As I near the one month mark with these recordings and posts, I feel the impulse of daily production winding down. It’s been an interesting exercise, the idea of practice as a practice, of experiment as a discipline (or discipline as an experimental practice). Quick, short, unedited bursts like this can free up the energy to consider more substantial work. I’ve found myself leaning more into textural sounds as this has progressed. Behind the nut playing, scraping, tonal tweaks of the harmonics through body bends, etc. These might become elements of more deliberate compositions if I keep going with this. Maybe I will play live again too.
After finishing Sally Mann’s Art Work I decided to read her first narrative book, Hold Still. Early passages interweave hilarity with the harrowing. Shotgun blasts through the page now react with my reading of her photographs. I try to reject this: the habit of drawing in biography to art. But it’s an impossible principle. Many have tried. All have failed. Still we try.
Tsundoku is the Japanese term for acquiring many books and other reading materials and leaving them unread in piles. Some see a host of problems in this habit. I see hope and possibility.
I’ve had Hold Still for at least five years. In fact, I bought the signed copy that I am reading in the summer of 2018 from a local book scout. I sold it to a collector that October. Two years later, the same scout came back to offer more books for sale. There it was again: the same copy, confirmed because it had my penciled price and inventory number in it. The buyer had died, and the scout found it at his estate sale. I bought it a second time and I decided to keep it. Yesterday I picked it up and began reading. That was a seven year expedition.
You never know when you are going to need to read the book that you don’t know you are going to need to read in the future.
Gertrude Stein wrote: “Writing and reading is to me synonymous with existing. A very important thing is not to make up your mind that you are any one thing.”
Not any one thing at any one time. Who knows who you will be in a few years, when that book needs to be read. Get it, keep it in the pile.
The present only exists in the past and the future. Not sure who said that. Could have been anyone.
I imagine that soon I will read Mann’s Remembered Light. Cy Twombly in Lexington (also a 2018 purchase from that same scout). Or not. I may lose interest.
I read Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X earlier this year and fell for its onion-like layers of fictions stacked on fictions. I quickly read her latest Möbius Book, and bought several other Lacey titles. They are all unread because I moved on to other authors and subjects. I do not regret having the books.
Our son recently told me that he wants to read Blood Meridian and I reminded him that we have a copy. He said, “But that’s your copy.” It’s a new, unread copy. But I know just how he feels about that. Mind you, I don’t think of it as mine, but to anyone else that might seem false. Fact is, I am pretty sure I am more temporary than all of these books. At least I hope so.
I had a daily practice of writing poems or parts of poems every day when this year began. It lasted a month. Then the writing spaced itself out. Lately, parts come very infrequently. I should say, not at all.
In October 2019 I watched Alec Soth’s Magnum video series Alec Soth: Photographic Storytelling. Soth presents himself as a generous and caring person, and his teaching and work reflect his thoughtfulness. At one point in the series he suggested that writing in a journal can break up mental blocks and lead to new work. I listened to his advice and revived my lifelong but intermittent journal practice in a manner that is typical for me: I opened up a little black book of lined paper and wrote for 100 pages or so over the course of a few days. It started out in the third person, switched to the second, and ended in the first. It helped. I have kept that notebook in my daily bag with me since 2019, though I have never again referred to it.
Though I did just open it and found this on the first page:
Make yourself a house and I'll drive to the door upstairs and downstairs I tried to forget the time I forgot to say I love you
On the second page I transcribed something that our older son said when he was four years old, on his brother’s second birthday in 2006: “My eyes have no more pictures. I have only static.” I still find inspiration in that, nineteen years later.
Things that I wrote in my 2019 flurry directly led to my making The Archive of Bernard Taylor the following year, in the first six months of Covid lockdown. Directly is the wrong word. Indirectly. Those bits of automatic writing followed me around and allowed me to conceive of something other. Not something or other. Not some other. Something other.
