Too hard.

As a way of changing it,

the forward motion requires

an interior alteration to the

Structure.

Will I need to "sign in" today?

Fo I have to "sign" it to sign in?

Follow me to the end of the page where I will decide.

Cast away these fears in order to make an order.

These aspirations will give us another chance.

Today this breath will encourage the voice to show itself.

It will be revealed as a signature.

Not clocks, not stones

The rocks and tops of other

Markers, meaning more

Than the calendar, I ask

For a moment, just a respite from

The notes and scraps of papers reminding

Pockets filled with filler

A time full and sounding of

Others clocks




Wipe them away

Come with me

Take my hand

It will be

A new year.

Now but not Next



1

He knew that his immediate obligation was to sleep.

It does matter that the photograph be held

In an outmoded cardboard sleeve

Now defunct but held, gently

Together by the slightest of paper sleeve frame memory

This memory, which at first calmed him, ended by tormenting him. He feared lest his son should meditate on this abnormal privilege and by some means find out he was a mere simulacrum. Not to be a man, to be a projection of another man's dreams--what an incomparable humiliation, what madness!

These dual projections, your language peeled away from mine, wear away at the bridge

Held together on my face, still—in blindness.


2

Each projection, then, becomes the invisible mirror

On which we may place our own regrets

Without waiting for the reflection to adhere to the surface

His victory and peace became blurred with boredom. In the twilight times of dusk and dawn, he would prostrate himself before the stone figure, perhaps imagining his unreal son carrying out identical rites in other circular ruins downstream; at night he no longer dreamed, or dreamed as any man does.

The images flow automatically; the pictures follow each other now waiting

Because it does matter how the old machine holds

The ring in place—gently giving one after the next resting

Like a lens.

3


Every night he perceived it more clearly. He did not touch it; he only permitted himself to witness it, to observe it, and occasionally to rectify it with a glance.

This time (the last time?) I place this without writing – with another type of script. This will follow in the form of a block, in a heap. I can picture it now—two projectors held together in proximity, in their epoch through their creator. These water stains do not diminish the fading we remember through the polarity of vision. This is because we want to understand these images. The succession of pictures held together in light, close to the lens and read through pairs of reflections of frames of sequence.

These are the ways we use the apparatus. We see the machine for what it is worth. We listen to him read his own stories. How does he (in blindness?) read his own stories? Are the glasses comforting even though they do not “work”? Can the labyrinth of mirrored images fix the misunderstanding? Maybe the labyrinth itself is simply a misunderstanding?

The pictures are held together by sympathy. Light held together by image of place. Have they been repeated now? Because of the dream of an explanation. The story offered by the lens.

The envelope holds the secret. The secret is revealed in succession. The projection breaks the rule of the secret. The picture burns its memory into the mirror of the past. We traced through many of these machines. They work for as long as they can; as long as they might. Without the power of the secret we trace the legacy of these machines.

The lens does not force the time to adhere to the present—to mark our moment by stopping. Only the creator of this tree knows this to be true. We tried this in pairs: right and left, eyeglass and binoculars, earth and sky, hand in hand machine and machine, sound and image, noise and machine, light glow murmur mirror and hum.











Dedicated to the memory of Matt Hanner—passages in italics are taken from “The Circular Ruins” by Jorge Luis Borges

On the Nature of the Deictic (Why I Write Such Good Books) The time for me hasn't come yet: some are born posthumously. --Nietzsche Installation 2011 Light fixtures, power cords, latex, spray paint, potatoes, salt, radio, casket, flour, shirt, hanger, ladder, bricks and dirt

11 September 2011

In the year of his seventieth birthday, Jean-Luc Godard remarked that he considered himself to be a failure in the cinema because he was not able to prevent Steven Spielberg from making his film Schindler’s List. And we would be wise to recognize just what Godard might have wanted to block if he had been given the opportunity. In the wake of the horrifying tragedy witnessed on September 11, 2001, it seems trivial to quarrel with cinematic style or taste but the questions go much deeper. Adorno’s reminder of the reasonableness that “to write lyric poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” is most appropriate in light of these questions. To mark the day the of the World Trade Center bombings as the day when art making became irrelevant is to trivialize both art and the tragic events of that day. Primarily, the end of art from that day forward acts as refutation both of history and the history of art. As atrocious as these terrorist events may have been, they are merely additions to the long list of barbarous acts perpetrated by man against his fellows. And it has been, and remains to be, the purpose of art to remember the tragedies of our collective past and resist the forces that attempt to perpetuate them. Not in the form of a bleak humanism that merely represents a forgotten past and soothes our consciences, but, in the form of an aggressive art that challenges, resists and reformulates the social and linguistic structures which seek to dominate humans through violence and economic control. The wreckage of the past cannot be adequately represented by a compliant art in the face of the radical evil of everyday existence.