Chaos and Order
When doors are opened to all possibilities, be prepared. This week, I thought I would have found words for emptiness, but the white fields and the black holes are not sitting still. They spill into each other. When trying to make order, chaos knocks at my door and for now, the door won’t close. The nothing I am looking for will not be found. Sighing tells me I am trying to fill an empty space with breath. Yawning tells me there’s a hole in the hole and there will never be enough air to fill it. I am missing Paul. […]
One Big Nothing and a lot of Little Nothings
Not of any thing, holes and shadows are immaterial, but they do have a shape, a place and a duration. When I tell Paul that I am trying to describe different kinds of nothing, he responds, Ah, you meanthe one big nothing and all the little nothings circling around it. His succinctness is always refreshing! I finally rediscovered FNAC yesterday. I remember it as something really new when I was here in 1985 or so with Mario. Nancy pointed it out to me in our skype conversation the other day when I said that I was looking for certain books […]
Water
Yesterday was the last day of Paris Plage and when I went for a late evening walk across Pont-Marie and Île-Saint-Louis, I watched with a distinct feeling of sadness as a worker dismantled the row of misting shower heads. I took this photograph earlier in the afternoon because of the tiny girl in the red t-shirt. She ran so fast with such joy, I could barely catch her image. In and out she dashed, her whole body quivering with a pleasure that jumped from body to body laughing and calling us all in to experience the miracle of mist. In […]
Noisy Black Holes
With the words and images of this post, I am creating a space where ideas grow out of an interweaving of people, places and events, both present and past. I don’t know where this writing is going, nor what format it will eventually take. For now, I imagine making short animations of words falling one after the other into an empty book forming a lake in the middle of the page. Or maybe the lake is a black hole, or maybe the hole is white and it just keeps swallowing all the words. I keep thinking of a black hole […]
Burnt milk
I sense I have to first of all answer this question: why nothing? What can nothing have to do with mother and with writing? I am drinking coffee and just as I write this, I choke on a long, thick thread of filmy milk that clots from lips to cup, drops onto my chin and makes a mess everywhere. Cramé, I think, du lait cramé. Burnt milk. This is why I am here. These things burnt together inside me a long time ago. February 14, 1961 when I was six years old and my mother disappeared. If nothing is truly […]
Is this nothing yet?
A lifetime of making art is sometimes referred to as a paring down of an idea to its most simple elements. It is also described as the singling out of a question of interest and through repetition, refining how that question is asked. I continue to put the words together to give texture to the nothing-ness that is at the heart of the work I begin here. I am wondering what is the question that defines my work as an artist? What feeds my desire to make art? I discover that I like running. Something in the rhythm and repetition […]
Running on the spot
This image is a google earth screen-capture of my running route. The yellow pushpin is where I live. The yellow line is what I just ran this morning along the Seine. There and back makes 5.34 km.
Assumption Day
Notre Dame’s bells are ringing a lot today. They are reminding us that Mary’s body rose straight to heaven. Over a skype to cell phone connection, my brother Norman is able to identify the row of trees filling my 2nd floor view as British plane trees. As we talked, he collected seeds in a new growth forest in southern Ontario from an endangered species of Butternut that has somehow self-seeded itself in a now, very unhappy developer’s property. There is something very layered that I like about all that. How much can be happening at the same time? I can’t […]