Subject matter: the air, the ground. Earth/air/water/fire. Object and experience. A "given" already seen, deja vu.The opposite of blank (ness); for example, by making blankness a subject, what is describable as being negative, an absence of something becomes something which can be added-on, something filling. A defining process makes subject matter objective, an alchemy of extended focus causes an abstracted concept, invisible by nature to be at the center of continuous analyses. Seeing (seeking) without need of an image, the consumer of subject matter may suspend all choice and judgement, perhaps making subject matter better grounds for science, than art. The possibility of choice splits subject matter in two; with parts gone, subject matter becomes fragmented and discontinuous, no longer a compendium, its completeness is determined only by those who choose to examine it.
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To discuss "subject-matter" somehow offers a perspective on writing processes which is not really linguistics or philosophy. Such a topic is literary in the most literal sense and offers the possibility of a defining a boundary for literary processes. Pragmatic obvious point: I can say- "The literary cannot exist without subject matter" if I said "not for very long." Becuse even the most modest of literary experiments in "subjectless" writing will soon replicate its history through its replications- the lists, documentations, the sum total of the social history which surrounds it. "Subjectless writing" seems to function like a black hole of meaning- the immense amounts of interpretive energy which hovers on, around, beneath, witin the work of such writers as Beckett, for example, whose characters approximate inner perpectives more than they do "actual" persons in the "real world."
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A title: "Signs of Life"- somehow connected- sounds.
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Subject matter is more than just matter and more than "just matters." And it has to do with just matters. Syntax sparkles, glistens, echoes around subject matter but it is different- it bends to the will, it has elastic properties, it is not intractable.
Ponge's method of revealing objects: it is like he is closing his eyes and feeling the object through all the other senses- remembering the smells and sounds, touching it, feeling it. This way subject matter is created out of experience, not out of thoughts, concepts and categories. these are syntactical, more map-like- or like a set of directions, a program.
The very act of writing "about" an experience tends to push the mind towards of view of experience likening it to subject matter.
Is there any area of exprience which offers no possibility of becoming transformed- (or transposed or transfigured) into subject matter? This is soon obvious- none. Then, is there anything other than experience which offers itself as subject-matter? The answer is much less obvious- I suggest it is- yes!
(Smithson suggested that language is (=) physical matter.)
What is this subject-matter other than experience. The answer is plain but not so simple- abstraction.
Because-
Sign-making converts experience into abstraction.
Through abstraction we chip away at the massive block of reality which we are incapable- thus far- of knowing and experiencing.
Subject matter is map like because it is the remaining trace of all experience.
(But) subject matter's relationship to art has vastly changed in the past century. Simultaneously- in another sense- it remains nothing less- than all of reality.
What can I mean by that?
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Or nothing more than a celebration, no more than a pause to reflect a journey to remember and talk about (or) target for a souvenir and change. Say you had never learned more than this letting things go with a great silence- sending others off their tracks to nowhere, it might still be enough.
I'm glad you remembered once
that I reminded you to notice what its like in the so quiet. snow
and, in the end, no more than particles that twinkle and dissolve
a star or a moment
dissolving after a pause
of billions of years
(922/85)
An experience: Toni couldn't find her Tarot deck. I stood up, after she looked for awhile and couldn't find it. I didn't know *why*- but I walked to the corner of the room. I had a thought: why do I think it's around here. Then I said to myself, I'll look around here.
I started to think about tracking. I mean a literature that tells us something new because it helps to didrect us *where to look* for the answers, if not the answers- or I could say (almost)-*how to look*----
If I don't like the way it's put, I can still abstract out the idea- it was *the experience* I was interested in anyway. How does experience become subject matter?
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What more than one observation at a time? Thisis the perceptual breadth of the eyes- limited to the range of vision. With the multi-sensorial (dreams, visual art, poetry) comes the multi-perspective,multi-rational, many strands or sequences of developmental thought, melodically related or contrapuntally contrasted.
(9/23/85)
