I too walk in
the mornings
Electrons, molecules, brittlestars, jellyfish, coral
reefs, dogs, rocks, icebergs, plants, asteroids all stray from calculable paths*
My father also walked every morning. If he did not, it was not
a morning, I had woken late and the sounds were not those of the morning. Or I
had woken old, and it was now, not morning but 10pm on a Saturday so many years
later and in a different city, and he was not walking. I had woken and I was 33
and the morning walking of my father is something just six people still
remember. When I write this I realise I don’t even really remember; what I
think of when I try is that there are no photos I know of him walking, but I
picture it like the stride will never land, like it’s going to be just that
morning for all time.
There’s a photo you took that looks like it’s of the cosmos; it’s of a puddle I think. As a photo it seems less a puddle, more an abbreviation, and when you’re exhausted – I’m exhausted – things read like shorthand. So this puddle, even before I’ve looked hard enough to see what it really is, I see that it was taken this month, February a year ago, so the light should be similar to the light now. But really the light is the light of the laptop screen, before you turn on the room light at the end of the day. I’m exhausted by trying to connect the light of last February with the light of the laptop, now. I’m exhausted by saying things are like other things, when mostly, they are not. They are near you, it is now, and then they are not and there is not another thing like them.
So I look properly at the cosmos in photo you took and two days later that makes me hear that extra-terrestrial bodies sometimes emit measurable sound frequencies; there’s a recording of a comet called Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko that you can listen to on the internet. It sounds like something singing – no, not singing, but something with a throat. Saying things are like other things is exhausting, but it can be the only way to say how they are. I’m thinking here of the night we ate oysters and the grey marble table was also an oyster and outside there was a briny wild rainstorm also an oyster and even as I saw it in the silver-gelatin print of just-then I was already knowing I’d be telling you again later just so I could see it again.
Because of reading Heidegger’s ‘The Thing’ (1971) again; because of reading Elizabeth Grosz’ essay of the same name (2011) again; because of you losing your keys that night of the oysters, and because of the sound of the comet being made into a sound work later[1], I’ve been thinking about sculpture and proximity. Sculpture as proximity. 'Today everything present is equally near and equally far'[2]Heidegger wrote, and I think I know what he means: the internet – its language of abbreviations, though it didn’t exist when he wrote that, bringing everything into reach-but-not-reach. But also that there is sculpture that complicates this idea, by being more like nearness than it is like anything else. To make a work, to read to yourself in the park and record that – or to read to yourself and record the cicadas, whichis the sound of you reading – is to be near to the idea of something, to be right-now with the ‘near-at-hand’, in a way that is specific. It’s not something likesomething else: it’s reading pages 99 to 100 of My Two Worlds by Sergio Chejfec in a park in Christchurch, February 2015.
After the reading, there are things too: the photos, the marked pages and underlined phrases which make all subsequent readers read over your shoulder. It’s a specific form of closeness, reading what someone else has read. And through it the reading in the park becomes, temporarily, more solid. A solid is another way of keeping something close, of holding the present like a book, on your knee, for now.[3]‘We stabilise masses, particles large and small, out of vibrations, waves, intensities, so we can act upon and within them, rendering the mobile and the multiple provisionally unified and singular, framing the real through things as objects for us’[4], writes Elizabeth Grosz. Over the sound recording of the comet, which I’m playing obsessively right now, I imagine Heidegger’s voice like gravel in a tank, 'Thing here is a cautious and abstemious name for something that is at all.’[5]
Other things that cannot be contained are recorded: the upholstered seat that is by the Physics Room door. The wide board wooden floor where the seat is, and the trousers on the seat, which seem like architecture as much as clothes badly folded. Nearness cannot be encountered directly, but by paying attention to what is near, says Heidegger, ‘near to us are usually what we call things’[6], and I agree but I just think the shape of the trousers says it better.
I wanted to write about your sculpture, and it seems to be getting further away; if I could I would describe the fabric of that seat, and then the other fabric which is the way the window outside of the frame throws light white as static across all the vertical surfaces, and the roofline gradient of the building which is the trousers. But I’ve read whole books feeling like I’m reading over someone’s shoulder, like I’m watching them seeing something I can’t. Not saying thing are like other things, working for proximity instead, means you have to be attentive to other kinds of closeness as you listen to the recording of a voice reading in the park.
I am 33 and I walk in the mornings too, but fast, with my head down as I’m looking up Elizabeth Grosz on my phone, and I’m looking for your keys, and, right-now, I’ve stopped worrying about missing something, because I’m looking at a picture of the ground that you took, in the Jardin du Luxembourg thinking about Record Player, 1988, by Gerhard Richter at the Centre Pompidou, Paris on August 22nd, 2012, and I’m reading ‘not only when I walk . . . the sound of the ground comes up to meet me.’ Because nearness is also found in motion.
* The second part of the title is an abbreviation from Karen Barad: ‘Electrons, molecules, brittlestars, jellyfish, coral reefs, dogs, rocks, icebergs, plants, asteroids, snowflakes, and bees stray from all calculable paths, making leaps here and there, or rather, making here and there from leaps, shifting familiarly patterned practices, testing the waters of what might yet be/have been/could still have been, doing thought experiments with their very being. Thought experiments are material matters.’ Barad, On Touching: The inhuman that therefore I am’, Susanne Witzgall and Kerstin Stakemeier (eds.), Power of Material / Politics of Materiality (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2012), 154.
