"You will take notes, and the scraping of your pen will be one of the most peaceful sounds under the sun."
"And even I can remember a time when historians left blanks in their writings, I mean for things they didn’t know, but that time seems to be passing…"
Unknown rooms, a garden gate, harbours, factories, warehouses, unknown faces on a train, a wedding reception from long ago, a letter or a book in somebody’s hand, empty telephone boxes, deserted crossroads, half open doors… This is how I wanted writing to be: as delirious, brutal and tender as an old photograph. We give things meaning because we are unable to give them love. Or rather, everything has to be meaningful because we cannot love. Writing, the same thing as loving: an experience of limits.
"I call the contemporary text a meditative vehicle because we come to it neither as to a map of knowledge nor as a guide to action, nor even for entertainment. we come to it as the start of a different kind of journey."
The beautiful ‘Commedia’ by Dante rests quietly upon the simple surfaces of sheets of paper. Raffaello’s ‘Madonna with Goldfinch’ drifts through the postal networks of the world printed on a piece of card. Tarkovsky’s last film is projected onto the white fabric of a cinema screen. I love this dependency of beauty - sublime and incomparable - upon the simplest of the world’s materials. And when a Japanese woman hands a zen priest a photograph of her sister, who is a prostitute, and asks him to write a few lines on the back, its not what he writes that overwhelms me but the image of him writing on the back of a photograph of another human being.
Phone calls in the middle of the night. Her brother. He’s going through some kind of breakdown, he’s having difficulty talking, but she’s gentle with him, takes the long silences without any fuss. He asks if there are any letters for him (she was looking after his flat while he was away) and can she read them to him over the phone. This is the amazing bit. She doesn’t just read what is written on the sheets of paper, she talks him through the entire letter, from the stamp and the postmark, and how the address is written, and how easily the envelope tears open, to the way the paper is folded and the placing of the words upon the page. Beauty now means giving equal attention to everything. The loving gaze as revelation.
"Where there is observation there is science, there is philosophy, there is dream."
She writes a letter on large sheets of paper pinned to the wall. Afterwards she photographs them to reduce them to ‘letter size’. Some of the words are too small or feint to survive within the shrunken field of the photographs. Some of the photos show only a portion of the paper, the resultant image testifying to a certain incommunicability, a word or phrase lost to the border, but a loss that’s at least as honest as speech: “When I made up my mind to work in the house where there was a new-born child, I …”; “I dont read, I walk besides words. You can’t imagine how little it means to me to…” In one photo, taken from the other side of the room, the sheets of paper are dwarfed by the cream coloured emptiness of a piece of linen covering the window, billowing in the breeze, filled with light. The letter-as-content has been transformed into letter-as-pure-intention, conveying a desire as unlimited as it is modest. And somewhere amidst those trailing sentences and disappearing words I realise that ‘stopping’ is one of the beauties of language. Its ok to just stop - right there in the middle of the sentence, before the distortion starts, before the artificiality, the cleverness, the need to be right. It means you dont have to waste the gift of language expressing your neurosis.
"Evocation of emotion determined by a resistance to emotion. As Bach, sitting at the organ, explained to a student: ‘its a matter of striking the notes at exactly the right moment’."
"A sentence is not emotional but a paragraph is."
So when you’re tired of writing it may be that you’re only tired of writing ‘I’. But you dont have to tell me about your life in order to keep in touch, in order to sustain communication. You could just ‘write’ - there doesn’t have to be a ‘you’ there, encoded in the writing biographically, referentially. The ‘you’ is already there anyway, in the materiality of the letter, the tenderness of all the touches, in the very ache of the writing as much as the writing itself. You don’t have to squeeze yourself into an outmoded psychology of biography, of the written ‘I’. You could let (yourself) go. I’m not saying that biography is wrong - not at all. In any case its absence is unimaginable: biography is the limit-case of the human, and in its own way as beautiful as a field full of flowers. (One day - not now - I will tell you about a fragmentary biography of a Tibetan lama I once read…) I’m just saying that if ever it gets too much you can live without it.
