Old Dreams of the Void

In this performance and lecture given at Visual Studies Workshop on 5/7/08, the occasion was an invitation to discuss my Paterson work at the beginning of my residency (t)here (now almost over); for this event, however, I talked about the blog and Williams only after a detour into the alchemical work of Michael Maier, Jakob Böhme, Robert Fludd, with further divergences into UFOs, Robert Smithson, and Marlene Dietrich. If you want to skip around this big file (1 hr., 16 min., 327 MG), it starts with a laptop performance, which lasts about 6 minutes. Then , starting at 6 min. 55 sec., there begins a discussion of alchemy (under the assumption that in it we can find unexpected alliances with Williams’ work, as we move from the Philosopher’s Stone to the Williams’ less exalted rocks). At about 52 minutes, I begin the more plodding requisite rehashes of the blog. Maybe at one point, I'll encapsulate this lecture in something less bandwidth-intensive, less murky, perhaps something along the lines of what I did with "Theogony of the Parking Lot." Until then, process, process, process.

In sterquilinio putredinis

I am convinced that the future is lost somewhere in the dumps of the non-historical past; it is in yesterday's newspapers, in the jejune advertisements of science-fiction movies, in the false mirror of our rejected dreams.
--Robert Smithson

The essential starting requirement is in the shit-heap of our putrefaction.
--Morienus, the Roman

Somewhere between Smithson's kodachromed futurism and the epiphanies of ancient alchemists, one can find one's way through Williams' Paterson. However, in getting together some materials for another talk I'm giving on Paterson, I'm finding that trying to unify all these transhistorical strategies for perceiving the everyday has many rabbit holes to fall through. At one point, I thought it might be interesting to think about the univocity of being (as it manifests itself in German mysticism, Spinoza, Deleuze) as a way to think about the ways in which Williams confounds a clear notion of his own position, and its relation to the city and poetic "transcendence." That didn't really pan out. I think, in the end, things get too "profound," full of secret underlyings-- difficult to pin on someone who said "the surface/glistens, only the surface./Dig in--and you have/a nothing, surrounded by/a surface, an inverted/bell resounding." (124) This is a long cry from "aaa ooo zezophazazzzaïeozaza eee iii zaieozoakoe ooo uuu thoezaozaez eee zzeezaozakozakeude tuxuaalethukh"--a gnostic password that immediately gets one into VIP lounge of angels and archons.
In any case, throughout May I'll be working on the more large-scale portion of this project as a resident at the Visual Studies Workshop. Not sure how much of that will pan out in blog entries, but we'll see. I'm still hoping to get a reading group together in Rochester (not sure if this will happen yet either), and I bet I can find an all-female thrash band who will do the Marcia Nardi letters. One can only hope. Some more Paterson visits?: not sure. I think Richmond, Virginia is closer to Paterson than Rochester is, even though I fooled myself into thinking that Rochester would put me in close contact.
This much, however, I know so far about Rochester: chair 223 is a deathtrap.