notebook: 1987

K (*Reading As Revery*) in celebration of *North of Intention* by Steve McCaffery

1. It would be embarassing at the beginning to put my words in the mouths
of your characters, even if they are available to anyone, necessary but
not sufficient. History itself is just as fixed in the eye of a storm, in
the words themselves, that the characters beginning with A would not be
complete. But would it be possible to exceed "A" in another register, if
at least the integers compared to themselves were not abused by our own presence,
and the vault that enclosed such vocabularies, as arbitrary and unrecorded as
the (this) exact movement of tides: such are the boundaries of reading- ever
tidal and undeferred- and time itself accords with such vast rhythms. Imagine
the contrary: imbecilic gestures from the minds of tyrants- visual figurations
of their own power-lines. Like all insignificant and dried branches- leaving
all the more exposed the "north of intensions."

2. Is it by chance that I return to you by the same route that I came into
my own revery? A landscape that still bears a trace (*passed on*, not remaining)
of another epoch (not in the past perhaps, in another clime) which surrounds
some unspoken utterances in the full chorus of the senses. They came by here
by another route, i.e.: the cooling breeze on the chest and arms, waves crashing
between thick silences, gulls cries *and* the enveloping silence; engraved *and*
erased- that static. Dawns never confuse the issue, so exact, nor do the steady
afternoons, nights, shadows of gulls overhead. Into these serene particulars
comes one displaced opening, and then another, moves a corner of comprehension,
a welcome meaning freed of its image, a memory of speech to replace the holding
continuity of a particular place:- (imaginary small color photograph of Alan
Davies, Toni Simon and me sitting close to the waves edge at Jones Beach on a
hazy day in mid- June, 1987).

3. Any weakening of the will will be evinced by our action (its double in the
proximate actuality).The king of this terrain (Kafka-Khlebnikov) is its
experience in the slow dissolution of one meaning, and then another. But
time (and this includes this time in an album still gathering its forms,
always did, even as many immense particulars, these waves co-exist under
another measure- aspect of the so-called Now moment. Imaginary figures
rush by and are forgotten (never were) as they rush into an avalanche of one
duration (Smithson, "sandtorm of pauses".) The smell is still there, the sound,
the breeze's touch, and the remembered meaning (exactly zero) is still nascent.
That is to say, I almost forgot the sun and the gulls standing in a circle of wet
sand. Could the real itself have exploded from the tendency of all things to give,
or eventually give in (i.e., give way?)

4. "Nothing more. The image is exhausted in the multiplicity of meanings...One
might say that psychoanalysis gave the dream no status beyond that of speech,
and failed to see it in its reality as language." Dream, Imagination and Existence,
Michele Foucault (1954)

Giving, giving way, "making room." Now the gulls are standing closer. Had I
not given the day, in part, to you (as to them) such space would still exist.
And it may yet, since this gesture (this space) would not exist. And it may yet,
since it is, by now, already prefigured in its passing, antithesis to what I wanted,
or expected was in my reach, but beyond this choice. Noting the proximity of
this trebling I announce a tendency, meeting yours on a separate day, a widening,
not a focus, in order to engender space from space. This wrenching, simply said,
apocalyptic but minute, to hurl the discus of withered principles into an infinitely
distance place, intuited complicity.