[a triptyph of sorts, am epigraphatic tri-fold]
1
“The story of my life doesn't exist.
Does not exist. There's never any center
to it. No path, no line. There are great spaces
where you pretend there used to be someone,
but it's not true, there was no one.”
– Marguerite Duras, The Lover
In a few days, I will be thinking aloud about Jacques Derrida and The Politics of Friendship with Charles and Devin, the wonderful polymaths of the Moral Minority podcast, and the near future commits me to thinking about this in that overwrought, unstable category known as ‘the present.’
Derrida, excerpt from The Politics of Friendship
“In all of Feldman’s recent work the paramount image is that of touch – ‘The use of the instrument must be as sensitive as the application of paint on canvas’,” wrote poet Frank O’Hara, perhaps quoting his friend Morton Feldman in the notes on the verso of a music jacket. This is one way of framing the friendship: by allowing its words to seep through the pieces themselves.
2
“We are forever translating ourselves
into and out of
each other.”
2 (a)
In the arts, friendships often develop from sharing a space in a journal, and recognizing a kindred or comrade in their publications or performances. ‘Transavanguardist’ artist Francesco Clemente met composer Morton Feldman through a mutual —Francesco Pellizzi — attached to a journal — Anthropology and Aesthetic.
Feldman dedicated his piano piece, Palais de Mari (1986), to Clemente. Appropriately, the piece made its debut at a intimate concert in Clemente’s studio. In the video below, Aleck Karis performs this piece which turned out to be Feldman’s final solo piano composition.
Palais stands out for its attention to silence: the light that sweeps through it is gentle and elusive, as if mixed with a watercolor brush. Feldman named it after “the ruins of a forgotten Mesopotamian royal palace, of which a photograph is situated in the Louvre Museum.” The photo in the Louvre is listed as the source of inspiration for Feldman’s Palais.
I am quoting from what may be the liner notes (?) for Karis’ performance:
In the beginning, an iconic four note motif fades into being and decays like a specter. The motif materializes and vanishes a few more times, with slight variation in the rhythm, order, and register. Each tone, each chord, each entity is carefully considered by the player. Each idea is not simply developed or repeated, but intermittently exists and persists. This conjures an entire new world separate from the real world, creating a timeless dimension that can be difficult to perceive in a linear fashion.
One form of quotation hopscotch that is frequently practiced in lecture forms runs the following triad: poem —> name —> image. Morton Feldman employed this structure of allusion in the Middelburg lecture by bouncing lines from a Marianne Moore into a reference to Clemente accompanied by the art of Francis Picabia.
2 (b)
Feldman owned a watercolor by Clemente entitled The Magic Wand (1987). My desire to see this piece dominated my morning. Desire and curiosity are not quite interchangeable here, since what I sought was relief (from the urge to see The Magic Wand) that situates itself awkwardly near to my implicit (and frequently disillusioned) belief that art serves as an alternate text into understanding the walls of the mind, or the rooms in which things are written. I wanted too many things from the magic wand, and all of these things could be stated as separate curiosities which, when allowed to converse with each other, reveal themselves to be imbricated in a clump-like structure.
I hunted for image of Clemente’s The Magic Wand online with the help of an internet search engine, the usual machine for finding badly-imagined objects and things.
Like the rooster for a ‘digital commons’, Google AI crowed from the top of the search results, offering its own intervention with the following:
While there isn't a specific artwork titled "The Magic Wand," Clemente's work is frequently described using evocative imagery and themes, including those that might lead to such a title.
Clearly, the corners or crevices are not yet part of AI’s domain. AI is a shitty reader of shadows, and shadows are my preferred sort of portrait.
3
As we prepare to attend a local music festival with the teens, I am distracted by my readings and hearings. Cannot stop thinking about Feldman’s continuous shifting between time signatures in Palais. (In no particular order, I quote: 5/8, 3/8, 2/8, 2/2, 9/8, 7/8, 1/2 . . . )
Time-signature: the way time and tempo sign their name to a stave; the way rhythm gets scored.
An oil-on-linen painting by Clemente, “For Morton Feldman,” crosses paths with the time-signatures that mark duration, unfolding a way to think with the complexity that friendship occupies in the imaginary.
Francesco Clemente, For Morton Feldman (2000). Oil on linen.
The subjects of Clemente’s image are two compositions: two texts delivered to paper, each leaving their own shadows on the pinkish-white background.
The crumpled music notation sits next to the crumpled star chart (one can discern the edge of Aries in the upper right corner).
Musical staves and constellations: two cosmologies, two ways of thinking and seeing.
Paper and paper: the flesh of two trees rendered as pulp.
Music and stars: paired infinities.
Linear and constellating: the binary that Critical Theory exposed (and why we cannot forget Walter Benjamin).
Aaron Schuster’s fantastic sidereal excavation, How to Research Like a Dog: Kafka’s New Science, has been in my mind this week. At one point, Aaron says that “the construction of a work of potential philosophy takes its cue from the skewed way the mind works, how its functioning is undisturbed by a wayward drift.” In this way, the potential (or perhaps even projected) “starts from its own lack, its unsystemacity.”
How long should the resonance last?
I think Feldman presents this question as an opportunity to any pianist who performs his Palais. The rests resist the call of consistency and perfect repetition. Variance emerges within the rests, themselves, creating slight drifts in the duration of each. We are always ‘thinking-through’ the resonances and shadows of others. In a sense, resonances create their own rhythm: the possible may be forsaken for the impossibility that drove that Kafka’s epistemic dread. There is no way out of the present that isn’t a way of playing with the unpredictable and developing in relation to it.
“In some pieces the entrance into the rhythmic structure is left entirely to the performer, and it is in this area that unpredictability enters and the performer must create the experience within the limits of the notation.”
— Frank O’Hara on music jacket for New Directions in Music — 2 [Morton Feldman]
Structures of allusion within structures of elision. Yet, how longingly all non-teleological touches meet in O’Hara’s words on Feldman, which I now repeat: “the paramount image is that of touch…”
Postlude
[“The poem never stops moving, changing, shaped by the one who receives it.”]
[“The poem never stops moving, changing, shaped by the one who receives it.”]
[“The poem never stops moving, changing, shaped by the one who receives it.”]