j.a. van wagner :: wordobject :: imagetime

Tag: Objects

  • [objections]

    [objections]

    From this, the writing I do daily, hourly, I wish to banish all objects!  Though these are indispensable.

    It is not so much concrete objects, though they disarrange my dreams, as it is the idea of the object in general. 

    What is an object ‘in general’? I don’t believe there is such a thing, unless it is the idea as an object, which it certainly is; therefore ‘ideas’ are to be banished if and when they are objects. So, as long as an idea is not an object, it is admitted. These are to be the conventions.

    The urgency is, to catch the idea unaware, in so raw a state it is prior to formulation, perhaps even without form; to trap it in the midst of its interminable migrations from place to place (even if  ‘place’ is admitted to be an object). 

    An idea born and buried in a place need not be an object, even if embedded in the object of place; but of course, this idea can only be a certain kind of idea which is not really an idea but a transient blur, a semaphore. 

    Certainly this sort of thing that is not a thing might be termed an action, which action can only be a thing if it undergoes the gesture of naming — I must, if I can, refrain from names. 

    The object of the name is one of the most fundamental,  most disturbing of all objects which, when bestowed, signifies the greatest of falsehoods and the broadest of generalities, where the more honest act would be to uncrook an index finger accompanied, at most, by the word “that” —  an ornamental utterance — while pointing to the thing which is actual. 

    I have no objection to actual things, as long as they are not named; nothing can be said about them with authority since they alone constitute proof of themselves. 

    As I probe my reasoning, admittedly shallow and void of the proper vocabulary for dealing with these matters, I observe that I object most vehemently to inaccuracies and lazy colorings in the giving of names to concrete things, and to those lies implicit in the production of categories, attached, like remoras on a shark, to things in general. 

    I feel justified, I think, more or less, in this blanket rejection of language, based on the consequences wrought by it on an apparently suppliant world. 



    Poor world, poor shell, pasted all over with spurious labels moistened by unknowing tongues! 



    Lies, errors, rumors attach to every word, even here —especially here— my crimes embedded in every finger tremor. I can never claim immunity from harm brought by anything I might write, even as daily, hourly, with every word, I try to inter the bodies I continue to invoke, calling out names that do not name, pointing with a grunt of blackened figures that are not objects but have become, in some way I cannot comprehend, heliotropes, admirals, mice, balloons.

    2024.07.01    jvw   from object-in-progress

  • Tall Men With Hats

    tall men with hats

    Or if mad, be immaculate.

    You think of a beginning initiating with a distinction or a division but it could as easily begin with an inequality, even if initiating a beginning is already a beginning begun, with two lengths of something mysterious, of which one length is shorter or one is longer, but, there being only one, something has happened so that it, beginning, comes out not equal to itself and themselves; but this does not explain the incident of that beginning arguably happening, yet who determines that not–happening is insufficient, or why insufficiency needs to be answered, or why it must be answered in the peculiar order of a thing happening before the answer to the insufficiency, instead of vice versa; such are instances of the numberless objections that cannot be scythed away.

    To answer to objections one goes on answering until the objections go away, but to be sure they are gone one goes on objecting until the answers have abated, though it is not as though there are no more objections. One goes on objecting in the absence of answers to the objections so that there will be no more answers, or so that they will not be heard over the objections, and over time the objections grow quiet, if only that they may hear the answers that might one day begin again to be given, if only that one may go on objecting if only that one may go on answering, for in the absence of both answers and objections what can there be but quiet, quiet persisting in quiet for the sake of calm, for the sake of distinction from the other that it is not, so long as within the quiet there is not still an objection, or not still an answer, for which one eternally listens.

    From the totality of the person one would like to take away the body to see what remains of one’s enjoyment, to see, within one’s brain, how it is, though we are told we cannot remove the body without removing the body of the brain, even experimentally, though we try to guess at the deep delight of such a brain, if left alone, though we are told even to be alone is to have a body, so we would like moreover to be without, in order to see what it is to be without; but they deny us this as well, for some things here and there are inseparable, of which a final separation, or a final distinction, must remain unknown, which seems to put all of the unknown into a lone unknowable, much as we may labor to cleave away its parts, apart and apart; still something unmistakable is left.

    2024.09.28