nor glory."
Sometimes I feel I quote too much, other times I feel as though there's no other way forward. There are obvious threads to the words above, that will remain unwoven for the time being. After the Blanchot, I started Irit Rogoff's Terra Inferma, I remember talking about it in a dream this morning. Yesterday the French man left and D came back and she cooked dinner and invited me as Moroccans do and talked badly about the French man for being French and said she didn't mean to be racist but that she wouldn't accept French guests in the future and she struggled to understand why I didn't speak English with an accent and asked what Bollywood actors I liked and I said Shah Rukh Khan because I didn't want to get into it really and she said they have two TV channels for Bollywood movies in Morocco and that they like them a lot here. I've been thinking about Twombly's first interview with David Sylvester and how insistent he was on letting Sylvester and "the public" know about the A in Iliam and how it was intention and how it was for Achilles and how nobody said anything. The A in Iliam is in Philadelphia and I've spent the last two days thinking about Hopoutblick's tape "Don't Believe the Rumors" where he claims that he's being framed for the murders that he's charged with, the narrative of the album is that he's innocent but also that his gang drops bodies - the beats and samples are great: Sweet dreams - beyonce, Juicy, Law and Order, Power, a Bollywood song that I can't place. At one point Blick makes a Brian Dawkins reference which is crazy to me because he would've been like 6 when Dawkins retired. My beard makes me feel older than I am, because I'm starting to feel how others see me. I watched Daughers of the Dust and Guimba the Tyrant, which is floating around with all the above mixed with a Skrilla leak, Skrilla videos, and this article called "Vodou: The Crisis of Possession" that Z posted. Everything only seems to moving on the surface for me, things linking, but without the words underneath. Rogoff starts the first chapter of Terra Infirma with a discussion of the question "Where do I belong?" characterizing it as "one of those misguided questions which nevertheless serve a useful purpose, for while it may naively assume that there might conceivably be some coherent site of absolute belonging, it also floats the constant presence of a politics of location in the making" which I have been sitting with. Mainly the middle part, the naive assumption that there might be some coherent site of absolute belonging. A few days ago I was thinking about New York City as unstable ground, and how foolish it would be to try to build a home there, or rather to build a home on unstable ground. But where is the ground stable