
Larry Levis
On Looking: Essays
by Lia Purpura
*
The most interesting task is to discover the shape of the now-moment. So it
becomes a matter of forms, more than a matter of structure.
What is the form of the present, and each succeeding present? Then, see
what-can-be-done with the form that is the real form of the here-now. Those here-nows
as the building blocks of some other structure. But the quality of the blocks
determines the possible ‘style’ of the overall structure.
Now, the form of ‘now’ can be determined only as I try to twist my body
(mental) until it FILLS somehow the moment, till it touches the borders of the
moment. The meaning then, cannot be in a superimposed fable, but is in the
modes found of being able to inhabit (fill the spaces of the present, and the
sequence of those modes. Meaning is-“how do you live in a space?” Spaces arise,
the way mutations are delivered’ upon the planet-and then life tries to inhabit
that new, mutant species. In the attempt to make an arisen space ‘habitable’ (a
species is also a ‘space’ for living)-meanings arise, such as “that plant is
poisonous.” I am concerned with such meanings.
*
Meaning? Make an item (the play) that other items can allude to when they are
making an effort to crystallize their own meaning-to-themselves. The play doesn’t
allude to a real world, through having a ‘meaning’. Rather it is there to ‘give
meaning to’ anything else that wants to take meaning from it.
What we need are models for a ‘way-of-being-in-the-world’ that we’d like to
remember as a possibility. I’d like, myself, to be ‘tuned’ to the world in the way the
play I create is tuned. I establish the world of the play so that hopefully, I can turn
to it, and begin resonating to its rhythms.
*
I generate a text, I make a composition out of what I ‘know’, that is to say-a
collection of ‘meanings’ carried around inside me. One meaning … in conflict
with another meaning. That means, of course, a continually shifting frame of
reference. That means of course … that there is no conclusion … no beginning,
middle and end … but, intermissions. Until I die, But then I won’t be able to
write about it.
—Richard Foreman. “The Carrot and the Stick” (full text linked)

zygmunt bauman, liquid modernity
The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.
Orson Welles
The writer’s only service to the disintegrated society of today is to create little independent systems of order of his own.
Evelyn Waugh

Roni Horn
White Dickinson EVERY SPARK IS NUMBERED, 2006
Aluminium and solid cast white plastic
124.5 x 5 x 5 cm / 49 x 2 x 2 in
Andy Goldsworthy
Hogweed stalks floating on pond
Hampstead Heath, London
15 December 1985
Diary: 15th Dec Hampstead Heath
Overcast, breezy, dry. cold at one
period. Warm now. Collected Hogweed
stalks – white inside – took to pond –
made dark frame with nettle and
dark stalks – pinned Hogweed
split open into strips – inside upwards.
went to ring Art Angel – came back
work disrupted by a dog – remade.
Would have liked to have made it
much bigger but goes dark very
quickly. Not a bad work.