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First question: What are the principles of function? Its riddle a circular equation through which the question and the answer are the same--the incessant repetition of the integer simulates a verb. Paint a house. Put yourself in it. Put someone else in it. Incorporate light and the lack thereof. Desire is nothing more than a jacket on the back of a chair. Light as clock, knowledge, forgetting and as accuracy. Resist becoming calligraphy. Remember, “…the time will come when no further progress in truthful representation is possible.” Skin as landscape, life without exit wounds--do you remember when you peeled back that rose, pretended to be alone, at high noon, in the middle of the city, until there was nothing left but the dull rage at function, you, there, with the broken mouth? Nothing left but the love affair with mankind in his dwelling relentless as nature. There is no evidence in the heartache but in the waiting and in the mortar & bricks, in the limitations of everything that we make, evidence in the company that speaks no props and is equally devastated by the steady gaze of being with its ugly warm comfort and chores. You had to fall in love with the automobile with its absolute function: each passenger as clear as a bullet in a gun. Borges wrote in his poem Someone

 “…the man who is aware
that the present is both future
and oblivion,
a man who has betrayed
and has been betrayed,
may feel suddenly when crossing the street,
a mysterious happiness
not coming from the side of hope,
but from an ancient innocence…”
He later continues:

“…He knows better than to look at it closely,
for there are reasons more terrible than tigers
which will prove to him
that wretchedness is his duty…”

Forget the innocence, as a tree doesn’t gnaw at its own shadow like a man or a dog--the function of things is much more selfish and necessary as loneliness. In the end, you painted yourself as Sun in an empty room--back to the first question?--becoming as tired as I am from looking at the moon.

 

 

 

Midnight with a reproduction of Hopper’s Sun in an empty room



jj blickstein