During one of our initial discussions about how to structure Golems Waiting Redux, I showed Daniel some details I'd cut from xeroxes of some of the photographs. I had them tucked away in my work-diary as a talisman against work and the way its sameness and its neverending tiny crises can drain the time out of you till you're at the end of another year with nothing done, and exhausted nonetheless – And as a reminder that the project would be done, because Daniel wanted to do it and I would see to it that we didn't let it slip out of sight and out of mind.
Daniel liked the details a lot, suggested we put some of them in the book. "…And so then there are these little moments happening…"
I'd never heard details called moments before. They'd been details since the time of Ruskin, if not Vasari.
It was an odd usage, so I put it away to know about and remember for its oddness, for the way it cut the piece out of the whole, and, somehow, speak as though the whole were momentarily forgotten. The word seemed to me to do this in a way that the word detail could not, because detail always suggests the whole.
Well, the neverending tiny crises continued and I forgot about moments/details, until I read (crisis interruptus) this on Lidia Yuknavitch's blog some months later:
Someday they will write about these things.
Look: this is as far as I've got. Perhaps this is all I have to say.
Theo already enjoying the idea of the cigarette he plans to light upon reaching his production company in fewer than ten minutes.
Look: just here just like this.
We must try to mature more quietly.
The nicotine inhalation. The energizing burn. Pleasure's smoky rush.
Like this and nothing else.
This is part of a page from Lance Olsen’s novel Head in Flames, published by Chiasmus Press. The typefaces represent the 3 different voices in the book – but it's not the fragmentation and interweaving that struck me so much as the insistence on the micro-moment within each fragment. Like this and nothing else.
Lidia goes on to say that Chiasmus books are meant to wake you out of the mental sleep that other books maintain and serve. I take it that she means, largely, corporate publishing.
(There are honourable exceptions here – Le Carré's subject has always been fury at the sheer bastardry of the people he went to school with, the British Ruling Class. The Cold War wasn't the subject, it was the setting of his signature works.)
And so it seems to me that there are 2 sorts of fragmentation going on right now in the semi-unconscious processing in our mental lives: the first, the detail becoming the moment, space-based art becoming time-based art, seems to me to not only invoke flow instead of stasis, but to reject stasis and the whole picture. Even the idea of the whole picture. (Although, if you are teaching and critiquing a piece, or even looking at it, perhaps what you call a detail doesn't matter so much. You're pointing and talking and the whole piece is right there.)
The second acknowledges the whole picture: the ruling philosophy and apparat of our (political, experiential) lives, and rejects it overtly (on political, experiential grounds) to build again from the experienced moment on up.
The universe beginning with a grain of sand.
