September 6, 2009

Origami #6: Faultline Poetics

The other morning I saw a xylophone projected on the wall of my bedroom. Each morning when I wake, I think: I need to pay attention to what time the sun falls in so I can see it again. Maybe take a picture. Capture light. But then I get distracted with checking email and revising my new manuscript. The next thing I know, it is full on morning, and the xylophone is now some elongated triangle, like the shape of a flag. I am typing with a band-aid on the left middle finger because while chopping onions for the red chile posole I was making for lunch, I lapsed in sense and judgment, though only for a moment, and sliced the tip. BTW: No blood made its way into the stew.

The other day in class, we discussed Foucault and the idea of author/author function. I'm interested in the figure that is the text... Am I outside this text? What precedes the writing of it? Does writing indeed "unfold like a game that inevitably moves beyond its own rules and finally leaves them behind?" The idea of unfolding makes me think of origami and how as a child I would unfold the crane or frog to see if I could put it back together again. But the folds in paper were dictating my future moves, my thinking. So now I want to straighten the paper so as to move beyond the original folds/rules. Are these folds akin to gaps/faultlines? Can we observe them in new ways to create new figures? Can we think about the gesture that preceded the crease, the doubling back? I looked up the word "function" in the dictionary and found #6: "correspondence between members of different sets." And so, we can think about the dialogue between one set of rules and another. The discourse between members outside the text and members who precede the text. Messages along various faultlines. Geographical fissures. Architectural gaps: in error or as a result of time (the settling of a house). The relationship between the domain (sphere of influence) and the range (register of musical passage). Interstices, locating absence and presence simultaneously.

This evening, where no xylophone can be found, is for writing: to create an opening for faultline embrace and to develop/extend an architectonic form.