VARIATIONS

Variations was commisioned by the Marsden Woo Gallery
in response to the exhibition Lexicon by Alida Sayer

Almost a being without boundaries — sparse, and more purely inner, very strangely tender and illuminating itself up to the edge — is such a thing known to us?

Let us consider the sense of variation. Our skin could be called variety, in a precise topological sense: a thin sheet with folds and plains, dotted with events and singularities, sensitive to proximities. At times, our skin, a hasty and untidy construct — happy from some fortunate encounter — resembles the chimera, the internal or common sense, the sixth or totalizing tapestry, the skin of the final tent; in other words, you and I.

A flower, a proposition, a noise can be imagined almost simultaneously. One can make them follow each other at whatever distance one pleases. Any of these subjects of thought can also be changed, distorted, made to lose their initial aspect, following the will of the mind that holds them. Yet it is the knowledge of this power of the mind alone that gives these things their value. This alone permits one to interpret such formations — to find in them only what they contain, and not to stretch them to the point of confusing their various stages with those of reality.

The variety of touch, basted with large tacking stitches onto the variety of seeing — these sewn temporarily to each other, and each one separately, piece by piece and in no particular order — work toward a definitive garment which never eventuates. They form components which are seen and which, on occasion, clash with the resulting variety or with a neighboring one. They are equivalent variations from a common substance, comparable one to another, carelessly, as it were — finding indefinite levels, sometimes nameable, but all belonging to the same category.

The place of wandering knows no straight line. One never goes from a point to another in it; one does not leave here to go there. There is no point of departure and no beginning to the walk. Before having begun, one has already begun again; before having finished, one broods. This sort of absurdity — consisting of returning without ever having left, or beginning by beginning again — is the secret of “evil” eternity, corresponding to “evil” infinity, both of which perhaps contain the meaning of becoming.

Undoubtedly, between those paper sheets, as in the sky, there is a secret order that I would welcome. But this order imitates chance — perhaps to penetrate its rules, perhaps to carry the rigor of those ink anagrams and the precision of thought to the point where the most determinate referent can integrate indeterminacy.

The impatience in voluntary death is this refusal to wait — to reach the pure center where we would find our bearings again in that which exceeds us. I like to live in a material as well as a moral sense. Often, light appears harsh, aggressive, and at times cruel. Wait for the night, take pleasure in twilight, light the lamp rarely, and let the shadow come.

Aristotle suddenly struck upon the multiple aporias of touch. Ever since, he foresaw all the obscurities of the tangible. “Touch isn’t clear,” he said. “It’s inapparent, obscure, secret, and nocturnal.” It is not a true night — it is night without truth, which does not lie. It is not our bewilderment when our senses deceive us. It is not mystery.

In the night, one can die; we reach oblivion. But this other night is the death no one dies — the forgetfulness which gets forgotten. In the heart of oblivion, it is memory without rest.

The point of view is not simply one of hope’s illusion; it is implicit in our life, and it is, so to speak, the truth of our death — at least of this first death which we find in the night. Night does not anesthetize the skin but makes it more subtly aware. The body trains itself to seek the road in the middle of darkness, loves small, insignificant perceptions — faint calls, imperceptible nuances, rare effluvia — and prefers them to everything loud.

Things wandering in the silence and shadow help it to rediscover practices long since lost through forgetfulness and habit. One must live in the day and labour for its own sake. Yes! One has to do that! But to labour for the day is, in the end, to find the night — and how essential, yet difficult, it is always to maintain firmly this nothing that divides thought.