“Just because you don’t know where you’re going is no excuse for not going on. That doesn’t matter at all to me.”
(Marguerite Duras, 1969)
I.
Inside the mania it moves around. It’s an upswing, but “some sharks must swim constantly in order to keep oxygen-rich water flowing over their gills” or else something, inevitably bad, will happen. The B-side of the record finishes and I flip it over to start again. It’s working exactly how I want it to. I’m in the bed. I take the headphones off and go into the office. I remember a note I had scribbled in a notebook and immediately forgotten: re-read Craig Watson books. In the office I climb on the rolling chair to grab the books off the high shelf. I’m not afraid of falling because to lose control is to find pleasure. This thought invokes another and I go to the living room to try to find the pamphlet I made of an essay about Jean Daive. The books are everywhere, things move around. Paul Buck says it’s best to reorganize the library every few years, to accept that certain books can and should find themselves comfortable in different places. Forgetting where a book is can be a necessary part of finding it. In the hallway between the office and the living room I throw a handstand to revitalize. Beyond, on the shelf with the zines and pamphlets, I find what I’m looking for. Flipping through, I also grab the Guyotat pamphlet I forgot I already had, find V Manuscript‘s ARGOT OF INSCRIPTION still wrapped in plastic, blood stamped. Why did I never finish reading this? I want to read it now so it goes in the stack under the Craig Watson books. The running around is corporeal, an exercise for the body that needs the grabbing and the shifting and the stacking and the touch. This is how I can feel it, connect to it. Thought forms out of these connections. The interest in study has no end point other than in the construction of my own personhood. Endless research; an embedding.
II.
I stand on my head when I need to figure out what’s happening to my body. I’ve learned it’s the easiest way to immediately tell if something is off: digestion, congestion, exhaustion. Condition also ends with -tion. The inversion tells me I am fine. When I’m inside the text it’s like this too: I can tell with my body. By 1:30 I regret having gone to yoga at 9am because I’m ready to go again. Where are we at? Disappearing Curtains is pushed away but I stop it from falling to the floor. INSIDE: The juxtaposition of the translation of a text by Bernard Noël that circulates around an absent photograph next to a translation of Mathieu Bénézet’s Us These Photographs, No keeps vibrating lately. When you want to continually experience something you find yourself embedded infinitely, matryoshka dolls, labyrinthine tangents. In William Cameron Menzie’s The Maze a frog pond is kept at the center of the meander. Why? Because this way getting to where you’re going is an act in its own capacity. The dynamicism makes it worth it. Gemini’s have to keep busy. “Don’t you ever come down?” “Not if I can help it.”
III.
Wandering through multiple texts is just another form of movement. I can’t slow down or else I crash. Distanced from this wander I’m absent & detached, perhaps even depressed. It’s not writer’s block because I’m not necessarily trying to write anything. I’m more interested in meeting an all-encompassing void. Sometimes people ask me why I’ve started doing so much yoga & I realize that the honest answer would sit somewhere between that all-encompassing void & a refusal to give up on the float. Sometimes I don’t want to say anything because anything would require too much explanation. If it were possible I’d just shut my eyes and transfer the aura of the feeling–the one that carries across: corpse pose after a good practice, the vertiginous space of literature, the echo of space coming across in the depth of the cassette, the flicker of light in the projected 16mm that opens up to another world, meditation. This is it. What if I told you I was only ever interested in writing to get closer to what can’t be expressed in words?
