Haptics: A Novel (Xerolage) (Volume 54)

These pages, chapters, are an homage to mark making, one in which body, hand and pen - brush, chisel, fine, small, and medium - listen closely to take the pulse, noise upon noise, diversely. Construed in the months of June, July, August and September 2011 with clipboard in hand listening spaces include a cold, fog bound San Francisco; the morning kitchen with Miles Davis, Paris 1948, ballads and blues, then back & forth with Glen Gould & Beethoven. Up to the local bar, Irish working class with Marvin Gaye, Van Morrison and the Supremes on the juke box; up the City high hill to the corner writing and drawing bench; up 10 thousand feet high to the Sierra Mountain (Vogelsong) with robust snow melt river & creek; descending down to does, bucks & fawns at play between gray granite, tree and lake. Then Modoc country with fierce, circuitous lava beds; to Astoria, the wide sun filled Pacific mouth of the Columbia River; on to Ashland & the Bard; then Mt. Shasta, so high & white, going home. All the while a country, its collective core splintered, dark and angry while the hand makes marks tender, aggressive, tenuous; pealing back the skin from what is white or dark or thick; then, ink line by line, to thread, to weave, to shade into one, or several fabrics; then breaking those surfaces apart again and again, shredding each until some fundamental mark joins another mark and another, until (through all this darkness) something luminous appears among new textures, shapes and erasures; as if when an unexpected stranger arrives and, when it is right, astonishes with an absolute, yet familiar otherness; each new page/chapter, a fiction, neo-fiction, a multiple trace, a dissolving dream, a nocturnal cartography within a cartography; shadows of a forgotten alphabet, a sonic infrastructure spelled out in a forest of fluid marks. A music – mark by mark – now raining specifics: rhythmic, concrete & continuous.