My last night in summery Zürich: the men are sunburnt and muscly, cafés are busy. There are no doubt some women around here also. The other Jung-Institut students and teachers have left – as usual I stay one or two days later, this time to see Patricia up in Thun on Sunday, then just to coast around on Monday...
The 'island' piece I just put into this blog isn't exactly a reference to Christopher Priest's Dream Archipelago, but can loosely and distantly fit into its unboundaries (as can Priest's own stories about/within it). I've been reading The Islanders, his latest on the archipelago, and was thinking – briefly, vaguely, in a dazed, sleepy and summery way – about the connection to that world – which is in any case structured in loosely connected dreams; so that if you find yourself exploring more not-previously-existent islands, they can fit in there too. Somewhere.
I wonder if it would be possible to keep adding to the Archipelago... I wonder if one could even have a workshop at the Jung-Institut with people adding to it, casually or for their own needs. I wonder if that would be a problem, or no problem, or a good exercise, especially when you are rather dazed and summery...
Perhaps I should go have a vacation on an island somewhere, after I get home.
It occured to me, in bed, after reading a chain of letters in the 'Ferredy Atoll' section of The Islanders, wherein a young writer exchanges letters with a writer over some years of communication and miscommunication, identification and cross-identification, that we are going about this book-reading thing all wrong. Of course letters between readers and writers are prone to faulty miscommunication – of course they are embedded in a tangle of fame and non-fame and desire, or perhaps of mercantile, Adornian cultural structures.
(This also fits an e-mail I sent to artist Richard Renaldi, earlier this evening – he has taken photographs of himself and his partner in various hotels and motels around the world for years – I sent a thank-you-for-the-beautiful-work-which-I-saw-in-the-current-Zürich-gay-magazine-and-online comment, which is part of all this kind of entanglement. No big deal, as it were, but a good thing: among people who are, intermittently, paying attention...)
Indeed from one angle, a letter to a famous artist is a communication between audience and performer, reflecting possible but possibly incommensurate ideals. And from another it is a communication between consumer and producer, and so is hopelessly tainted and uncomfortable.
But if you take all these structures, lift them into the air, and turn them just a little bit; then set them down and see them from a slightly different, third angle...
they are also casual connections between people watching their internal worlds, their imaginations... unburdened and unproblematic; just sort of sharing material, to see where it goes....
Comments