At each try to make, I collect errors.
The linocut I grow impatient with becomes a cut on my finger and that cut on my finger is shaped like nothing seen before. I find myself showing off the cut, telling everyone how I barely noticed it and then it was there. The cut collects the narrative. The cut collects mystique. The cut becomes the "thing." It's thing-ness is unquestionable and more important than the intention of making a clean linocut for holiday cards.
I interpret this mistake the same way I interpret the wet rag I left overnight on the hardwoods and found, again, in the morning: When I picked up the wet rag there was a type of rage in the hardwoods—a stain and a damage. The stain points to me and says, “You've made another mistake here. Here, here's the remanent of your mistake." It stays there and might even shout: Here. Here. Your mistakes are still here.
And when people come over for dinner, that stain is still there. Though it could go unnoticed, I tell everyone about how I left the wet rag there, how I cannot forget that mistake unless I redo the floors and, even then, I would retell the redoing of the floors with the memory of the stain. It becomes internalized: Mistake. Mistake I've made. Mistake that stays. Mistake that cannot be mistook for intention, for other-than mistake.
The mistake, the error, is always there. It repeats.
Katie says, over huevos rancheros and burnt coffee, that our failures and our errors are liberating. She says, "It's liberating isn't it?" I think, for a second, that it is liberating. I take the compliment when she says I'm brave to be making mistakes and letting them happen.
I take the compliment and spend the night feeling good about myself. Until I accidently drink from the water glass I've been putting my paint brushes in instead of the water glass I've been putting filtered water in.
I make mistakes. My mistakes interact with the way I live in the world, the way I'm seen as someone who lives in the world. The couch is wine stained and my husband knows I'll drop a few plates.
I think about Li Hui's photography, about how new everything looks and how the lights, the blurriness, the missing faces, the ethereal qualities look like vibrant mistakes. I think she is very deliberate, I think, How interesting to have deliberate fuzziness. I wonder about this and my own elliptical tendencies, my own perspective of error and failure and what it means to be deliberate about mistakes...could we call this intention an experiment? Even—bolder—an expansion of what we know we'll always do?
I return to Tolstoy, “Error is the force that welds men together...”
It's kind of freeing to think that our mistakes can be our own connectivity. Was it The Death of Ivan Illich where Ivan is hanging curtains and his mistake, his small and unobtrusive fall, begins the series of realizing his own humanity--his own finitude? Or is this more present when King Lear can't unbutton his own buttons, needs to say, "Can you undo this button?" We see our limitations. We see that our limitations are bound in the real mistake of thinking we are limitless.
Here, I'm in the middle of a "mistake." I've relocated to a town where people collect everything on their porch and let it rust, let it pile and rust in full sun. There are collections, even, of stray cats. I've moved to this place and I've left my "good job" to see what more there is in that "more" people talk about.
And yeah, I admit defeat. I admit that this wasn't thought out, wasn't practical. I admit to walking through leaf piles in full tears. I admit to standing on train tracks and wondering what it would mean to stand there when the train comes. There's a rage, a full out, what was I thinking?
And my husband and I look at each other and know this wasn't the best decision, but it's the decision we've made and we're about to make another one that could slap us in the face just as much. But, we wonder, what else is the point?
I'm sure, even, that I don't want it to be this way. I want, in fact, the peeling wallpaper and hangnail. I want the very real and very authentic feeling of "oh shoot."
Of the mistake that's my present context, there's a lake:
"Do not expect but poison of stagnant water," William Blake warned. And the water is moving. The other day, the lake turned a dark color, turned a color that suggested the ocean floor was moving. It's true, there's so much more than what's immediately seen, even immediately unseen. I sat by the lake and watched the lake become something else.
When my husband and I sit by the lake, I think about how I need to slow down and to start to see the mistakes for what they are: liberating. lovely. honest.
Sheena and I are going to take a close look at the fullness of mistakes and the potential inside of our mistakes. We're going to have fun because we're growing up and the expectations, weightiness, and fear that we're in right now isn't always leaving a space for us to laugh and learn from all the messiness. The messes are still happening, are getting larger.
In this study, in this play, every fragment, every clipping, every piece of kindling will show us potential and progress. We're pretty excited to not be bound by the "product" or the "finished" piece. The process is less suppressed, more urgent and more true to the mind in the thick of thinking.
We're in the thick of thinking.
_______
. . .it must have recesses. There is a great charm in a room
broken up in plan, where that slight feeling of mystery is
given to it which arises when you cannot see the whole
room from any one place. . .when there is always something
around the corner. . .
_ROBERT Duncan, “The Architecture / Passages 9,” Bending the
Bow. New Directions: NY, 1 963, p. 2 6.
Hopefully we'll reach this goal: to break up the work. To bring unfinished notes, sketches, and running thoughts to work and let them become idée fixes—an obsession.
And those are the goals:
mess.
urgency.
authenticity.
play.
reflexivity.
process.
