In response to September 16.

For a number of years I have kept this piece of paper with me, tucked in between the pages of various books and other places (I think -- I can't remember where else it might have lived, though it feels as if it was in a box at somepoint, and not just the pages of a notebook...). I found it again in my art project book earlier today, and I knew I had put it in there to remind me of something, but I can't recall what that was. All I could do with it this time around was read it, then type the words out into world with my last blog post, thinking I needed to crawl inside them to recognize their life.

The page is a standard 8x11 laser print-out, courier font, point twelve. I had folded it in half, half the other way, then half the first way again. It has four main creases that were defined more strongly by squeezing the folds with nails, not just fingertips. At some point in its history, the bottom left corner of the paper was folded in and back, adding a triangle to the topography of the page. The title, September 16, is in bold and finished by a period. There is a slight tear an inch to the right of the period, just hitting the top of "resilient" in the first sentence of text.

Whose text is this, I cannot be sure. When I found it again, before putting it in its current archive, I thought it was mine and read the words as if speaking the name of my child over and over again to a kid on the playground -- no response, no matter the persistance and repetition. And with a deep wave of disappointment over the empty pit of discovery, I remember I never gave such birth: This text is not mine.

Again, whose text is this? Who belongs to these lines, the metaphors? The adjectives? The nouns? For a short while when struggling to identify with it as if it was mine, I would say yes, this line makes sense, I could have thought this on a wet wet gray morning (this had to have been first written on a wet wet gray morning -- an Ithaca morning, a wet tree trunk morning, like suddenly stepping your sock-wearing feet into the puddle made by the shower). But the stiff-necked drama of words like "Victorian daggers," "One" and "beautiful" are not my voice at all, especially these references to age -- teenagers, children, "mess of a life." (I don't like such overt references to time.) Such perspectives on time had to be written by someone more my elder, or, someone who is young but creates their identity and life around the notion that they are so tragic their ability to write from a perspective much more experienced is merited through such naive melancholy. Besides, this text seems too worked, too revised. Over worked, over produced. It is easy to tell that it was born with an audience in mind, not just directed to the self, or the individual inhabited by the "you," by the "our."

I like parts of the text. I don't like a lot of things about it. I am glad it is not mine, but I added to the end of the last line. Can you tell? Which part is me? The difference between one person and the next is certainly more than fingerprints and hairlines --- Vocabulary, and the candor of its employment, are just as defining.

We all have our favorite nouns, verbs, expressions, metaphors, ... all these discursive allusions to experience we live and share with others to make life feel more real...

Typing the words out this morning, knowing they were not mine...it is an act not unlike the experience of wearing a friend's clothes or the pleasure of using your roommate's shampoo. Trying them on, something new without the commitment of actual change ... imagining another life ... when my roommate waits on people, he invents stories about their life, imagining the house they live in, the friends they have, if they are funny and witty or not ... i mostly wonder about what they are like in bed, what their sex style is ... are they frigid and timid? lights off only? is it jackhammer sex? who is a talker? a moaner? an Oh God or Fuck Me person? i have a theory about reading an individual's sexual style by the way they treat their paper napkin when eating, but that is for another time...

What was it about the folds of the paper I kept returning to? They mark out the history of the page, and more importantly, how many times this stranger's words were read by me, another stranger (the original writer doesn't know I exist). I think this page came from Ithaca, from college. Working in the computer lab in undergrad gave me the opportunity to be a written word spy...Like trying to see what the title of a book someone is reading on the metro, or listening in to the faintly audible noise from someone's white iPod headphones. Curiousity: What does this person think about? How do they use their words? Would I expect that sentence from her if I just saw her in the hallway? What does the subject in that paragraph really mean to him and would he come back to that idea again? What is in her Works Cited?

I believe I first found this lost text from a pile of left-over print-outs never picked up at the lab desk. I surely had it that long, (the folds are so many and so deep). The intrigue of its origin must be why it has survived so many moves to different towns, different apartments. It just keeps resurfacing.

When will it disappear again?
Where will it go?

September 16.

Only the resilient milkweeds are left standing in the garden; cocoons hang from their leaves like forgotten ornaments. A few shards of terra cotta punctuate the uniformity of the dried soil. The rosebushes have shriveled. There is no trace of the beautiful hibiscus that we planted. Sawgrass and dollar weeds have overrun everything. They're as stubborn as the birds that continue to visit the ruins of our backyard and die there. I found three carcasses, almost bones, impaled by homemade stakes, probably carved with Victorian daggers. (Wouldn't that be our tool of choice?) Doubtless, the work of teenagers as unruly and gloomy and sadistic as we were. A garden of dead birds -- how excited you would have been at the sight of this. Of course, in some sense, these ruins, the intrigue of homespun murder perfuming them, are perfect. They explain what has become of us. Surrendering the garden to merciless elements, we've tended its disintegration the way we have tended our own -- with beautiful abandon. There is something in these ruins that speaks about us, and to us, in a way that the repulsive periwinkle of roses and sickening lavender of orchids never could. We were always children of overgrowth, of sloppy excess. Disorder breathes life -- and its opposite -- into us.

