recently i was given a copy of journals that my father (who died in 2001 or 2002) kept from the mid 1970s through the early 90s. i had heard about them but hadn't seen them before.

as i've been reading through them, my head has been getting tweaked in odd ways, setting up strange resonances that i am not quite sure what to do with.
i wrote this earlier today and it really didn't help any of that. if anything, it made the resonances worse.

in 3-d i talk pretty directly about what's on my mind. when i write, it seems like there's always more than one layer and that sometimes the layer that's causing more of the turmoils is submerged, chattering through the details of the surface story, bending it around.

by the way, bernie is my father. by the time he started writing the journals, he had come to dislike that nickname. he preferred the french pronunciation of bernard. i'm not sure why he became bernie in the following. this has something...

...







The line that is moving across this surface has been twisted such that you only see the top.

The microclimate here the movements of the air, the play of light, the dimensions through which they circulate: all are predictable so long as you hover in a relation that does not approach the granular. And you are just entering this environment. You do not yet know.

I write along the sides of this surface which are turned away from you, which from my viewpoint is the front and the back, using characters which resolve into another sequence when encountered from your viewpoint.

I feel within this procedure a certain freedom. What I want to say is here but you cannot see it. It is influencing what you read, but you cannot know how.

You can turn this surface, but you will not see the substructures. The substructures perform their characteristics across considerable...

an excerpt from:
Composition in Retrospect
by John Cage

NONINTENTION (THE ACCEPTANCE OF SILENCE) LEADING TO NATURE; RENUNCIATION OF CONTROL; LET SOUNDS BE SOUNDS.

EACH ACTIVITY IS CENTERED IN ITSELF, I.E., COMPOSITION, PERFORMANCE, AND LISTENING ARE DIFFERENT ACTIVITIES.

(MUSIC IS) INSTANTANEOUS AND UNPREDICTABLE; NOTHING IS ACCOMPLISHED BY WRITING, HEARING, OR PLAYING A PIECE OF MUSIC; OUR EARS ARE NOW IN EXCELLENT CONDITION.

A NEED FOR POETRY.

JOYCE: "COMEDY IS THE GREATEST OF ARTS BECAUSE THE JOY OF COMEDY IS FREEST FROM DESIRE AND LOATHING."

AFFIRMATION OF LIFE.

PURPOSEFUL PURPOSELESSNESS.

ART = IMITATION OF NATURE IN HER MANNER OF OPERATION.

COEXISTENCE OF DISSIMILARS; MULTIPLICITY; PLURALITY OF CENTERS; "SPLIT THE STICK, AND THERE IS JESUS."

ANONYMITY OR SELFLESSNESS OF WORK (I.E., NOT SELF-EXPRESSION)....

Climbing along the side of a soft sand and stone cliff hundreds of feet above jagged rocks and water I push my body against a surface. The path I followed into a fold in space disappeared once I crossed the initial curvature.

I am looking down for a foothold: between my legs configurations of water and stone a hundred feet below. I am afraid of heights. I do not understand what I am doing here amongst these waves of enervated nausea.

I look to one side then the other looking for a foothold. Behind I see one but there is no space to adjust my position. Return is excluded. Ahead I see a slight protrusion and am moving my foot across the gap toward it.

Above networks of thick-stemmed green plants emerge from cracks in the rock. The stems are hollow and strangely fragile: when my fingers break through they are covered in slime.

There is a crumbling beneath my weight, a separation of fragments, the performance of trajectories...