What The Matter Is

It’s horrible. I’ve moved my to-do list onto my phone, in a smug little app with tick boxes and urgency stars of different colours. I put my lists there because you can have multiple lists and multiple tasks, and add new ones unexpectedly, set alarms and so on, but it’s not nice. It feels too far away and not quite real. So I’ve stealthily been copying out bits of the lists onto paper so I can refer to them with due calm, and actually cross them out when they’re done.

Top of the to-do list at the moment: finish the text for this book I’m making. It’s about 72 pages of text, but it only amounts to a couple of paragraphs because I’m handwriting a single line across each double-page spread. It’s a kind of lovesong to the line of ink I’m using to write the lovesong. It’s hard to get it right for the very reasons I’m describing in the text itself: the difficulty of grabbing hold of the line to keep it sufficiently still to think about or address it; the need for the line to keep moving in order for words to keep flowing; the wish for the line to pause and stay still with me a minute without ceasing to mean and hence speak back.

Since I try not to take my nib from the page while I’m writing (to stay in continuous contact with the line) I can’t cross the t’s, dot the i’s or add any punctuation until the whole text is complete. It makes it very hard to read over and edit. It’s an important quality of the book itself, but it makes the writing process particularly difficult. I’ve been writing notes all day in barely legible long-hand, and I think this evening I’ll try drafting the text again on my computer. Even though it’ll be divorced from the ink and the paper for a while, the text itself might come away more coherent. Then I can transcribe it. It feels like fakery, but I think it’s the only way to get the text clear enough to work on. The text has to be strong on its own, quite apart from the form it takes on the page. Indeed it has to be strong in order to withstand the form it takes on the page.

GOOD TO BE HOME. On the train back from Edinburgh I took great care to restrain myself from just moving straight on to the next thing on the list. A list to end all lists has been accumulating in my absence, but Edinburgh needed some thinking through on the train.

Things do need thinking through. And writing down, ideally.

On Friday afternoon I visited Ian Hamilton Finlay’s garden and forgot both my notebook and my painkillers. The absence of each had a similar effect. I can’t manage the pressure of dumbness very well. I write a lot of things down on a daily basis so I have them recorded, and at a place like Little Sparta (that’s what his home’s called) it’s headache-inducing to let things go by unrecorded.

It isn’t that I liked everything I saw. A lot of it I straightforwardly disliked. But the garden contained certain difficult to recollect sensations and sentiments, and if I’d had a pen and paper I could have tried to gather them down into words and leave them there, and carry on with an unclouded head. Having no means of noting anything down, I had to contain all these things throughout the hours I was there, and continually risk losing them without using them up properly. I mentioned the other day in an interview at The Other Room in Manchester the need to mop up World, and the hope that language might be able to do that. And the hope above all that poetry – language redoubled – might be able to mop up more World still.

Details of the works in the show, corresponding to the photos I posted on Wednesday. We tried Making Ends Meet for the first time this afternoon – I’ll write more about it on the train home tomorrow.

* Days, Time’s Mice

Lines 44-45 of Guillaume Apollinaire’s poem Le Bestiaire (1911) read: Belles journées, souris du temps, Vous rongez peu à peu ma vie. (Beautiful days, time’s mice, gnawing little by little my life away.)

* Doing Things with Words

J.L. Austin’s lectures How to do Things with Words (1955) identify certain categories of utterance that affect rather than describe their context.

* Doing Words with Things

Doing Words with Things shares its title with my collaborative performance between a sculptor and a signer of British Sign Language, resulting in conversations made of wire. Performance at London Word Festival (Apr 2011).

* Third Word Bird

Pencil marks resulting from my performance of Third Word Bird, Icelandic Embassy, London with Maintenant and 3:AM Magazine (2010).

* Tag

Peter Dreher’s painting series Tag um Tag ist Guter Tag (Day by Day is a Good Day, 1974-ongoing) comprises nearly 4,000 numbered paintings of the same empty glass.

* Each to Each

Each to Each originated as a sculptural installation of the same name, created for the Citations Lifted Loose exhibition, part of the Concrete and Glass Festival (2008).

* Making Ends Meet

Visitors whistle to one another in pairs, one note at a time.

THESE ARE NOT POEMS is installed! And the vinyl lettering arrived after all. Here are my five completed “shelf poems”.

It’s a brief show – closes again on the 19th – but do come and have a look if you’re in Edinburgh. It’s here:

TotalKunst Gallery
3 Bristo Place
Edinburgh
EH1 1EY

Time for bed now. There’s a maybug outside the window. Maybugs are good things, too heavy to be realistic moths at all.

The train window next to me reads EMERGENCY EXIT. It’s written on the outside of the glass, and from in here it’s backwards even though we’re the ones who’d need to exit. But it isn’t an exit at all – it’s a fixed pane with glass that looks very very strong. You wouldn’t want to try and break it without a very serious emergency on your hands. My back aches. It’s lovely, out the window, it’s getting Scottish. And there’s a telecom tower taller than the clouds.

But today has been shaken and damaged by things not working. Complicated and uninteresting administrative things variously involving a touring exhibition, a text submission, a contract to sign, a scheduling difficulty, and most of all the vinyl lettering for tomorrow’s show, heartbreakingly lost in the post for the second time in a fortnight. The guaranteed overnight courier didn’t materialize, and the artwork doesn’t work without the vinyl. All this and no proper internet access to monitor things and try to get them straight. I slept very little last night, I couldn’t concentrate on getting sleepy.

Standing at the station earlier today with my coat falling down its own sleeves dragged by heavy bags badly packed, my suitcase toppling at every move, tapping emails into my phone and getting all the touchscreen spellings wrong, I thought it was probably time to slow down.

When everything works, the breakneck speed feels good, like the quiet rustle of apparatus working smoothly. When things break, all the speed catches up with itself and trips over. I do worry about the long-term effects of trying to fit too many things into the month, the week, the day, especially when I know blank time is the most productive. People need to be slow sometimes.

Then I got an email from a friend saying hello. We met up last week, and I described to her the work for the Edinburgh show. She feels, incredibly to me on days like this, that what I’m trying to do is worthwhile. I’d told her it sometimes feels like pretending. She told me about floatation devices in the sea, viewed from the shore.

I’ve just noticed the EMERGENCY EXIT is in vinyl lettering. Lucky train.