"And even I can remember a time when historians left blanks in their writings, I mean for things they didn’t know, but that time seems to be passing…"
Unknown rooms, a garden gate, harbours, factories, warehouses, unknown faces on a train, a wedding reception from long ago, a letter or a book in somebody’s hand, empty telephone boxes, deserted crossroads, half open doors… This is how I wanted writing to be: as delirious, brutal and tender as an old photograph. We give things meaning because we are unable to give them love. Or rather, everything has to be meaningful because we cannot love. Writing, the same thing as loving: an experience of limits.
"I call the contemporary text a meditative vehicle because we come to it neither as to a map of knowledge nor as a guide to action, nor even for entertainment. we come to it as the start of a different kind of journey."
The beautiful ‘Commedia’ by Dante rests quietly upon the simple surfaces of sheets of paper. Raffaello’s ‘Madonna with Goldfinch’ drifts through the postal networks of the world printed on a piece of card. Tarkovsky’s last film is projected onto the white fabric of a cinema screen. I love this dependency of beauty - sublime and incomparable - upon the simplest of the world’s materials. And when a Japanese woman hands a zen priest a photograph of her sister, who is a prostitute, and asks him to write a few lines on the back, its not what he writes that overwhelms me but the image of him writing on the back of a photograph of another human being.
Phone calls in the middle of the night. Her brother. He’s going through some kind of breakdown, he’s having difficulty talking, but she’s gentle with him, takes the long silences without any fuss. He asks if there are any letters for him (she was looking after his flat while he was away) and can she read them to him over the phone. This is the amazing bit. She doesn’t just read what is written on the sheets of paper, she talks him through the entire letter, from the stamp and the postmark, and how the address is written, and how easily the envelope tears open, to the way the paper is folded and the placing of the words upon the page. Beauty now means giving equal attention to everything. The loving gaze as revelation.
"Where there is observation there is science, there is philosophy, there is dream."
She writes a letter on large sheets of paper pinned to the wall. Afterwards she photographs them to reduce them to ‘letter size’. Some of the words are too small or feint to survive within the shrunken field of the photographs. Some of the photos show only a portion of the paper, the resultant image testifying to a certain incommunicability, a word or phrase lost to the border, but a loss that’s at least as honest as speech: “When I made up my mind to work in the house where there was a new-born child, I …”; “I dont read, I walk besides words. You can’t imagine how little it means to me to…” In one photo, taken from the other side of the room, the sheets of paper are dwarfed by the cream coloured emptiness of a piece of linen covering the window, billowing in the breeze, filled with light. The letter-as-content has been transformed into letter-as-pure-intention, conveying a desire as unlimited as it is modest. And somewhere amidst those trailing sentences and disappearing words I realise that ‘stopping’ is one of the beauties of language. Its ok to just stop - right there in the middle of the sentence, before the distortion starts, before the artificiality, the cleverness, the need to be right. It means you dont have to waste the gift of language expressing your neurosis.
"Evocation of emotion determined by a resistance to emotion. As Bach, sitting at the organ, explained to a student: ‘its a matter of striking the notes at exactly the right moment’."
"A sentence is not emotional but a paragraph is."
So when you’re tired of writing it may be that you’re only tired of writing ‘I’. But you dont have to tell me about your life in order to keep in touch, in order to sustain communication. You could just ‘write’ - there doesn’t have to be a ‘you’ there, encoded in the writing biographically, referentially. The ‘you’ is already there anyway, in the materiality of the letter, the tenderness of all the touches, in the very ache of the writing as much as the writing itself. You don’t have to squeeze yourself into an outmoded psychology of biography, of the written ‘I’. You could let (yourself) go. I’m not saying that biography is wrong - not at all. In any case its absence is unimaginable: biography is the limit-case of the human, and in its own way as beautiful as a field full of flowers. (One day - not now - I will tell you about a fragmentary biography of a Tibetan lama I once read…) I’m just saying that if ever it gets too much you can live without it.
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