And this is but a tiny draft, trying out how to write, how an artist like myself attempting now to art my words, to make my research, using Gladman’s word, simultanate itself, conjoin, on the page where one appears to always be moving forward (though I am always moving back), a transformation of a melody into a harmony, something that unhinges – verticality – so that the prose (so like a poem) goes together all at once.
Later as she continued her piece, she wrote over the lines the way a painter paints over her lines, both erasing and retaining all at once. The paint may cover over but it also glues below what came before, it ghosts the momentary past into the present and it fixes it in place.
How to make a music out of Kobro and Strzeminski’s shattered lives.
She literally writes one passage over the other.
Boustrophedon writing, where alternate lines are written in opposite directions, as oxen, reversing their movement, pull a plow back and forth, the origin of this form being in the turning from one side of the orchestra to the other of the classical Greek chorus.
Portraits and prayers.
Oracion.
And sentences.
All loose manuscripts make portraits and prayers, according to Gertrude Stein.
Stein stands there, Ulla Dydo writes, before the Picasso portrait that represents her, before herself, speaking of herself and of the portrait as is her work.
Crossing over from painting into writing, making writing into painting, painting into writing, an arranging of oneself across a space. Call it a page.
Weaving myself into these notes.
Notes and prayers.
A meditation upon looking, writing, thinking, making, understanding.
Prayers and notes.
To understand that to undertake to overthrow your undertaking.
She demands, Dydo writes, total concentration on the naked text
before the eye and ear
She is tapping ‘rivers’
words
across the street
I see the park and the river
runs along behind it
A word beside another
and it moves
by a path I must discover
moving from the auditory to the visual
sense
‘these’ joined words
‘rambling about the ordinary’
is meditating or writing
She meditates about composition
Name or describe
Nothing
Share, bestow, meditate
Create a stark verbal space
Give nothing away
Sudden shifts
She is in and out
I am here
placed in a plane
Order and placement, writes Dydo, refer not only to writing but also to painting.
Explain wording and painting and sealing and closing
opening
as if doodling or arranging
flowers opening up
A checkerboard. A grid.
The city is a grid.
And Uwe Johnson had it all laid out on a map that he could see above his desk. A series of maps he memorized, incorporating them, like prayers, into himself.
Regular geometric patterns he could study
Muted colors
‘Stall’ opens words of spatial order –
‘tall,’ ‘all’
–
boxes, loose boxes,
cubes
buildings, windows, walls and doors
Throughout 1921, Gris used the motif of the open window.
And look at the order of time
lodges
in the mind
A sad procession
not a description of private life
They come together as a construction requiring no explanation
an arrangement of words in compositional space
landscapes which make everything visible at once
images after Strzeminski
and Katarzyna opens forms
They met during the first world war, and later had a child.
It is in ‘Geography’
She is looking from inside
Out
And how do you reside?
It is not about places visited
It is not about setting, or scenery
It is words in relation
The realization of a word
‘Arrangement’
in space
Sound, sight, sense
Painting music
Music in paint
Words arranged along a line
moving up
and down in space
‘Geographically to place’
Rhythm, resonate, point of view
An arrangement of flowers
An auditory construction
passage
sucked in sucked out
threads fairly nearly
As it can be
irregular sharp rhythms pivoting on float
watercolor on paper
circumstances and circumstantially
and saints
opens onto shifts of seeing
closeness, distance, writing
spread as glass
red as glass
phrasing time
‘It piles up.’
marginalamericannotes.com 