Shushbooth

in which dying is only mentioned once (okay, twice)

(via)

"True Name"

Desert I shall name this castle that you were,
This voice, Night, your face, Absence,
And when you fall in the sterile earth
I shall name nothingness the flash which bore you.

Dying is a land you used to love. I come
But eternally by your somber ways.
I destroy your desire, your form, your memory,
I am your enemy who has no pity.

I shall name you War and I shall take
Upon you the liberties of war and I shall have
In my hands your face dark and travelled,
In my heart this land that the storm illumines.

--Yves Bonnefoy (my tr)

The day it was made is lost. Nineteen sixty-three became known for other things. I don’t know how many times i have walked around this, feeling its presence; i sort of remember when i first encountered it, & the jolt i then felt.

“Abstract art” (pernicious misnomer) is the product of conscious choices, each of them a part of its meaning. In the case of sculpture, the meaning they make takes up space. More deliberation went into the material (welded stainless steel, brushed-textural surface, exposed welds) while the arrangement—arbitrary seemingly, but less & less so as you linger—& the way light shifts around it (negative, positive space, shadows & blurred reflections, some of them of itself) describes a grammar of possible forms. Ultimately it rests in your mind, a whole thing. But you never get to know it completely.

He called it the seventeenth Cubi. He made eleven more before he was killed. Was it a journey, a legacy, an unfinished cathedral? All we know is that it names what was otherwise nameless..

Word in the beginning. Let’s start with the stimulus that encounters a reflex. In our experience, there are degrees of automation. Stumble on a broken sidewalk, & you stagger to recover your balance; it is not necessary to name that spot (though you might want to point it out to others), even less so, the swerving resumption of verticality. The more carefully you control your response, the less likely you are to get hurt. You might even practice if it’s difficult (climbing a steep cliff). Thus, abstracting something essential, out of the infinite fractal surface of the earth’s thwarts.

Metonymy, travelling light, packs only the least amount of meaning. Carry a few of them, & you have a vocabulary. Your companions will not especially want to argue the nature of stumbling, & only a very long boredom might result in discussing various strategies. That discussion was Smith’s Cubi series. Each one different, a separate stumble, a true naming of the hours which built it or opened up into the possibility of its being built.

I don’t go there when i follow his map. I might not even suspect that’s what it is. Thus, the state of introspection remains a mapfulness within repose. A metonymy for what we must suppose this thing “consciousness” (a super-map of every map we will ever make) might be. If i sit still for long, my own mental chatter dies down (or doesn’t). The background hum—metaphorically!—does it need itself a name?

Call it “Cubi”. Its geometry came out of the geometer. There is nothing on Earth like it, not even salt crystals, magnified. But is this arrangement—its moment—eternal? Is geometry? Is consciousness? I don’t introspect until i begin to talk about what’s “inside”. A story that requires a protagonist, a narrator.

Before, it was a gleam of light upon brushed steel: this angle, that angle. A day in 1963 that is also a day in 2026. At one time i considered a theory of aesthetics, generalizing from some of the sorts of things i liked, such that one tries to incorporate as many opposites as possible. (Each pair of opposites was a “perfection”.) Here: smooth & rough, metallic & organic, poised & teetering, solid & empty space, one moment & timelessness*… But aside from its perfections (which many another specific artwork might also be described by), there is the irreducible singularity that is only named by Cubi XVII.

Metonymical for (gestures vainly into thin air)—