meta-projection

i set out to make a series of 26 pieces and now find myself at 13.

i cannot tell if writing this is a healthy activity or not for me. sometimes i think it is causing me unnecessary pain, but it seems that to make something i have to be in the place so i have something real-seeming to reprocess. i can't just make things up. projections as to the world rooted in particularities of an experience or situation seem different to me from similar things simply imagined and staged. but sometimes i wish i could just dream things up rather than spending my time dreaming about specific things, specific people.
but i enjoy the work required to hollow that out in writing so that anyone could in theory project themselves into that space into that situation.
and the moving through it in real life gives the writing it's grain.

but this is a hard nut, the project. i can't post it here because of the formatting trouble. and it needs to be black letters on white paper for some reason. space/negative space i guess.


it's a map of the world.
but a map is an invocation, a conjuring: a representation calls into being what it represents so is different from that and the more one sees the distinction between a representation and what is represented the clearer becomes the space of conjuring. there is no reflection. there is no reproduction.
so a map of the world is also a doing, a form of practice, just as a description is a listing of features and a way of moving you through an aspect of the world at once.

there's no real difference between writing what is and calling something into being.
description and magick are the same.

so then sliding from one intensity to another becomes easy at the level of putting words in particular orders.
but sometimes the place you get to that way is surprising.
how far you can go in wanting to call something into being.
how sharp control over words can make that.
and it's not that i don't feel it: it's just sharper, clearer, more precise.
because the voice which carries this comes out of editing, so is not a direct expression but the result of a selection and reordering process, a cutting and balancing.

i read this project now at the half way point and ask myself what is it really that i want it to bring into being.
where is my breath going, what can it do there.
it talks alot about desire and sex but it's obvious to me that is not what it's about, not only about that, it's about something else.
it's about tearing down a way of telling stories, assigning names, creating symmetries and replacing it with another at the same time.
it's about itself.
it's about alot of things i suppose.
so if the piece works, what does that mean?
to work does it have to bring about a change in the material world?
or to work does it only have to operate as a text?
both?


this is all probably strange to read because it appears here without the context for most of you.
but no matter i suppose.

and i expect this all seems terribly self-indulgent. but i've escaped most of this friday at work focused on this project, so it's on my mind. i went outside earlier and read it through. maybe it's just me, but it kinda blew me back a little. just a little. and set this sequence of curious reflections into motion. so i put them here, where i cannot put the project, so instead of it.