Writing from the Gap

 

 

So few pictures, so many thoughts. It turns out that writing and making was not to be my next thing.  I haven't read much and it feels like I have forgotten most of the things I have ever read. I forgot what the word was for making up new words and had to look it up. It is a Neologism - this is a word to be remembered and forgotten multiple times.  Just like the familiar actors in Carry On films who fade gradually into obscurity. As I age I have become more comfortable with things fading, with letting things go.

My dead dad is a big gap; the space he occupied persists. His ending coincides with a fading in the line of my practice, the lack of desire to find the non existing path that used to make sense of things, desire always marks the way. Sometimes the gaps add up and the space that they used to occupy gets filled with something else. As my PhD thinking and my old idea of an artist's practice fade, the gap opens, the plane of consistency, the fold constituted by its absence. 

While doing my PhD I made up two important words that flowed into concepts.  In reality I made up one word and appropriated another. These are below (from my PhD glossary),

Newsense 

Newsense is a word I made up for the purpose of this study, I describe it as a
concept. For a while I hyphenated the two words to new-sense or used
brackets new(sense). However, it felt useful to invent a new word. It is
intended to stand in for nuance, new sense, nuisance, and nascent. As a
dyslexic, I see this word as all these things at once, in this context it makes a
complete newsense of itself. 

Ravelling 

Ravelling is the second concept I developed for this study it is presented as a
coming together, a knotting and tangling of threads that do not centrally
position a human actor.

I had a glimmer of practice that shimmered in my peripheral vision yesterday.  I was thinking about my new workshop, the central thing or object or desire of the last 10 months.  It's a rather large  objet  petit a  but still suffers from related issues of desire and ego.  It can never fill the gap of the need that enunciated its making.  Even with attached sauna, the true proposition of an eternal recurrence is both divine and terrible. Even as a Doctor of Philosophy I find it hard to refer to Lacan and Nietzsche in the same paragraph without a hint of irony, though this gap of writing must be filled with something.  Every story has to return somewhere.

I write things without reference which is now my privilege. Proposition Cottage has become a desire. If I build it, ideas will come.  It started as part of practice, my next step, the thing that filled the gap.  When I stopped the writing, the representation in words, I briefly felt a return to a space of making. This was a space-away, where I remembered how the world could fold.  I wondered if I had mixed this desire to make with my hands with the idea of a practice.  For many years the idea of art for art's sake has felt as ridiculous as a white bearded God lording it up in heaven. Something lots of people believe in but I find problematic. 

To return to the glimmer of practice before I fall into the gap of making again.  I was wondering about what I would do when I actually finish Proposition Cottage.  It has come a long way since I read Derek Jarmen and pondered death.  There is a background worry about what I will actually do in there.  Making art objects is a real possibility, tinkering with patina on sea worn plastic to form vibrant assemblages, this is, in the end the way of many an aging art school taught sculptor.  Yet memories of the Ouroboros, the snake feeding on her own tail, reminded me of my long term ravelling with alchemy. The stoned philosophy of change and transformation.  So that is it, the glimmer of an idea at the edges of the gap. Why not, in later life, become an alchemist.  It is not a popular hobby yet it sits in a tradition of experimentation that gave us phosphorous matches and sent Isaac Newton mad.  Who knows what I will distill from the gap, who knows what transformation could take place.  So here's to boiling mercury and distilling urine in my Alembic in a vain effort to conjure gold and find God in the gap that opens up on the edges when things unravel.