No More (2024)
Inkjet and Watercolor on Hanji Paper.
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Damascus steel is everywhere on the streets of Toledo. I'd been on the wikipedia page before, I got there from Wootz steel, which originated in Tamil Nadu, but I can't remember why or how I got to that page. They don't know how to make Damascus steel anymore, somewhere in the past it got lost.

At the El Greco musuem I stared at a painting of Paul. He held a sword while he was writing. I bought two post cards of the painting in the gift shop, I paid with a single coin, I thought of Derrida and all the above extending beyond the top of the website, and I kept going up until I was 16 looking at The Holy Family with Mary Magdalene. It was hot outside that day too.

I started Certified Copy last night and finished it this evening. The dialogue about art, how we see it, and such and such was bouncing around in my head as I walked around today, but after the parts about Love and Marriage, I feel inundated and can barely recall what I was thinking. A soccer ball rolled down the street and a boy chased after it, like in the short Kiarostami made in Italy. It'd be nice, to pretend to be married with someone.

There are few things as pleasurable as checking into a hotel room to stay by yourself. You go up to the room and everything is meant for two: two cups for coffee, two sets of toiletries, two towels, even two beds. There is a quiet in the room that is hard to come by elsewhere. The room beckons you to bring another person into it, and remaining alone only accelerates the sense of solitude like nothing else. I used to dream of a life lived in hotel rooms. It'd be like living in the airport.

In the mall in Cordoba, there's a guy wearing a red YMCMB snapback. I thought about Forever and how Drake was shutting shit down in the mall. I thought about last summer, listening to dumpster baby seeing animatronic dinosaurs in the mall in Chennai and then writing that down in my notes app. I thought about Averroes and Averroes's Search and translation:

"In a translation, we have the same work in a double language; in the fiction of Borges, we have two works in the identity of one single language and, in this identity that is not one, the fascinating mirage of the duplicity of possibilities."

"Thus, the world, if it could be exactly translated and copied in a book, would lose aIl beginning and all end and would become that spherical, finite, and limitless volume that all men write and in which they are written: it would no longer be the world; it would be, it will be, the world corrupted into the infinite sum of its possibilities."

"I felt, on the last page, that my story was a symbol of the man I had been as I was writing it, and that in order to write that story I had had to be that man, and that in order to be that man I had had to write that story, and so on, ad infinitum."

Thinking and writing in the heat is so different from working in the cold. I copy my quotes and attach minor commentaries and it all feels so difficult. When I copy a quote, I feel as though I'm painting a miniature of a picture, the words enter and exit me, they become my own copy. Yesterday I climbed up Toledo from the bus station in the sweltering heat, wondering when else are things "sweltering"; today I walked down and it was so much easier, the weight of my bags basically negligent. I took the train back to Madrid then left the Atocha Station once again, I got in a BlaBlaCar and saw windmills on the highway. I copied sections of the Prophetic Speech chapter of The Book to Come, I thought about El Greco, and I thought Campagna.

"Prophecy is not just a future language. It is a dimension of language that engages it in relationships with time that are much more important than the simple discovery of certain events to come."

"... prophetic speech announces an impossible future, or makes the future it announces, because it announces it, something impossible, a future one would not know how to live and that must upset aIl the sure givens of existence. When speech becomes prophetic, it is not the future that is given, it is the present that is taken away, and with it any possibility of a firm, stable, lasting presence..."

"It is once again like the desert, and speech also is desert-like, this voice that needs the desert to cry out and that endlessly awakens in us the terror, understanding, and memory of the desert."

"The desert is still not time, or space, but a space without place and a time without production. There one can only wander, and the time that passes leaves nothing behind; it is a time without past, without present, time of a promise that is real only in the emptiness of the sky and the sterility of a bare land where man is never there but always outside. The desert is this outside, where one cannot remain, since to be there is to be always already outside, and prophetic speech is that speech in which the bare relation with the Outside could be expressed..."

WHERE IS THE LIGHT COMING FROM??? scrawled on the top of my notebook, above the roughest sketch of Tiepolo's The Immaculate Conception. And it's from above, the folds of the blue shawl that wraps the Virgin Mary betray shadows. My gaze flits around the painting as I sit there, looking, thinking about looking, thinking, looking, thinking about looking, thinking, repeating. The halo of stars above her head. The part of "I'm In It" that goes "star...fucker... star... fucker...". The frame towards the bottom, covered by the branch. The frame within the frame obscured, containing all the Immaculate Conceptions of the past. I sat and I scrawled more thoughts, how the work was hung next to his son, how it was meant for a church, how the Virgin Mary would never meet my gaze.

They don't let you take photos in the Prado. It's good, I've never been a museum that size where nobody is taking pictures, but near Las Meninas I pulled out my phone to take a picture to send to G, and thought about a recent text convo about how the lack of a reproducible image was a major part of early art criticism, the need for ekphrasis, how that need is lost, and the remix as criticism. But I couldn't sit with Las Meninas the way I wanted too, too much echo in the room, I was there too late, I knew I needed to get there first thing in the morning again, for silence to stretch time. I could buy headphones. I could buy codeine too. Moneystretchingtime. I finished the Hedayat and thought of Veeze and Lucki:

"I felt as though I was borne on the wings of a golden boat and ranged through a radiant, empty world with no obstacle to block my progress. So profound and delicious was the sensation I experienced that the delight it gave me was stronger than death itself."

When I had long hair I would twirl the ends of it and end up pulling strands out in the process. There would be piles of hair after a session of sitting, twirling, thinking. It's the same with my beard now.

I went to do laundry and there was a bar next door. While I waited for my clothes I drank wine and ate potato omelettes. The bartender was from the Dominican Republic. He lived in New York for 14 years, in Manhattan and the Bronx. I told him I lived in Brooklyn and Queens. He's been here for 18 years, but he wants to go back to the DR to die. He said that's where he's from, so that's where he must go. I thought about how I don't plan on dying in America. I thought about how I don't plan