Another edit of Hopeful, I rebuild:



Unrelated but relevant: right now I'm reading Great House by Nicole Krauss. There are a few different threads of stories running through it, all tied together by a desk that exerts power of those who have had it in their possession. I love that a simple object can hold so much meaning for the characters in the book. It brings up interesting questions about objects and where they go, ideas of ownership, memory, permanence. Its really good. Krauss seems to have similar beliefs about objects as I do, namely, that they are keepers of (historical, sentimental, powerful) meaning than they appear sometimes. She writes, 'A hidden weight seemed to attach itself to simple objects, a teacup, a doorknob, a glass, hardly noticeable at first, beyond the sense that every move required a sightly greater exertion of energy, and by the time I negotiated among these things and arrive at my desk, some reserve in me was already worn down or washed away.' (33)

my window installation at adobe books (3166 16th street, san francisco)
pantihose, books, acrylic batting, black beans

i was thinking about writing. when reading someone's writing, you are abandoning your own voice to absorb the voice of another. a writer types their words, from their mind onto paper, that paper is bound into a book, the book is read by another, and then those words are absorbed into their mind.


i am still thinking about string or some filament directing this line, almost like a assembly line of steps, transference.
so there is filament (could be wire, fishing line, colored something). what represents the mind? there is the wire radiating from the brain in a tangle to the keys of the typewriter, there are pages in the typewriter and they flow out, abstract and wavelike into a book, or books, splayed open/ the strings radiate from the pages and to another brain, tangled. its just this fluid transferance, the string is the ideas.


currently reading the history of love by nicole krauss. there is a book within the book-- a chapter from this is called 'the age of string':


So many words get lost. They leave the mouth and lose their courage, wandering aimlessly until they are swept into the gutter like dead leaves. On rainy days you can hear their chorus rushing past: IwasabeautifulgirlPleasedon'tgoItoobelievemybodyismadeofglassI'veneverovedanyoneIthinkigmyelfasfunnyForgiveme...
There was a time when it wasn't uncommon to use a piece of string to guide words that otherwise might falter on the way to their destinations. Shy people carried a little bundle of string in their pockets, but people considered loudmouths had no less need for it, since those used to being overheard by everyone were often at a loss for how to make themselves heard by someone. The physical distance between two people using a string was often small; sometimes the smaller the distance, the greater the need for the string.
The practice of attaching cups to the ends of the string came much later. Some say it is related to the irrepressible urge to press shells to our ears, to hear the still-surviving echo of the world's first expression. Others say its was started by a man who held the end of a string that was unraveled across the ocean by a girl who left for America.
When the world grew bigger, and there wasn't enough string to keep the things people wanted to say from disappearing into the vastness, the telephone was invented.
Sometimes no length of string is long enough to say the thing that needs to be said. In such cases all the string can do, in whatever its form, is conduct a person's silence.