There’s a photo you took that looks like it’s of the cosmos; it’s of a puddle I think. As a photo it seems less a puddle, more an abbreviation, and when you’re exhausted – I’m exhausted – things read like shorthand. So this puddle, even before I’ve looked hard enough to see what it really is, I see that it was taken this month, February a year ago, so the light should be similar to the light now. But really the light is the light of the laptop screen, before you turn on the room light at the end of the day. I’m exhausted by trying to connect the light of last February with the light of the laptop, now. I’m exhausted by saying things are like other things, when mostly, they are not. They are near you, it is now, and then they are not and there is not another thing like them.
So I look properly at the cosmos in photo you took and two days later that makes me hear that extra-terrestrial bodies sometimes emit measurable sound frequencies; there’s a recording of a comet called Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko that you can listen to on the internet. It sounds like something singing – no, not singing, but something with a throat. Saying things are like other things is exhausting, but it can be the only way to say how they are. I’m thinking here of the night we ate oysters and the grey marble table was also an oyster and outside there was a briny wild rainstorm also an oyster and even as I saw it in the silver-gelatin print of just-then I was already knowing I’d be telling you again later just so I could see it again.
Because of reading Heidegger’s ‘The Thing’ (1971) again; because of reading Elizabeth Grosz’ essay of the same name (2011) again; because of you losing your keys that night of the oysters, and because of the sound of the comet being made into a sound work later[1], I’ve been thinking about sculpture and proximity. Sculpture as proximity. 'Today everything present is equally near and equally far'[2]Heidegger wrote, and I think I know what he means: the internet – its language of abbreviations, though it didn’t exist when he wrote that, bringing everything into reach-but-not-reach. But also that there is sculpture that complicates this idea, by being more like nearness than it is like anything else. To make a work, to read to yourself in the park and record that – or to read to yourself and record the cicadas, whichis the sound of you reading – is to be near to the idea of something, to be right-now with the ‘near-at-hand’, in a way that is specific. It’s not something likesomething else: it’s reading pages 99 to 100 of My Two Worlds by Sergio Chejfec in a park in Christchurch, February 2015.
After the reading, there are things too: the photos, the marked pages and underlined phrases which make all subsequent readers read over your shoulder. It’s a specific form of closeness, reading what someone else has read. And through it the reading in the park becomes, temporarily, more solid. A solid is another way of keeping something close, of holding the present like a book, on your knee, for now.[3]‘We stabilise masses, particles large and small, out of vibrations, waves, intensities, so we can act upon and within them, rendering the mobile and the multiple provisionally unified and singular, framing the real through things as objects for us’[4], writes Elizabeth Grosz. Over the sound recording of the comet, which I’m playing obsessively right now, I imagine Heidegger’s voice like gravel in a tank, 'Thing here is a cautious and abstemious name for something that is at all.’[5]
Other things that cannot be contained are recorded: the upholstered seat that is by the Physics Room door. The wide board wooden floor where the seat is, and the trousers on the seat, which seem like architecture as much as clothes badly folded. Nearness cannot be encountered directly, but by paying attention to what is near, says Heidegger, ‘near to us are usually what we call things’[6], and I agree but I just think the shape of the trousers says it better.
I wanted to write about your sculpture, and it seems to be getting further away; if I could I would describe the fabric of that seat, and then the other fabric which is the way the window outside of the frame throws light white as static across all the vertical surfaces, and the roofline gradient of the building which is the trousers. But I’ve read whole books feeling like I’m reading over someone’s shoulder, like I’m watching them seeing something I can’t. Not saying thing are like other things, working for proximity instead, means you have to be attentive to other kinds of closeness as you listen to the recording of a voice reading in the park.
I am 33 and I walk in the mornings too, but fast, with my head down as I’m looking up Elizabeth Grosz on my phone, and I’m looking for your keys, and, right-now, I’ve stopped worrying about missing something, because I’m looking at a picture of the ground that you took, in the Jardin du Luxembourg thinking about Record Player, 1988, by Gerhard Richter at the Centre Pompidou, Paris on August 22nd, 2012, and I’m reading ‘not only when I walk . . . the sound of the ground comes up to meet me.’ Because nearness is also found in motion.
* The second part of the title is an abbreviation from Karen Barad: ‘Electrons, molecules, brittlestars, jellyfish, coral reefs, dogs, rocks, icebergs, plants, asteroids, snowflakes, and bees stray from all calculable paths, making leaps here and there, or rather, making here and there from leaps, shifting familiarly patterned practices, testing the waters of what might yet be/have been/could still have been, doing thought experiments with their very being. Thought experiments are material matters.’ Barad, On Touching: The inhuman that therefore I am’, Susanne Witzgall and Kerstin Stakemeier (eds.), Power of Material / Politics of Materiality (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2012), 154.
This essay was written for David Clegg: loca projects / correction, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, 2018.
[1] Lucreccia Quintanilla made this work, A poem for Sun Ra (2015); she told me
about it during a visit to Auckland in March 2016.
[2] Martin Heidegger, ‘The Thing’, Poetry Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstader (New York: Harper Collins, [1971] 2001), 175.
[3] Karen Barad, ‘Theorizing, a form of experimenting, is about being in touch. What keeps theories alive and lively is being responsible and responsive to the world’s patternings and murmurings.’, On Touching: The inhuman that therefore I am’, Susanne Witzgall and Kerstin Stakemeier (eds.), Power of Material / Politics of Materiality (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2012), 153.
[2] Martin Heidegger, ‘The Thing’, Poetry Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstader (New York: Harper Collins, [1971] 2001), 175.
[3] Karen Barad, ‘Theorizing, a form of experimenting, is about being in touch. What keeps theories alive and lively is being responsible and responsive to the world’s patternings and murmurings.’, On Touching: The inhuman that therefore I am’, Susanne Witzgall and Kerstin Stakemeier (eds.), Power of Material / Politics of Materiality (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2012), 153.