One would have to know that there once was a garden behind our house to find it. So little is left of it. One finds it the way I find you: in small bits, in cryptic transmissions. Some things are obvious, naturally, but others may be just a little interference in the background that one has to zero in on. It's not that I can't picture you running through this house, or sitting in the garden, or locked up in your room (you were always locked up in your room). It's just that there has to be more than that distance between us, that blankness that separates us like morning fog. A distance that is not so much between us as it is us. I take you in slowly, in tiny bits and try to put you together. But you exceed the meager version that I come up with. You're like the sawgrass and dollar weeds that spead over every border they reach, swallowing up more and more space. At least, there is some consolation in knowing that what is responsible for this mess of life is a forced simple logic and a broken imagination that can't get their hands around a circle that isn't closed.

Well, i felt something should be here now

given all of the thinking i've been doing ---

here's something composed during the last 139 seconds (that's two more than you, Rod):

Can we stop fussing about with all of these names?

Let me use lead
As a litmus test
For all other tastes
Fall to the left of sweet and the
Right of sour

If the taste cuts like the blade
Of a sharp piece of green grass
sliced through the tongue
Then it is pure
It can be called Real.
Not a drawing.
No canvas.
Pixel-less.
Blank. Beautiful. Sharp. Green.

the eyes didn't listen to the ears

so we are still up contemplating sound.

i'm listening to live sound - a breath drawing in the chemical of a cigarette, the slow tap tap tap and tap tap and tap again of the drum stick on a cymbal.

a few weeks ago i busted out some mime moves at a party. i've never done it before, nor do i recall ever seeing a mime on anything but the tv --- i think it was on Reading Rainbow, or maybe there's just that scene in Singles...

could the voice die in its over-production, its hyper-presentation? is the mime obsolute in this culture of communication? do people who witness miming as a performative artform have a base experience of silence to draw upon in creating their response? i ask this as a couple next to me passionately exchange what looks like a debate from the tone of their body language -- they are speaking in sign language.

hands touch more language than the tongue can produce, than the lick of the pen or keyboard could ever recall. muscles have memory beyond the fiber of ink, beyond the flesh-less press of key to board.

biting your lip means you just might get it. if it bleeds, then turn the hand on yourself.

"reach out and touch someone." bye bye baby bells.

How many head trips does it take

to get to the center of nothing to say at all?

At yoga our instructor said to pick the quietest layer of silence and hear what is below that. In class tonight my professor argued that the changing of the senses over time happens, but seemed to lean more towards a somatic source for this observation...

I believe the senses do change over the course of history, but that their evolution is rooted in what sits on either dish of the scale they balance/mediate - body external (social) v. body internal (material). I see this evolution as tightly related to the cultural implications of changing technology (its impact on the auditory landscape, social impact of visual construction in communication ---). It's not just that we have cell phone ring tones that our body jumps in response to, as opposed to snapping tree branches (for example), but it is the importance placed on the relationship of this technology to our behavior patterns for communication that actually generates a shift in sound importance for the auditory sense.

i would say more but my ears sense that it is time to sleep the taste of the day away away away

easy drive-bys,

incomplete picture pieces, shifting value scales, chapters closed before read aloud, vitamin after vitamin after vitamin


Pattern Recognition, 2004
Kathryn Cornelius
T610 mobile phone digital photograph

so i'm getting tired of this planning thing

...talked to my professor about circles and lines the other day...for a while now, and especially lately, i've become more convinced that the way to stop the line is to spontaneously begin a new trajectory that does not map nicely onto any sort of patterned predictability. like when you're driving and your cell phone service cuts out because you enter, briefly, a space that is not perfectly networked --- you've really stumbled onto/into something; it changes your pace. don't be angry your call dropped. that's an opportunity if you want it. what will you do with it? i could talk on and on about frames of context, shifted footing, everyday performances and the argument of performance versus behavior, but i'm late.

disconnection is a beautiful thing. yes, i said beautiful.

okay okay

there's a profile now

who knew

an acquaintance met in san fran last may recently informed me that there are two "kathryn cornelius" bloggers on blogsite. this news comes to me like the realization that i am wearing my underware inside out -- unexpected, but not changing much. / as if living with a catherine all last year didn't confuse enough people. / and the other strange thing is that apparently the other one avidly proclaims her love of christ on her blogger profile (note the abscence of my own profile.). i guess in leiu of a virtual sleeve...

so this is how it feels to be eminem. classic. oh the simulacra.

comment this

thanks to captain pickles for noticing...comments are back --- feed it.

template my life

apparently i thought it necessary to change the design of this site; though i've slightly customized the content, i'm having "template remorse."

just the idea of mapping another's design onto the body of my text is stuffing my legs into the arms of a shrunken sweater - blah.

