Work

Perhaps a walk


Every night I'll go beside you
Riding with the wild procession,
And we'll chat and laugh so gaily
Over all my crazy speeches.


I will help to shorten for you
All the night hours-but in daylight
All the joy will fly, and weeping
Then I'll sit upon your gravestone.

Yes, in daylight I'll sit weeping
On the royal tomb in ruins,
On the grave of my beloved
By the town Jerusalem.

Graybeard Jews who chance to go by
Then will surely think I'm mourning
The destruction of the temple
And the town Jerusalem.

--Heinrich Heine, from Atta Troll


I am the revolution. Turning away from the evidence, we move to history. The reliance on scientific jargon has, after all, only served to confuse the search for an undiscovered past. Collisions of the two worlds singing the first time the instructions were heard. How many times will it take before we tire of the song? Unfamiliarity creates a living force, a thirst for surprise. Each individual holds a different threshold for the new, the alien: cold floors, steep stairs, dark closed rooms. When the city’s architecture falls to memory and is replaced by the new commerce, instinct adapts to the animus in the street. Quickly the urge to liberate is turned into a desire to destroy. The embodiment of knowledge in the form of structures of repression falls into a growth pattern that relies on chaos and genius of location. This lies hidden within the discourse on nature. Written into the wilderness of the language of repulsion felt by the fallen, the ideals of a forgotten past cling to this fragile architecture. Wandering through the streets alone, the remnants of these embellishments on memory are difficult to dislodge from the creature’s frame. This feeling has meaning only within the context of aggression and contempt. It is a rebellion against the continuity of sense --the logic of sequence and the shame of a monstrous decadence masquerading as theory. The control of this slow development moves toward true change after the late, last tributes to other stories have faded.
Every time I return to the scene, I feel as if I have to try harder to see something new. The strain against recollection begins to become a problem after so many near failures. The legacy of these passions remains strong when compared to the barriers erected to protect us from such intrusions. The love of nature itself takes many forms. Realize the startling potential embodied in renunciation of the goals of those who seek to regain the origin. We hold onto the quest for authenticity. Mere presence falls away when confronted with the descriptions of the stories of actuality in the age of nearness.


The ability to pay attention to small details can be given up once the skill has been mastered. Then it becomes possible to forget. The trouble with the borders between becoming and forgetting shifts constantly. The walker can be treated as an invalid—the delicate approach to recovery of the past comes with its own violence. In the end, the story unfolds with predictable certainty. Only the exterior surface of these structures of beauty replaces the weight of images from momentary lapses of language production that harm the walker in slight, but insignificant ways. Understand this inspiration as torture to the soul of a criminal mind left behind once the discovery of new paths toward sublimity have become understood. Cold and dry air replaces the images again. A quiet pattern of suffering followed by the pain of unrelenting throbbing in the brain. These things add to the wreckage of detail forced into form by script and recording of script. Scribbling while walking creates difficulty for an even, measured gait. The thickness of the air chokes the words into a packed, dark bundle. The throat clogs after consulting the clock of day watch. Regard the view from above. This is a terrible harm. Rise to defend against such dangers. Turn around and capture the response now lost to morning. This is only a light burn of light skipping the whole scene because of lack of space. The cost to the land is felt across the quarter. We hear only soft, passive voices of defeat and weariness.


Breathing easier after a short rest, the details of the scene begin to return. Moist skin and questions of forgiveness and regret. What holds these things together? Politics serve to sort out the accumulated pieces of hard feelings, difficult memories and dirty secrets. The emotional weight of history becomes an official policy for explanation of imagery. Stone, clod, jug, well, milk, water, cloud, thistle, leaf, hawk and other fragments of language.

But he also wonders about himself, that he is not able to learn to forget and that he always hangs onto past things. No matter how far or how fast he runs, this chain runs with him. It is something amazing: the moment, in one sudden motion there, in one sudden motion gone, before nothing, afterwards nothing, nevertheless comes back again as a ghost and disturbs the tranquility of each later moment. A leaf is continuously released from the roll of time, falls out, flutters away--and suddenly flutters back again into the man's lap. For the man says, "I remember," and envies the beast, which immediately forgets and sees each moment really perish, sink back in cloud and night, and vanish forever.

