meiosis, watercolor, circa 1992.
between working on a few new large pieces, office admin, and archiving images for the website, i did my daily jaunt around the web-block to visit friends and inspirations - one of the people who remains at the top of both lists is my dear friend, the poet, Michael Lally - who is successfully recovering from brain surgery - it shivers me to even think of it - i mean, nothing gets more personal than exposing, touching, or modifying that organ - nothing ...
over the past eight weeks he has dutifully checked in to write on his blog about the process - and even when he isn't subject-specific about it, you can follow the recovery through his organization of thoughts - kind of, "read me think" - like the way we used to learn to read - 'see jane run', etc.
coincidentally [and i question that], i was up working pretty late scanning photos of the 'Neuro Series' - a body of small works i did in the early 90's and thinking about the difficulties in applying personal preferences to conventional methods or codes - for instance, i enjoy unedited stream of consciousness writing as much as i do technical journals, formal novels, etc. - but, like music, there's certain styles that fit the consciousness of my paintings - like detailed and interactive modal improvisations or just plain assemblages of thoughts and ideas where the syntax is denominated by the original impulse - a transcendental experience ...
unfortunately, it's often seen as gobbily-gook by the guardians of formality or even friends trying to GPS my current activities ...
my favorite, among authors who have successfully applied the technique was Jorge Borges in 'The Aleph' - and granted, he laced it into a coherent story line - but when i first read this passage it was like smelling all the aromas of home:
"I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid; I saw a splintered labyrinth (it was London); I saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror; I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me; I saw in a backyard of Soler Street the same tiles that thirty years before I'd seen in the entrance of a house in Fray Bentos; I saw bunches of grapes, snow, tobacco, lodes of metal, steam; I saw convex equatorial deserts and each one of their grains of sand; I saw a woman in Inverness whom I shall never forget; I saw her tangled hair, her tall figure, I saw the cancer in her breast; I saw a ring of baked mud in a sidewalk, where before there had been a tree; I saw a summer house in Adrogué and a copy of the first English translation of Pliny -- Philemon Holland's -- and all at the same time saw each letter on each page (as a boy, I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not get scrambled and lost overnight); I saw a sunset in Querétaro that seemed to reflect the colour of a rose in Bengal; I saw my empty bedroom; I saw in a closet in Alkmaar a terrestrial globe between two mirrors that multiplied it endlessly; I saw horses with flowing manes on a shore of the Caspian Sea at dawn; I saw the delicate bone structure of a hand; I saw the survivors of a battle sending out picture postcards; I saw in a showcase in Mirzapur a pack of Spanish playing cards; I saw the slanting shadows of ferns on a greenhouse floor; I saw tigers, pistons, bison, tides, and armies; I saw all the ants on the planet; I saw a Persian astrolabe; I saw in the drawer of a writing table (and the handwriting made me tremble) unbelievable, obscene, detailed letters, which Beatriz had written to Carlos Argentino; I saw a monument I worshipped in the Chacarita cemetery; I saw the rotted dust and bones that had once deliciously been Beatriz Viterbo; I saw the circulation of my own dark blood; I saw the coupling of love and the modification of death; I saw the Aleph from every point and angle, and in the Aleph I saw the earth and in the earth the Aleph and in the Aleph the earth; I saw my own face and my own bowels; I saw your face; and I felt dizzy and wept, for my eyes had seen that secret and conjectured object whose name is common to all men but which no man has looked upon -- the unimaginable universe."
Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph
now that's the way my brain works - every 'thing' inter-laced with another - spilling over, and flowing - so when i think of a subject and allow the gates to open, an endless stream begins to flow - a cornucopia, or wikipedia of inter-related data - and to think it all begins with a single synapse firing ...
so i agree with my friend Lally: "observe it as it happens and think about the mysteries of the brain and the ways it works and organizes thoughts. Hmmmm." ...
