Untethered 2

Just how much is in not very much? At this point i have written just over 8000 words to describe a little over 10cm of a small twig, down to the first branching section you can see in the image below. It is a pine or spruce twig covered with two types of lichen making it very detailed, textured and tangled. A complex thing to describe then.

 

I’m about to start the most complicated part of this text piece; the intricately tangled lichen over the smaller branching twig sections. 8000 words of not very much, certainly a lot of repetition, but surprisingly little information. I find i am having to chose words carefully. A sort of code is building up, perhaps that’s too formal, it’s more a collection of terms to differentiate between similar each strand or area. It reminds me of German compound words; ‘the-dark-strand-in-an-m-shape’.

The methodology is simple: to write a description of an object using the same (or at least as close to the same) restrictions to those i have developed when drawing. The subject is similar: a piece of delicate and tangled foliage which is hung to dry. i have used 8000 distinct words to describe a very small thing, but even that isn’t yet enough information to tell anyone else anything much. 8000 words to say very little.

I am writing this to be read by someone else, thinking all the time about clarity and readability, whilst at the same time doubtful that anyone else would want to or be able to sustain a lucid reading of this text. A lucky first reader insists that the first few pages are actually easy to read, they flow and are in a strange way compelling. But would it be possible to read it all and still stay focused on the words, maintain concentration of sorts, be able to structure the words so what they describe makes some sort of coherent visual image?

One of the differences between writing and drawing is that words are linear and temporal. You can not look at a pile of pages of text and get an immediate impression of what they are describing. Instead you (usually) start at the beginning and read along and down, with each word amending, adding to or changing the words before it. Although the method of drawing i have developed is similar to the method of writing i am now developing (in that both are linear, starting at the top left and describing or picturing each tiny area in turn, the drawing method creating distinction abstract shapes rather like words) and both create a sense of a distorted whole when compared to the original object, the visual result and therefore communication to others is radically different. With a drawing, even one drawn using this method (highly restricted, almost blind drawing of perceived outlines, drawing bit by bit rather than sketching the overall impression, eliminating subjectivity through specific methods whilst accepting this aim is deeply flawed) you get a drawing which at one glance conveys something about the entire object to the viewer. Not so with the pages of printed text which requires a length of time reading, and a great deal of concentration and memory work. What results is a mental image that is both imagined and remembered somewhat strenuously.

The writing of the text piece becomes less about the interception of memory and imagination that occurs between looking at the object and drawing a corresponding line, rather the focus shifts to a particularity of words, a sifting through a short term memory of what has just been described and with what words, and how to make the next series of words different enough so the reader doesn’t get lost. There is certainly the risk of untethering*.

I wonder if this sort of text is rather like looking at a drawing of this object but having to look through a tiny viewing hole no bigger than a pinhead, so you have to piece together an idea of the whole without ever ‘seeing’ it all at once, without ever knowing the limits of the drawing. Having to constantly revise your mental image of the object when you find previously unseen areas or realise the 2mm bits you can suddenly see don’t fit together at all as you might have imagined.

Yesterday Enni Vekkeli, a Finnish artist on here at Mustarinda, asked to have a copy of the text so far. She will read it and try to draw from it. Then later that day, Donna Roberts, an art historian and writer from Helsinki proposed that she writes from Enni’s drawing. A collaboration of Chinese whispers? Translation through three different eyes, minds and bodies?

 

*Untethering; physically and mentally is a great fear.  Coming loose from oneself, losing one’s coordinates, being in freefall like a little stone in space. My son talks with delight, and I listen with fear, about what the world would be like without gravity, for example.