There is weariness in an abundance of things. Serving the purpose of delivery and retreat falls into the field of fullness and eventual resignation. The assault from each side waits while the numbers accumulate. Outside the details are charged with differentiation and distinction. The wallpaper of interior life marks a status and ranking ordered by purpose of being. Contrasted with the category of existence known only through the lens of the past, the moment of arrival stops briefly only at small points along a disseminated circle. We are not saints. This will not deter us from trying to seek the origin. Looking for an original source. That awful power we carry with us every step along the path toward the place of scattered remains. Gathering the information necessary for selection of the methods for recovery of the past. Grasp the method firmly in order to attempt union with disclosure and its benefits. Follow the story without regret.
This is the duty of repetition. The torture performed by light, by color and heat. The diurnal urges to seek an end to thought. Originality, then, comes to us in stages—for different needs. Incommensurable with meaning, the emotional need for distinction (within a temporal frame) is frustrated by the divergent paths to origin, to the source. The legacies do not shake easily. Connected and still tormenting the morning mind. Secretly the safe portions finalize access to the rhythmic speech of light and heat. Living near the time for recollection, only the artist walks safely between the border dividing memory and history. All of the attempts to reconcile the various interpretations for a non-decoded past fail to capture the imagination’s potential for destruction. Now struck by the desperate need for newness and the image of progress, the search for the shield of authenticity seems ever more pained. Time strains to accommodate conflicting stories for the need for this technology of truth. Telling the story accomplishes the lie. Belief in the lie smoothes the ragged emotional barriers separating need from desire. Causality and duration trouble the mind of the traveler to origin. This walk will not conform to the illusion of progress. The body breaks into the pieces necessary for reconstruction as time regards the numbers for accuracy. Selection of the actual drives this way. Over and then around the structure of these connections carries a burden—this will solve the problem of becoming and actuality in an age of belatedness. The artist makes a copy of the age in the form of a name for seeking. The creation of new sources of nourishment intoxicates the imagination with exotic flavors from unfixed sources. The blend of languages focuses attention to a still developing picture of speech without illusion. The value delivered to a mixture of sounds from noise to thought brings comfort to the mind tormented by change. Real change breaks down the speaking body. Elimination of language empties the corporeal from number, from form and light and day counting. Mark the absence of time by wrapping the sun into a picture of sequence. Time is always running out. The age of dissemination reaches a moment of self-recognition at the point when time is recorded—lying still, silent and scattered. This block of time is expressed through voices. Voices heard outside the window, over the doorframe, against the hard walls. Fear permeates the streets and alleys, guiding the blocked memories past sound back to images. Noise is forgotten in favor of light in shadow, pictures of faces and other stone surfaces. Built from the detail of god given sight, the pieces of the reverie in motion fade into oblivion of hard feeling. There is no word for feeling. Touching the edge of the structured response allows an illusion to pattern itself across the eyes. Constructed of materials known to be native to this land, the surface is crossed again and again in order to recreate the feeling of first crossing. Speak of others the same way that bridges know their maker. Glass eyes break through the surface of delusion and penetrate the barrier of sound. Reason perpetuates a cause and effect relationship with the falling down and the imagined destiny. No wonder, no malice, no ego, and no thing. This is simply an exacerbation of what has always been true. The repugnance we feel from such exchanges resolves itself in a tight bundle of unspoken responses to the future as an illusion of itself. This darkness is felt every time the wind blows back against an unknown face or unfamiliar noise. Turn around during the storm and witness the progress so far. Identification, incomplete and indifferent, itself a problem during times of distress backs up again and again when faced with overwhelming difficulty. Disinterest then recreates a path back to repetition.


History belongs secondly to the man who preserves and honours, to the person who with faith and love looks back in the direction from which he has come, where he has been. Through this reverence he, as it were, gives thanks for his existence. While he nurtures with a gentle hand what has stood from time immemorial, he want to preserve the conditions under which he came into existence for those who are to come after him. And so he serves life. His possession of his ancestors' goods changes the ideas in such a soul, for those goods are far more likely to take possession of his soul. The small, limited, crumbling, and archaic keep their own worth and integrity, because the conserving and honouring soul of the antiquarian man settles on these things and there prepares for itself a secret nest. The history of his city becomes for him the history of his own self.


The recuperative power of the embrace of nature meshes uncomfortably with the renunciation of progress. Natural forces are dragged into a complex of forces hoping to slide the cover of the natural over the stone of progress. This is the technology of defeat. Records are kept and then destroyed by mechanisms of revolution for the toppling of concepts like name, destiny, power and self. Becoming a name for a leaf, a stone, a clod of earth. Written across the record of the passage through the bitterest experiences the failure to remember marks night stains. The picture of history blocks out the supporting features of the decorative surface. Brushed against rough textures, gathering strength against a torrent of detail — the grains of memory fall into the spaces between the pages. The coarse particles of thought write a story of reversal — end to beginning, back to front, background filling out the frame. The interior space of the room selected for the transfer of information crossing and forever fixed on too blank paper will seem cramped when images are hoarded. The one thing falling into focus forever pushed into its own crevice between niche and shelf is the name of the end, marked by a forgetting of its secret.