Posts tagged Essay

Alvin Booth, Osmosis (1999), Uniquely Toned Gelatin Silver Print [Essays]

Alvin Booth, Osmosis (1999), Uniquely Toned Gelatin Silver Print [Essays]

“Congruity could be disrupted by a metaphorical complexity within a literal system. Literal usage becomes incantory when all metaphors are suppressed. Here language is built, not written. Yet, discursive literalness is apt to be a container for a radical metaphor. Literal statements often conceal violent analogies. The mind resists the false identity of such circumambient suggestions, only to accept an equally false logical surface.” — Robert Smithson [more / the collected writings] [my sense of language is that it is matter and not ideas - i.e., “printed matter”] Robert Smithson, A Heap of Language, Pencil drawing, 1966

“Congruity could be disrupted by a metaphorical complexity within a literal system. Literal usage becomes incantory when all metaphors are suppressed. Here language is built, not written. Yet, discursive literalness is apt to be a container for a radical metaphor. Literal statements often conceal violent analogies. The mind resists the false identity of such circumambient suggestions, only to accept an equally false logical surface.” — Robert Smithson [more / the collected writings]

[my sense of language is that it is matter and not ideas - i.e., “printed matter”]

Robert Smithson, A Heap of Language, Pencil drawing, 1966

The Blind live in a world that is inconvenient, and undefined world from which certain colors emerge: for me, yellow, blue (except that the blue may be green), and green (except that green may be blue). White has disappeared, or is confused with grey. As for red, it has vanished completely. But I hope someday – I am following a treatment – to improve and to be able to see that great color, that color which shines in poetry, and which has so many beautiful names in many languages.

I live in that world of colors, and if I speak of my own modest blindness, I do so, first, because it is not the total blindness that people imagine, and second, because it deals with me. My case is not especially dramatic. What is dramatic are those who suddenly lose their sight. In my case, that slow nightfall, that slow loss of sight, began when I began to see. It has continued since 1899 without dramatic moments, a slow nightfall that has lasted more than three quarters of a century. In 1955, the pathetic moment came when I knew I had lost my sight, my reader’s and writer’s sight.

— Jorge Luis Borges, The Perpetual Race of Achilles and the Tortoise: Blindness, Chapter 18, pp. 112 [1977] translated by Eliot Weinberger