Friday, August 17, 2007

A muted morning on Harris Creek, grey and silent. These are perfect conditions for solitude. I am thinking of Goldman in Hesse's book Goldman and Narcissus wandering through the countryside during the plague, and coming upon a house in which all of the former occupants have become sculptures of the agony of "black death." I imagine a profound solitude in that scene, that is, I imagine Goldman's experience as one of solitude.

It is not that time has stopped for Goldman, but the space through which Goldman and time move is inanimate, a space abstracted from time. It is as close as Goldman can get to death without being dead. Except for Goldman, all the players on the stage are frozen in that last tick of the clock. They have become art objects, and Goldman is walking alone in a museum. The pleasure of solitude is in that image.

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

The relationship between the sensory body I call my own, and the corporate self to which I awaken each morning on Harris Creek is one of analogy. Metaphor is analogical. The body is a book.

"Universe, like the dictionary, though intergral, is ipso facto nonsimultaneously recollectable; therefore, as with the set of all the words in the dictionary, it is nonsimultaneously reviewable, ergo, is synergetically incomprehensible, as of any one moment, yet is progressively revealing." Buckminster Fuller.

"Progessive revelation." The body and the book reveal the story. The story is the composition; what is left concealed is the decomposition. The sensory body and the book are not only related to each other but to a necessarily concealed third. The conscious self and sensory body do not reveal the unconscious; to see it you must read between the lines.