When I ascend the stone steps of—last week, Lake 22, or yesterday, Vernal Falls—I am suspended in that moment between departure and arrival, effort and ease, interrupted only by some terminated vista of lake or waterfall when the path and therefore the moment reaches its endpoint. I am in the flow state: suddenly all of my senses are on, my field of vision both widens and sharpens, the edges and contours of the forest and trail vibrate with new detail. I am at home with all things, spirit sans mind, and yet still a body, a machine purpose-built for this environment. Another thousand feet of gain towards the frozen lake or the waterfall that refracts the color of the day and this physical body is suddenly transparent and clear, inseparable from the air it breathes now, more deeply than it ever has indoors. I am made for this—the first thought, and the last thought—made for this sensation, ecstatically alive and without time, without analysis, free at last from the burden of personality.

Enough time within the closed system of one’s thoughts and artistic practice and the work has a tendency to degrade towards an elemental state bordering on banal. There is a smoothing over of ideas and concepts. Time and repetition wears down the original grains of inspiration until they are round and easily held. I suppose it’s why some artists, after a lifetime of work, get to a place where they are producing ‘slick art’, polished expressions devoid of any urgency or true intellectual appeal. There are of course the rare exceptions (I’m unsure how Thom Yorke, for example, continues to innovate) which excludes the rest of us. In the long tautology of getting to the heart of an inquiry, the mystery inevitably falls away and what is laid bare in the work is some representation of truth often indistinguishable from cliche…it is why I struggle with nearly every artwork in every commercial gallery, at least in this town, but now that I’m thinking of it, just as easily in a place like London or New York. Why I haven’t touched any of Brian Eno’s oeuvre beyond the 1980s. Why I myself struggle some days, after a handful of decades photographing and writing habitually, to release anything at all. The mysteries are absent; the animating questions have been answered, the work has become systematic, self-conscious. I am simultaneously bored and thrilled poring over the genius of an Agnes Martin retrospective or, the other day, walking through the acid-washed everest of Richard Serra’s Wake—by all means impressive works, both of them, which for me still evoke little in the way of emotional charge because of their prevailing rationality and adherence to conventional notions of ‘successful art.’ These days I’m more transported by the primacy of children’s drawings, of that unplanned, unstaged comedy and wonder on paper, unaware of itself—and why the sight of some trashscape beside the road, in all its chaos and texture, inspires surprise and delight, like the urban palimpsests that are the flyposters torn from a surface and reapplied again and again. There’s even a certain charm to the marks someone’s etched into public furniture while waiting for a train to arrive, pure idleness made visual, free of any artistic notion—and most certainly there’s all the erstwhile beauty and still-potent mystery of things abraded by time and neglect—the red barn at the side of the road, wilting towards oblivion, ready to surrender to the earth. Lately these are the things that strike me as the most beautiful of all, beautiful beyond whatever we call art, all the things that are random and chaotic and pure which still have license to be ordinary because we have not yet closed hands around them and given them some special name.

Image: Munenori TAMAGAWA / Colors, 2020

What it was that I had lost, I couldn’t say. Still, there was the feeling of being here before, but not only being, belonging—a sensation that might only accurately be called nostalgia, yet not the nostalgia of distant lovers but distant lives, ones long forgotten, perhaps disinherited, perhaps prosthetic or imagined—and then the desire to return home, as though then this fragmented spirit might rest…but which home was I feeling for, and why?

One by one, the sight of the scarred hills are arriving into my field of vision, rising and falling like the notes of some minor key symphony against the mid-afternoon glare, the landscape an arpeggio of bleak brown terrain that ascends and descends as the train speeds down the track…this is not the Venice of picture books but its grimy exurbs, no pink palaces or striped gondoliers are reflected in serpentine lagoons, but a featureless void, a dead zone between stations and cell towers where the mind goes blank. I’m accessible only to the landscape, and the landscape to me.

