So if it is as I said in my last post that what matters is connection to beauty, freedom, something that I’ve lost, then rather than write about Deligny, I should write, or make, whatever can connect me to that. Well, then I think, to walk around this place in my mask is one thing.
Richter, Masurovsky, Janmari, Vey and Me
Masurovski’s ink-dipped pen
flicks and drips through
Ingres MBM Arches paper
tiny curves like u’s, dashes,
hyphens, n’s, m’s or arabic letters —
none of these things – flicked ink,
coming to form in its concentration
or sparsity, nudes in shadow,
trees, skulls or merely shadows
with the shadow of meaning, tantalising,
like iron filings scattered on a board
and drawn by a magnet held underneath
Janmari towards the end of his life
sometimes too sick to sit down
handed a ballpoint or a felt tip pen
traced m’s one day and the next day o’s
that filled the page in rows
Or guided to make frames, a circle drawn
with the width of a crayon, a square
he was prompted to draw himself, would fill
these shapes with – no not o’s or m’s –
but circles and double arched squiggles
the size of letters. The whole book is full.
Costs thirty two euros. I set off on this trip
in my campervan from Berlin to France
with some goals but asking myself for an intention
said that I was seeking poetry again, beauty,
to live a life that was meaningful again.
Why do I cry when I flick through Janmari’s
pages?
the same but with slight variation, the pen changes maybe,
or an o is filled in, but otherwise this is repetition…
I cry for the sense of freedom, the unconstraint
from what we imagine is allowed or beautiful
that Masurovsky could never have achieved —
The Arachnean — free from a sense of constraint or judgement
to fill notebooks, to discover underground springs,
to pick a wasp up by its wings. Craving beauty and to live honestly
I come to the arachnean, to follow Deligny,
to follow Janmari, and to also learn where I failed in love
Richter preferred not to choose his subject or composition but to follow chance
or something chosen by someone else. Janmari filled
notebooks when a pen was put in his hand.
I doubt and doubt my reason for this journey,
this project, this way I’m living my life, with no one
to tell me I’m doing right.
Can’t it be chosen for me? But then it isn’t right.
Not having found a subject, Richter painted huge canvases grey.
“The people who know what they want — wherein some see their freedom — are precisely depriving themselves of that freedom by believing they have put a stop to the detours of the Arachnean, which can in this case be said to be human”