Thinking thoughts

Dear Void,

In every paper I read atm, everyone seems to be ‘mapping intersections’ and I’m doing all I can not to declare my own project to be 'mapping the intersection' of, let’s see, 'materiality' and 'thought'. Although that is probably what I’m doing. Ho-hum.

The ho-hum is coming from my mood, I think. It was pouring rain most of the day but now the sun is streaming through my little window in the dormer. About this time of day, I play a game of avoid-having-your-hand-sit-in-the-sunlight-as-it-hits-the-desk, or shift-your-body-away-from-the-glare-of-the-sunlight-bouncing-off-the-top-of-my-mac, bc it reflects laser-like through my glasses and into my cornea. Still no aircon in the room. We’re all wilting, but I brought in a paper folding fan that I bought from the MCA after an exhibition (Pippilotti Rist, Sip My Ocean).

For those who like their information quantitative, please know that I’ve scrutinised my way through 9 of the 27 numbered sections of ‘Time in the Codex’ (TitC) from Lisa Robertson’s Nilling. It is a philosophical foundation for Robertson’s Baudelaire Fractal (BF). Indeed, Robertson suggested in a reading given last year [forgive me, I’m writing this quickly today, I’ll get the details of the talk, it was terrific, and edit this bit later] that the subtitle of Nilling—PROSE ESSAYS ON NOISE, PORNOGRAPHY, THE CODEX, MELANCHOLY, LUCRETIUS, FOLDS, CITIES AND RELATED APORIAS—might also work as a subtitle for BF. She read some passages from TitC as a primer to reading BF. From my notes (2021) as I listened to Robertson speak:

Most of the essays in Nilling are about reading in some way 

the essay on the codex began as a catalogue text for Marlene McCallum 

addressing her practice, engraver, book maker, materiality of reading 

^ book

I was writing quickly, so I’m not sure what ‘^ book’ means! ‘Materiality of the book’, would make sense. But I like it for the title of a poem!

So, today, has been taken up with continuing to microscopically scrutinise TitC—slow work—as I try to immerse myself in the text and identify those blooming responses to the material (just the digital text, rather than a physical book). Whatever is inscribed there exists to be read. We bring the surface inwards, we make a copy of the form within us, an inward space that mimics the sense of the object: if the object is welcoming and sociable so too is that inward space. This has something to do with the power an object has to influence or to make an impression, but I also think we must be made attuned to be able to perceive its dimensions. And then to articulate those inwardly perceived dimensions, in ‘impersonal speech’ (text) requires structural terms, but also space words, place words, treading words. *There* it *is*. How things stand. 

In the afternoon I moved on to David Bohm’s On Dialogue (1996). I’m interested in Bohm’s idea that thought is a medium that is ‘generated and sustained at the collective level’ (vii). Generated and sustained at the collective level. So, thought is a medium and dialogue is the process by which we explore the ways that it is generated and sustained.

I’m thinking, now, about the commonplace book. A device, don’t forget, that functions as an extension of memory and of thought, a tool to help think through (and write through) already existing text. The way, then, that those units of reading establish the patterns of collective thought and then sustains them within the individual would be interesting to think on.

Okay. There are all my thought intersections from today mapped on my Island of the Reader (can you see Robertson Ridge? Bohm’s Basin? Barthes’ Batholith?).

Anon, Void,

Jx

PS. It's raining again. Hard.