• English

My approach

1Rob Stephenson’s work raised a number of echoes in my mind. I am studying Shelley Jackson’s art and although the two bodies of work are rather different I could not but find parallels between them as I read Passes Through. Rob Stephenson’s unmoored writing style made it easy to insert foreign elements into it. I resorted to the concept of the “quilt” that Shelley Jackson uses in her electronic novel Patchwork Girl as she composes a whole section from borrowed quotations linked one to the other “crazy-quilt style”. In order to bring to the light the links that came to my mind between the two works I recomposed a text from the first chapter in Passes Through (plus one page of the following), the stories “Heart” and “Cancer” from Jackson’s The Melancholy of Anatomy, a few excerpts of her electronic work My Body, and a couple of sentences from the introduction to Deleuze and Guattari’s Mille Plateaux.

2There are hearts bigger than planets: black hearts that absorb light, hope, and dust particles, that eat comets and space probes. Motionless, sullen, dirigibles, they hang in the empty space between galaxies. We can’t see them, but we know they’re there, fattening2. They give off a kind of light, but it is backwards light that races inward away from the onlooker to hide itself from view3. A game of hide and seek4. I have given my life to observing hearts5. It is the hidden things that drive him. A fuel that work in tandem with the part that is not out there in the open6. Observing, of course, is the wrong word for the patient cultivation of blind spots, for trying to understand, by the ways in which, yes, I do not understand, what the heart is7. I want some unified system I can comprehend8. I am trying to find out9.

3So this light, whose color we would so much like to know […], looks more like darkness than any ordinary darkness, and seems to suck the sight from our eyes, and make itself visible in the form of a blind spot10. Secrets that stay underneath. In the dark. Stay beyond the corruption of analysis11. In this investigation, invisibility is evidence, blindness the closest I may come to an insight, the particular shape and tenor of ignorance, a clue and a scripture12 (maybe it’s a color we haven’t seen before, for which we must sprout new eyes)13. Some art you appreciate better when you’ve acquired a certain sense of seeing. Learning another language so you can translate it back into your own. A stasis in the interval14.

4I sit at my telescope, straining my neck, my fingers numb claws, in hopes of catching sight of nothing at all15. Looking too closely can be dangerous. It can ruin a positive outlook16.

5I suffer from bouts of migraine, and sometimes I miss things, or see things that aren’t there, flashing shapes like the blades of warrior goddesses, the vanes of transcendental windmills17. I have to live with that18. Migraine blindness starts with the funny feeling that I’ve missed a clue, that someone’s pulling a prank on me19. Things have been missing (ears, page numbers, the arm of a sofa) but I have been filling in for them20. Shut up and fill in the gaps with something multifaceted21. When I can no longer see anything, I will know I am face to faceless with the heart22. Yes. I will know it when I don’t see it23.

6Soon, this simple absence becomes visible. A shimmering arc stands before me. It is energetic and purposeful. Quickly, it lengthens and becomes more elaborate. There is something both horrible and magnificent about the chimera that visits me and borrows my eyes for the duration of that ceremony24.

7When I have my eyes back I am not sure I know them25. To enter the next room provides a better perspective on the one you are leaving. But often the difference between the two is negotiable after a while26.

8I pictured the inside of my brain as something like a burrow, a labyrinthine system of contorted tunnels with hairpin turns27. I felt the delicate sound of my thoughts suddenly stretched in all directions. Like plants. They branched. Tiny painted paper apparitions. Touching one another. Attaching. Then contracting. They form a bridge of infinitesimal plate-shaped crystals. They slide past each other. In the chasm that separates domains28. There is a rupture in the rhizome whenever segmentary lines explode into a line of flight, but line of flight is part of the rhizome. These lines always tie back to one another”29.

9Ordinarily, the passages were roomy, pale and dry, like tunnels worm-bored through chalk or bone. When My head ached, those walls […] swelled until the passage shrank to fistulas. I tried not to think. Thoughts were dirt, and collected in greasy seams in the walls, and inflamed them30. I went out on the back porch and screamed until blue pressure lights dazzled out the stars31. The role of pressure inside the eye suggests the structure of an organism is a system of constraints32.

10He likes to arrange things. His schema can be considered a network. A grid. What occurs in one region awakens echoes in another. One ends up with a model in order to link all these different points in time and space33. Any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be34. The mind stutters. Too many different trains of thought in such a short time. Holding onto each other. Never a convincing conclusion in a graying countryside35. The rhizome has neither beginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu) from which it grows and overspills36. It turns out each middle has its own distinct properties that affect the message in precise ways37. The shifting play of thoughts and images is unfathomable38. By sundown we’ve collected many theories of why39.

11I continue to find beauty in unusual places. Some of which are still unspeakable. Blurry edges. Wonderful images that sit in the mind40. Though it is “cellulite”, (now there’s a loaded word41) word that sounds like a brand name for a packing peanut, and makes me think of dank dressing rooms and curdy flesh glimpsed under slipped towel, it is beautiful, like the brindle in a tabby cat’s coat42, like a crocheted net just under the skin, like the cream curdling in coffee, just a little, and collecting into pale skeins43. Of course, it is also strange and worrying, like all things that turn up late in the day44.

12When you’re away, I have to go on reading all those books you’ve talked about and listen to all the songs you like over and over again. I might be able to figure out what you’re feeling. I want to find the words that entered you and stuck there45.

13My friend Lisa […] told me that earwigs crawled into your ear (if you were foolish enough to sleep outside), laid eggs in your brain, and crawled out the other ear. When the eggs hatched, you went crazy. […] I gave the idea some thought. […] It was true that earwigs were unnerving animals and I later found they were named after the rumor Lisa was spreading, centuries after it was recorded in the Old English name earwicga, or ear-beetle46. Now there’s a loaded word47. (Words like these. Not the same words. Came from me before. And Came from somewhere else. Long ago48. None of this is news49.

14Made rich by the variegated detail retained an amplified by review. Art should have enough layers of meaning so that you can come back to it over and over again and find new things50. I can’t take the old words away. I can only add to them. I can’t understand them either. They are all fused together. Layered in undecipherable blackness. An imperfect dark51. Where nothing is, emptiness itself is twisted, its features distorted beyond all recognition. This is why people rail against the heart. It is bad enough to change everything that is, but when nothingness itself is altered, something must be done52.

15I wanted them to be transparent so there would never be misunderstanding again. I wanted to make them unchangeable. But […] I left the store and the whole idea of wanting to preserve exactness in language. I let the words change and let them change me. There was no choice really53.