74. unaccountable ellipses

… ellipses signal a continuation and an omission, an absence, silence or the presence of a pause … ellipses signal the presence of thought and /in the absence of words. Sometimes there may be nothing to say, and yet a regime, a schedule, a promise or commitment to write nevertheless requests Yov’s presence, requires Yov to speak to write to go on.To contrive an event, to say ‘Yov did this …’ would be commonplace, and, if possible, art and writing should never be commonplace. Yes, they can be of and about everyday things, everyday-ness but they must at least strive for some form of uncommon value. It may in fact be the artist’s fundamental role to create, maintain, extend and critique values and value, to forge, yes like an ‘alchemist’ something from nothing or something of value from something of little or no value…

… ellipses, something of value, the value of a pause, of a silence, a hesitation, pending what? A further event? Writing is a sequence of events. The cursor demands orderly progress, like the crook of a shepherd, the lines, that may wish t be other than lines and other than orderly, comply with their prescription. So much has already been decided. So much already written. The words come out of a playbox, like building blocks for children, like a chemistry set for a youth. The grammar comes down from God, the “God of grammar” about which Nietzsche warned us. And yet, we invent, or seem to invent nevertheless, forging new alloys from these familiar minerals, aspiring to some kind of value …

… ellipses … a kind of pictogram, actually illustrating the passage of time, emptied time, represented as three little presences and three little absences, set, regularly apart, a pause that nevertheless maintains a direction. Time, of course, is not necessarily as linear as this. Each point of the three-point ellipses could live on a different planet for all Yov knows. Each could represent, a split second or a whole hour.

Still the cursor flashes, as if setting the pace, the crook of a shepherd, leading the way, into the whiteness, the nowhere, the empty and invisible path we call ‘forwards’. Someone, somewhere set the pace of the cursor. Yov compares it with Yov’s watch, with Yov’s heart. It seems to flash at approximately one second intervals. Regular, ‘regular as clockwork’. The computer, Yov suspects, did evolve in some way from a clock’s workings, form a series of machines designed for accurate calculation, for accuracy above all. Accuracy, a kind of inhuman trvth.

Accuracy enables. Delivering galleons to to their goals then men to the moon, but accuracy is surely not ‘absolute’? Is anything absolute? Yov suffers from a fear of absolutes, a fear of accuracy and certainty, placing in their place … ellipses … uncertainty … insisting on difference where identity previously reigned. Yov’s job is to ease, to oil the sliding of the sliding scale … the sliding scale that is today supplanting all conceits and aspirations to identity … the sliding scale that blurs language, shoulders over the column of the I’, and aims to free Yov from the god of grammar

‘SAVE’ …’DRAFT SAVED 3 MINUTES AGO’… at least Yov is safe here, even SAVED, and automatically too. Automated saving might be just what Yov needs. It almost sounds like a religion … ‘Automated Saving: The Religion for Busy People’. The crook of the shepherd continues to flash, always reminding Yov that Yov can’t go back and must go on, that writing goes on – at least machinic writing does, always tethered to the line and orientated by cogs, wheels, pixels and processors, the words chained together in a strange parade, like escaping prisoners making uncomfortable, tardy progress, perhaps wishing they could be free, not just of the institution from which they have escaped but from each other …

The cursor flashes, twinkles like a star, winks like a ‘come-on’, comes in and out of existence. the virtual crook of a shepherd, and Yov the lamb, the sheep, stepping on, not knowing where or why, clocking the word-count in the corner of the screen, becoming increasingly “difficult”, “difficult to read”… sometimes preferring the whiteness to the words, the absence to the presence, and trying to make value from both. 702 words, 703 words, 704 words. Fulfillment of the task becomes the identity of the process and the value of the transformation from nothing to something. Yov is uncompromising and yet writing is compromised by its own prescription. 737 words. Yov is counting down, acutely, intimately aware, conscious, self-conscious. But still   … ellipses do not count as words, ellipses are unaccountable …

 

 

Advertisement