24.7.21
[right now, in this split second that possibly has also spanned months]
I don’t feel an urge to create images. there is nothing colourful I want to say.
writing is comforting. I can give you the tools to create an image, but not give_ the actual image, because it never existed. it is in this impossibility of existence that I find solace. yes, I feel moved by images constantly, overwhelmed, honestly, that at the receiving end of the spectrum, I have nothing to offer, [as of the present]. yes, I see even more images in dreams but what use is it to re-present it to you when the dream is wrapped up in these layers of impossibilities that could never ‘look’ like the un/real thing?
maybe I can better give it to you in words. maybe you can get a better ‘feel’ for it. ‘take my word for it’. it existed, and it’s as good as real. this is a documentation through the only way I can communicate right now. take it. take it from me and never give it a second thought. let us run in opposite directions. I will be right here.
it feels like I am navigating a black and white jungle. there are no animals, just signs of half-life. inanimate objects and symbols stand out in their non-activity; the train, of course, the goddamn train, the ticking time, the dead body of the camera, the cadaver of it all.
I think to Breton’s second example of his Convulsive Beauty; the expiration of movement. something that should be moving but rendered stationary. it is sick, it is astronomical, it is fantastically abhorrent. it shouldn’t exist. it is an impossibility made possible.
In the opening of Ocean Vuong’s marvel of a letter to his mother, he begins by going back to a time when his mother encountered a taxidermy buck, hung over a soda machine at a rest stop in Virginia. “…Can’t they see it’s a corpse? A corpse should go away, not get stuck forever like that,” she said, exasperated. Ocean describes that it was not the “grotesque mounting of a decapitated animal” that shook her, but that the “taxidermy embodied a death that won’t finish, a death that keeps dying as we walk past it to relieve ourselves,”
He continues, “I am writing because they told me to never start a sentence with because. But I wasn’t trying to make a sentence - I was trying to break free. Because freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey.”
So, by writing, he is chasing the freedom he yearns - but at the same time, that freedom will always exist in the context of hunter and prey. There will always be something after you, but in that distance, you will always be free. It is the suspension, reality of the world.
I feel everything important exists in the in-between. you can also call it ‘suspension’. Yes, I am thinking of the galaxy train. yes, it will always be a metaphor for the uncertainty of the world. but it is also the most intriguing overlap of the diagram, the ambiguous. why would I explore something concrete when there are so many shadows of ghosts, layers of blurred landscapes threatening to come into focus? The outmoded camera, the floating train, the unmoving taxidermy. there is a reason why they are convulsive to me, and I will map out a diagram for it. would that make the relations clearer? who knows. maybe it’ll be the in-between of the in-between. one day I won’t be able to crawl out. but maybe I don’t want to. maybe I want to exist in a diagram, all movement expired.
the very obvious thing here is that language makes the impossible possible. it also makes the mundane exciting. it can breathe life onto its victims, a deathly kiss. it is a beautiful medium and I think I want it to carry my work [right now]. because it is the only thing I can manage to do [right now]. because I can only breathe through words [right now]. because I can only think of [right now] when [right now] has already passed when I think it. it is a cruel impossible.