The mountainous expanse that can be seen from the observation car is strewn with faded white houses dispersed across the land seemingly at random, points haphazardly arranged in the landscape like particles suspended in water, sheep grazing in a pasture, or stars in a night sky…

What is it that I want? The image spawns a feeling akin to desire, a desire almost indistinguishable from melancholy. There is that same gravity towards something distant and primordial—as though the sight of these crude hills is awakening in me now some forgotten wound, tearing up the edges of some past life I cannot be sure, by all accounts, is fully mine. I feel certain that this place has lived in me before, and yet it is my first time here.

Many days lately I miss Mark Hollis

Driving to BART with you this morning, I can see our whole future separate…but then you start playing D’Angelo’s Brown Sugar—

Looks like he’s playing shows again now that he’s lost a little bit of weight. Some stars turn to cocaine, some turn to Ho-Hos, you say

And somewhere in that space of foretelling/deconstructing our future I laugh for an impossibly long second, a second that lasts all of San Pablo Boulevard, with its cacophony of signage and rucksacks, its trashscapes and neon—and for the first time in a long while, the mind turns off, it turns off.

2011

Walking along the water’s edge, spirit enveloped by the drifting white fog, feels something like encountering the light field at the end of a life. Rumi’s field perhaps, out beyond notions of right and wrong, beyond boundaries and divisions, where only the open plane of possibility remains. The rational mind unwinds and unfurls and all that remains of me is spirit and its breath, an ego giving way to reverence, and time’s mask, falling away like a husk. In this space beyond language and intellect there is only the present sensation of sand yielding gently underfoot, the primordial hum of the waves, and the call of the seabirds through fog. The arrival of wide, white stones against the blackened shore like anti-monuments.

Here, my solitude is neutral, binary, as much a fact of nature as air or sea…and yet I realize that I am not alone.

Out there in the distance, somewhere beyond the fog, fixed in space, there’s a figure…and I cannot discern—are they coming or are they going? In the presence of this other I return to my body, holding it in some mixture of anticipation and protection. All they are is a point of color on the horizon, and there’s something about the figure’s precise distance which creates an optical illusion, the eye is vestigial suddenly, perhaps the figure out there is simultaneously coming and going. Were, are, is and was, how much, when? asks the mind, while meanwhile the soul says, Welcome home. If you are coming, it does not matter. If you are going, it does not matter.

•

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn’t make any sense.

—Rumi, from A Great Wagon

Ultimately, perhaps, places are simply waiting for someone to look at them, to recognize them. Perhaps these places belong more to our existence than to modernity. They are perhaps waiting for new words or new figures.

—Luigi Ghirri, from Luigi Ghirri e l’Architettura

(Photo, mine, from a first trip to Istanbul)

From time to time it occurs to me just how much of a loss our culture has endured with the suicide of Mark Fisher; the trenches and grooves in which his thoughts, musical associations and curiosities would flow and play is sorely absent from the internet and discourse today, and I’ve not yet found a suitable ersatz cultural/musical theorist to occupy and align myself with. It’s only been a few years since Fisher’s death, and I’d argue that there has been less and less musical output in recent years that is truly innovative, less and less that would have truly resonated with him, particularly after his argument on modern music being nowt more than a rehash of the past—still I wonder what he would have made of an album like Roméo Poirier’s Hotel Nota, with its ‘dilapidated but deeply charming environs’ of 'gauzily impressionistic beach scenes’ (Boomkat), a weird mirror-world of Tim Hecker’s Radio Amor, another lazy calm of a record peppered with crackle, reverb and low-level nostalgia that is among my absolute favorites. Too, I wonder what he would have made of Burial’s Antidawn EP, (particularly the bleakly hopeful opening track, 'Strange Neighbourhood’), stylistically not a huge departure from the eponymous 2006 full-length release. Nearly 20 years have passed since then; what connections would he have made with regard to time, timelessness, and the spectrality of an enduring, almost unchanging hauntological style?

I’m grateful that the webhost at abstractdynamics.org is keeping Fisher’s old blog alive for posterity. It’s always worth a revisit.

TBC.

Man no. 1 — Humid, rainy weather. A hot vegetal musk wafts across the table as we sip our respective coffees, some sort of generic natural deodorant that gives the general impression of a forest, masculine.

