Morning Fog, March 29th

The fog was so thick you could cut it with a knife. So that’s what I did. I spread it on toast, even though this made it difficult to see where to take the first bite. As I ate, I became more imprecise and more vague than usual, which is saying something. This piece of writing is a product of the fog I swallowed. I can’t see where it’s going – I could bump into just about anything. A white blossoming pear tree all by itself in the clear-cut woods.

Hard Copy: An Appreciation

Words on the page of the novel, the well-printed book, first of all the page itself, looking closely, very closely, the off-white crystalline surface, light and shadow paper texture, then the individual letters, the black shape, the sharp edge, dense black, its soft sheen, and most of all the impressions, the slight indentations of printing on the page – hammer on anvil, striking, sounding, chiming as I read.

Font

Such a tiny writing
This hand I'm composing in
So expandable in the repackaging
By fonts
That can, however,
Do nothing to enlarge the thought
Nor can small type diminish
The day
This morning
Heavy rainstorms
Rivers surging
Land and sea emerging
One oceanic face.

Sunset, Tuesday, 5 January 2010

William Theodore Van Doren. Sunset from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 16 x 20.

The Onion ran a great item on a guy who writes in a Moleskine notebook so as to avoid the pedestrian experience of having to write in a cheapo pad from CVS. (“Privileged Little Artiste Writing Something Oh-So-Precious Into His Moleskine Notebook.”) Especially funny to me because I do exactly both – I love my Moleskine notebook, which I use for combined sketches and notes (as seen, for example, here and here), but can’t function without my CVS Chunky Pad, which I write on every day. (Sadly, CVS now calls this product something else much more generic, but I’m sticking with ‘Chunky Pad’.) I’m sure to post a sketch someday in “Bic Velocity Ballpoint on CVS Chunky Pad.” Not archival, but you won’t be able to tell the difference.

To complicate matters, this entire entry began as a test of my theory about another notebook, the one I use most often. It’s made in Japan by Apica (here’s a plug for where I got mine). My theory: the Apica’s paper is so amazingly smooth, and effortless to write on, even though I couldn’t think of a single thing to say, this post would just start writing itself, automatically. Which it did!

Apparently writing pads, left to their own devices, like to write about other writing pads.

Storyline

I am raving, hear me rave, as I recount a story of all stories, their essence. A story, ostensibly time, place, character, action, is in reality color. All about color. Story color comes before story line – this is a principle of aesthetics and a fact about action.

Blue moves me and I move in blue. Sometimes, a different matter entirely, I may wake up with the Blues. Or I wake up sunny yellow and go on into the green of noon. And when you greet me, you may be violet, red, crystalline white.

My own body – should we need a description of the protagonist – is a bay of moving color, steam clouds of pigmented feeling boiling a shape. You can say I’ve lost all sense, but it’s no wonder when you consider what I’m made of.

Night Light

The night knows what is to be written long before I do – it owns a complete record of my possible writings, thoughts, paintings, the night waits for me to fulfill these. The night is a great room of waiting, an ocean of patience – an inexhaustible sea of light, by virtue of its darkness. The night hides and is everywhere apparent – retreats, while it envelops. The night knows us all, and recognizes no one. In the night I am truly myself, while I am one and indistinguishable with everyone else. In the night I cannot see, surrounded by vision.