Is this Writing?

Roland Barthes writes much on the topic of writing. Except that for Barthes, writing is not always the act of simply placing one’s intention in small black letters on the page. Far from it. Writing becomes something else and other gestures are forms of writing. For example Japanese cooking in Empire of Signs is writing. In an essay on fashion, he says what Coco Channel does is writing.

What is writing then? It seems a gesture towards that which is, perhaps, a perfectibility beyond us. Not that perfectibility is even possible, but that the gesture towards a perfectibility, towards an order in a world of chaos becomes a gesture that is larger than any intention. Serious work of any kind is perhaps writing? Barthes says, "Writing is precisely that act which unites in the same labor what could not be apprehended in the mere flat space of representation."

While thinking about these things on a recent weekend in New York, I began to look around the world and see if I could read in it instances of writing. This first materialized on the subway where the studiousness of people lost in their own world while waiting to arrive at 89th Ave from W 14th St. seemed a form of writing. The writing of the moment in the gesture of time passing. Could this not be apprehended in a mere flat space of representation? Is this serious work?

Yes. It is serious in that it requires one’s absolute attention, the gesture becomes the person. The person is that moment. In that moment, they are writing. The writing of the moment is the old woman’s deliberateness to put on lipstick perfectly though in every gesture from opening the tube to inspecting the color to the moment of confusion when she attempts to replace the cap the wrong way smashing the perfectly formed tip, this is a gesture of writing, but a failed attempt.

In the Met, it occurred to me that those small moments of looking that are perhaps moments beyond looking are also writing. Are these instances of writing?

Does the perfecting of the image in the photo become an instance of writing? Or is it simply recording the moment without thinking? The latter couldn't be writing, could it?

Does imitation become a way of writing a text?

A text that has already been written once, and

now it again becomes the author that copies, a copy

that is the author, the copy not of the image before

the person, but the person who "writes."

An autobiography as Derrida would have it.

Is the father in the background teaching his daughter to write?

Is this couple in some way writing? Or reading the writing of Monet on the wall to the right of them? Or is it possible they read no writing at all and are only involved in the writing of each other?

"It is also an emptiness of language that which constitutes writing; it is from this emptiness of language that derive the features with which Zen, in the exemption from all meaning, writes gardens, gestures, houses, flower arrangements, faces, violence."

Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs

Traveling

I'm making plans to go to New York. Somehow the idea of escaping one unfamiliar city for another is inviting. The world is different here in the directions of street signs and unusable bus transfers; I find myself a foreigner in a strange land albeit still the land of America. I'm drawn to New York. How odd that that is the place I choose when I'm home sick. Simon Critchley once told me that New York didn't belong to anyone. That was one of the things that is so intriguing about it. I believe he is right. Perhaps that is why I can feel somewhat at home there. In a city of 8 million, where on a short subway ride one will hear at least half a dozen languages, there is a place where everyone can be at home and not at home simultaneously.

I thought as time went on I would grow used to this place. But I find my self instead looking for a place in time when I can return home. Only the home I know doesn't exist for me. I still think it does at times. At times, I forget. Looking out a bus window, I believe I'm at home. Not that I wish or remember that I'm somewhere else, but that I really am there. Then I remember. Remember where I am. I was in a pub on Friday night and overheard some men talking about how New England was perfect, how they were pleased to lead that life of a fisherman. Perhaps we always feel most at home where we originated from. Our beginnings are the root of where we find perfection, only we forget this as we grow older and think we must find this in other things, and so setting out in the world, we lose our home altogether.

Home I am beginning to think is not a place, but a state of mind. It is nothing that I have at the moment. Perhaps when I am in my apartment quietly reading alone, I can feel at home, but most of the time I feel like an outsider. There are moments I remember back in Portland with friends at Roadside Attraction on a winter evening talking in a corner booth about everything and nothing. Those are moments that feel like home. But they have vanished into time and space that is bridged only by memory. How do I regain this? Perhaps the answer is something like in Proust to write more and all the time until the writing of memory becomes greater than the space of time.