Pussy Money Weed (2024)
Inkjet and Watercolor on Hanji Paper.
♥ ♥ ♥

When I think of The Name, I think about the Tamil tradition of Cankam poetry. To be a Cankam poet is to be part of the brotherhood of poets, something larger that oneself. In The Interior Landscape, Ramanujan writes: "The classical tradition of Tamil poetry is an impersonal tradition. The use of epithetical names that for these poets no signature was more authentic than their own metaphors". This is after he describes how the poets sign their works with names such as "The Poet of Red Earth and Pouring Rain" and "The Poet of Long White Moonlight". He goes on to say: "By a remarkable consensus, they all spoke this common language of symbols for some five or six generations. Each could make his own poem and by doing so allude to every other poem which had been, was being, or would be written in this symbolic language. Thus poem became relevant to poem, as if they were all written by a single hand. The spurious name Cankam [fraternity, community] for this poetry is justified not by history but by the poetic practice". As I type this I can hear Lil Uzi Vert from outside my window: "It do not matter"

On the train to Madrid is a specific location of non-location, one that remained in motion save for an extended moment where we were suspended on the tracks. Another train was stuck in Vitoria, blocking the platform. I missed the earlier train, not because I was late to the station, but because I didn't buy a ticket on my phone, and even though the train didn't leave for another 20 minutes, the machine would not sell tickets, and the line to see an attendant was too long, too slow. This happened on the way to San Sebastián as well, with the bus, so instead I took a BlaBlaCar for the first time, I rode in the passenger seat as a 21 year old girl drove and we practiced English and I tried to explain what America and New York were like. She thought people would be friendly there.

In the floor directly above me in this Madrid apartment is someone hammering and drilling, they lack a rhythm to their work, so it does not turn into monotony but a constant source of distraction. Last night I came here, laid on top of the mattress, slept without a sheet in this nausea that comes and goes since I started traveling. I felt it the night before too, when I went out with E and F, I was waiting at a bar, I ate two pintxos and drank a glass of wine, and with more wine the nausea slowly went away. It was the first time I'd been out with them since Christopher's Palace, they met me at a bar that G had recommended and we ate and drank a little there, then we went to a different bar, where we stayed for a while longer, drinking red wine, then white wine, then white wine, then another bar for another red wine. We sat on the steps in front of a church, and in the distance down the street there was a drunk man being dragged down the street by another man. He tried to fight a couple people. Then a police car pulled up. Then another police car. Then another police car. We walked with our glasses to the beach, no one else was there and the night sky still had so much light in it, the Big Dipper was masked by a cloud, but there were so many others, on the seashores of endless worlds children meet and it is so easy to graft the bits and pieces together but there is so much to graft that choice itself can be paralyzing.

We talked about A, how they didn't know his last name, and I talked about things I've written already but that they haven't read, it felt like reciting lines, and this is a feeling that has started to recur since the start of this, recursivity and contingency, an old pdf is downloaded again, and I'm reminded of a part of Hyperdream where Cixous talks about searching for a book she cannot find, she orders another volume, and that reminds her of Benjamin and a pen he lost, and I'm reminded of how Benjamin died in Spain, and Cixous's mother had bought a bed he was traveling with, it was in Oran, but who knows where it is now, who knows if and when I'll make it to Oran to speak broken Arabic in search of past traces in a present that will be unfamiliar, full of shadowed heats, and I talked with F about how much things have changed in the last year, a return to locals, how I went to the Guggenheim and as I looked at Twombly's 9 Discourses on Commodus there was a child with her parents miming "Ta-da!" and her parents applauded and there were so many tourists and I did not feel like a tourist the same way I don't feel like a hipster, I feel like this opacity that floats through spaces, and the woman didn't think I was young enough to be a student, I had to show my ID, and I thought about how I no longer had an interest in making work for the purist and the tourist because I realized that when I was the young boy in Russian Ark staring at Peter and Paul I was not a tourist, but something else, and as I voiced some of this to F I became aware of the walls of language.

"Language is not made for communication. It is made for something else, something, perhaps more important, but also more perilous. Language is, in fact, the principle obstacle to communication, which animals know perfectly well. They watch us sometimes, filled by a strange compassion for us, caught up as we are in language. They too, might have ventured into language, but preferred not to, knowing what might be lost." - Agamben

"Life as it proceeds reveals, coolly and dispassionately, what lies behind the mask that each man wears. It would seem that every one possesses several faces. Some people use only one all the time, and it then, naturally, becomes soiled and wrinkled. These are the thrifty sort. Others look after their masks in the hope of passing them on to their descendents. Others again are constantly changing their faces. But all of them, when they reach old age, realise one day that the mask they are wearing is their last and that it will soon be worn out, and then, from behind the last mask, the real face appears." - Hedayat

The hammering and drilling has ceased for now, there is only the hum of the fan and EDGE OF THE WEST playing from my laptop speakers and I open the window to let the bird songs in. We were on the beach talking about how different it was there, how time was different, how worries were different, and how this made different people. How being an artist or a writer in Europe seemed like something you were born into, or if you pursued it now, you studied at certain schools where you might be chosen to enter certain systems, and it's not as though the same thing doesn't happen in America, T and I noticed a recent Mills MFA graduate in the Bad Painting show who stood apart from the usual list of names, but the idea of New York is one of grind, striving, aspiration, a rat race one opts into, and in opting in, one allows it to shape one's work in a certain way, and one in which fictions can become non-, a more malleable world, moldable, sculptable, but these are only ideas. F called the way I live "a method", then moved away from that framing, but I agreed, it is a "method", I live methodologically, I move in certain ways, and I move deliberately, I threw the wine glasses into the ocean and my phone shattered and I woke up thinking NOTHING WILL HAVE TAKEN PLACE BUT THE PLACE once again

It took Twombly 22 years to paint Untitled (Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor). There are so many things neccessary to work on a thing like that for 22 years, and my method has not yet lead me to a place where I can devote myself to similar tasks. There is the matter of painting the same painting, over and over again, and there is the matter of painting the same painting, over and over again. There is the matter of writing the same passage, over and over again, and there is the matt of writing the same passage, over and over again. Down there on the beach re-beginnings where everything is washed clean each day nothing veils the scene of memory, no curtain, no television, no artifacts, no human fabrications, there is no time, only youth, virgin life and the canny woodcutting of nature. Down there on the beach re-beginnings where everything is washed clean each day nothing veils the scene of memory, no curtain, no television, no artifacts, no human fabrications, there is no time, only youth, virgin life and the canny woodcutting of nature. Down there on the beach re-beginnings where everything is washed clean each day nothing veils the scene of memory, no curtain, no television, no artifacts, no human fabrications, there is no time, only youth, virgin life and the canny woodcutting of nature. There was sand which was glass, there is glass to be made sand, there all the broken mirrors of the past.

Cixous wrote of love letters and I scour my highlights for the passage, getting lost down other passages in the process: "Every day I hope the next day to be called upon by the authorities to create the opera of the creation." --- but then there it is:

"...a true love letter, arriving like all love letters too late, like the love letter transformed into supreme book that the narrator was never to address to Albertine, a letter which had to wait for it to be too late twice over before it could begin to grow and grow until it attained the disproportion of a work of art."

There's still no explanation. There's not always an explanation. And Stendhal never got the joy of speaking on the telephone.