A new image...

from the CIRCLES project


Hand in Hand in Mirror, 2004
Kathryn Cornelius
T610 mobile phone digital photograph

a few fragments from 'Fragments'

thinking about these as I collect the bits of paper from books I need to return...

"So far as intellectual 'work' is concerned, I have no idea about that any longer. What I have left is a total receptiveness in the void, where nothing is to be expected except from universal gravity."

"Another promise of fragments is that they alone will survive the catastrophe, the destruction of meaning and language, like the flies in the plane crash which are the only survivors because they are ultra-light...the lightest items sink most slowly into the abyss. IT is these one must hang on to."

--from Baudrillard's "Fragments: Cool Memories III, 1990-1995."

It's been a while...

...but I have a good excuse. Just finished a new blogsite last week to wrap up my summer course, Theories of Virtuality with Matthew Tinkcom (by far the best CCT has to offer).

Check it out: http://circlesandlines.blogspot.com

Can’t my letters be like paint?

...My sentences slope like streaks laid across the canvas? If the best gesture of my brain is my keyboard’s flutter which says “this is our/are for each other,” than can I laugh, lean back, for painting is not a paragraph and art I think is no parenthesis.

Adaptation from e.e.cummings (since feeling is first). cummings = a literary Jackson Pollack (?) -- perhaps, if Pollack must be a symbol for artistic gesture executed with orgasmic drunken abandonment (of course with a touch less self-intimate), dripping words with careless precision.

I want to eat another’s paint, soak up words with my hungry canvas stretched much too thin. Satisfy me. Someone.

L. where are you? The biggest We of I misses you!

From the Long Sad Party
Mark Strand

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Someone was saying
something about shadows covering the field, about
how things pass, how one sleeps towards morning
and the morning goes.

Someone was saying
how the wind dies down but comes back,
how shells are the coffins of wind
but the weather continues.

It was a long night
and someone said something about the moon shedding its
white
on the cold field, that there was nothing ahead
but more of the same.

Someone mentioned
a city she had been in before the war, a room with two
candles
against a wall, someone dancing, someone watching.
We begin to believe

the night would not end.
Someone was saying the music was over and no one had
noticed.
Then someone said something about the planets, about the
stars,
how small they were, how far away.

It seemed to write me about it...

Revisiting Directions

Absence is the record of a presence not yet spoken
An extension of the hand not reflected

Restraint is an understatement when addressed in too many circles
An empty face is a pile of features upon features
touching touching touching touching

How to inhabit your space without admitting the touch of others

How to guide a moment into meaning beyond The already known, The could already be forgotten,
The discarded skin of fruit sliced
too ripe
too soon

a photograph
a peel

Green is the loneliest color you'll ever know

from the MS Word dictionary, a partnership with the Merriam Webster company:

Unripe or not mature
Newly cut and still unseasoned
Not yet tanned
Not yet fired
Envious or jealous
Pale and sickly-looking, especially as a result of nausea
Naïve and lacking in experience, especially because of being new to something
Young, new, recent, or fresh

-->end quote re: definition of green<<

-----------------
Crisp white linens tucked into four corners of the bed
a glass of water on the stand, half-full
for now
before the empty sets in

these are days worth waking into
fighting heavy fingers that urge
the body back to
rest in peace

the sheets are the receipt for this transaction
an uneven, single exchange

The sea I suck in deeply, extending the fingers as oars to type waves into the words

...are splashes upon splashes of papers sticking themselves up out of books, posted driftwood -- "hey, save me first, anchor these words!" attention drawn by the highlights, maximized minimum space (black text on white) of 15-20 pages >> nevermind; due three weeks ago...

The form of the index card - constraint? release? retention? reminder?

How do we know what is important?

If it makes its way off the page, through the eyes, to the brain, signaling the hand

1. reach for pen
2. reach for paper
3. write the black ink configured as you see it,
4. record the moment of reading
5. to translate it - later - into a era of knowledge

then it is given a portable reference/record. One that can be owned, traveled with, accessed again upon whim, no need for a library check-out.

With all the information that is possible, how do we know what is important to know?

We mark its importance through its recording, picking the object closest to us for the translation:

The index card

A believer himself in the index card, Barthes (in Roland Barthes) remarked on the action of using it as a tool to record data:

"Still warm, nothing is yet to be determined of its quality: stupid? dangerous? insignificant? worth keeping? to be thrown away? to be focused? to be protected?"

you know you're On the Right Track (???)

...When your citation list for your graduate school paper includes at least 4-5 of the personalities depicted on the Theory Trading Cards. (so jealous these guys came up with this first!)

Question: Why is Tracey Emin on a card in the same deck as Goffman, Foucault, Benjamin, and Said? Was one of the creators of the Theory Trading Cards included in her tent installation, Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995? I guess since it perished in flames a few weeks ago, we'll never know. (Maybe Gilbert and George know yet another something we don't...??!)