Man no. 2 — Faint, familiar, the smell of my father, who did not sweat and yet had a specific olfactory presence. His hair is black, eyes brown, like my father too, he speaks from the side of his mouth, conspiratorially, as though telling me a secret.

Man no. 3 — The smell of baked potatoes, salt and vinegar potato crisps, and laundry retrieved from an airless closet. The smell of his naked body after work like gym socks, pungent, and old sweat. His hair looks and smells like an old house.

Man no. 4 — Soft, otherworldly, delectable skin scent, no sweetness or acridity, no synthetics, no soap, the smell of a perfect being. I bury my nose in his armpit, his secret erogenous zone, now mine by proxy; I cannot get enough.

Pros: Saunas in every basement. Upload speed. Wearing all of the coats forever. Chanterelles for free. Urban Deli. Introversion is the norm. Cheap thrift/vintage stores everywhere with a lot of barely-used high end items. A new appreciation for the fellow American, somewhat rare to encounter, and usually a delight. A pervasive feeling of equal parts water, green space and urbanity. As my buddy Georges Perec once said about utopia, ‘Everything has been set in order and order reigns.’

Cons: Cost of public transportation (~$5 for a single metro ticket). When I return to America I will be extra judgmental about the fit of everyone’s trousers. When I return to America I will be extra judgmental about everything. Introversion is the norm. As my buddy Georges Perec once said about utopia, 'Everything has been set in order and order reigns.’

2017

Solitude and taking photographs are connected in an important way. If you aren’t alone, you can never acquire this way of seeing, this complete immersion in what you see, no longer needing to interpret, just looking. There’s a distinct kind of satisfaction that you get from looking and travelling alone, and it’s connected with this relation of solitude to photography. If you’re not alone you take different photos. I rarely feel the urge to take pictures if I’m not on my own. That trip looking for material was sheer pleasure. I’d get up in the morning and drive off into the blue and just keep driving all day. For long distances I didn’t even have any music on to listen to. There was nothing I needed but to look and take photographs.

—Wim Wenders

The beast is hungry and the dream keeps on coming. Of the cities without ending, the flow state walks, the bridges, never before witnessed, receding into banks of fog. The metaphorical Bering Strait crossing. Possibility and possibility. Uninvented sweetnesses and discord, and all senses on. 

Sure, you can write a book in a pandemic, one that addresses the slippery thing inside of you, that wild and yearning spirit still hungry for the world. You can make peace with the beige country of your room, the color of trees. You can travel from the armchair’s vantage and come to terms with immense stillness, find some safe place within for every impulse to go, even as the internal Greek chorus presses you to leave. Towards meaning, towards more!

I’ve had this dream for the past twenty years. In it a plane is always leaving, and I’m sprinting through the airport, wild-haired and perspiring, staring into the faces of anonymous airline clerks, gesturing in a wild commotion, limbs flailing (suddenly I have five of them, all hurtling through space-time simultaneously). The words are metallic in my throat, Is there another flight going tonight? Is another flight going?

In the dream perhaps I’m in London, or Taipei, or San Francisco, there is no difference between the grey airport atmospheres of each dream, the mind colors my panic and none of the surrounding detail, colors the feeling of 500 carrier bags bobbing suddenly around me, as though suddenly I were underwater and surrounded by every possession I’ve ever owned, floating and sinking dead weight. 

There is a Russian word for ‘forget’ (запоминать) that sounds like the Polish word for ‘remember’ (zapomniec). In America, we say, ‘What you resist persists.’ The world is opening up again. And so the hungry beast says, what if? And where next?

Somewhere between the poles of thinking and feeling there is a place that I am always seeking, somewhere between soul and ego, analysis and surrender where finally I can rest. A place or a feeling? I don’t know what I’m looking for…I know I’ll have that feeling when I get it, I tell myself, as the Coltrane quote goes. Looking for something that hasn’t been played before.

I am going to go live in Istanbul for a bit — a place that feels a bit to my brain like free jazz in urban form, the highest compliment I can give a city. It turns all my senses on, a place of sensuality and structure, serendipity and madness, like London or New York, yet one that for now remains a mystery.