I love paper.
I don't know why I just accept it and I have collected so many kinds.
Not the paper that comes as junk in the weekend news, not the paper with the
legal dialect reducing the dense history of a life to anonymous sterile points, not
the paper of bills amounts owing who determines how much.
Not anonymous and bone bleached.
No I collect real paper, paper made as a work of art.
Produced through time, rich with the hand in it, carefully chosen and worked.
Paper with soft disappearing edges, indefiniteness that relaxes into space,
is kind and forgiving to the artist, says, "start on me any where you like-no
conditions".
Over the years with no deliberations on my part this paper has collected
into the corner store of my life.
So many kinds of paper I have stored and rolled in my only post war closet, rolled up on their sides under the bed stacked on more dust balled sheets.
Paper from Italy.......peasant hardy stippled as the fields and rocks houses are made of.
A composers consideration in its fabric.
Japanese paper........immaterial, floating, still, the character present but masked.
Absence.
A landscape in essence, form, in incomparable whiteness, sinew and fibre
without the 'I' ness of whom or what it is.
Floating clouds above my board that I dip my hands into to draw over.
English paper.......all refined, proper, self conscious, morally correct in its water mark.
A tamed shrew created through a precise, laborious and pedantic process.
Nothing immediate or unleashed or irrepressible or coarse.
But the English is hardy, pervasive remnant from an industrial psychology.
I have little of it and only from curiosity.
I let go my stoic, anal, and self conscious root.
Spanish has heat all coiled up in it, explosiveness of spirit, roughness as abandoned sex in a Mediterranean room with thin curtains across the window parting occasionally from the breeze, the hillside and olive groves and vineyards sprawled out in the mid day sun, moistness on the walls, dampness in the sheets, soft moist legs wrapping and moaning about the body.
Spanish is really free.
Lusty with red sand and salt.
So, now I begin to work tirelessly with my paper.
Sweet softness emptiness uncorked and spilt across luminous surfaces, life to live itself out, some bull speared angry, twig broken, soft lack of past years horny and rubbing itself into reality over clean sheets.
Universe of beginning and ending drawn into white surface.
Through all time a precious carpet to ride over history's mirage.
Our senses, my senses, fall into an opiate state with its simplicity, purity,
and virtuosity.
Open, open, open.
Open sesame and give me your sweet smelling sex.
Paper rich in poverty, full of milk, lifeless and alive, a sensual hermaphrodite politically correct in its naked state, field and ground, unisex to all our desires.
Image of our original state, invention out of spirit and nature laden, capable
of divinity and illiteracy.
Out, out, out it comes, the torso in lead, colour of pain joy lust.
LITERATURE