Material Space 3
Shawled
Shawled
fringe “a border of threads”; “the confused double outline produced by lack of registration between two or more component pictures of a colour photograph” — what is seen only there — “one of the various white and dark bands produced by the interference of light.” Writing flares around the edge.
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Attention withdrawing attention. Tension. While waiting for an entrance as circumference. Bordering a body, edge, embroidering skin. The body’s limit its extension is its freedom written in. Shared, you once said.
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Poincaré, casting about for an intuitive justification for the concepts of mathematics, felt the sense of space to be proprioceptive, based on movement, and that one could conceive a spatial dimension for each voluntary muscle. And he held that the notion of number came from the experience of time, of things happening in succession. These ideas influenced Olson, who wrote space BIG, as he found it. There is another entrance though, from the inside. A smooth muscle space, where there is an expansion and contraction of the peripheries of awareness.
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“The unstriped plain, or involuntary muscle, is found in the walls of the hollow viscera . . . the oesophagus . . . the trachea and bronchi and the alveoli . . . the erectile tissue of the clitoris . . . the prostate gland . . . the mucous membranes . . . in the arteries, veins, and lymphatics . . . in the iris and ciliary muscle.
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Membranes which are composed of unstriped muscle slowly contract in part of their extent, generally under the influence of a mechanical stimulus, as that of distention or cold; then the contracted part slowly relaxes while another portion of the membrane takes up the contraction.”
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A circumference shared. A place within writing that is the patient withdrawal of attention, withdrawal into a vanishing point (an infinite solution), a white decimal, not on, but which is the edge of space. The edge of existence (limen), not nothing but the flux of particles and punctuation. The threshold of a necessary poverty of imagination, poverty of self, sitting, taking away from words the poverty of solace they would possess. Leaving them graced, gratuitous, in a little dull, spontaneous space.
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First definition in the first paragraph from Kline’s Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, second and third definition from Webster’s New International Dictionary. Fourth paragraph extracted from Gray’s Anatomy.
Shawled - Writing 27, 1991. Thank you to Colin Browne and the Kootenay School of Writing.
Gray, Henry. Gray’s Anatomy. London. 1858.
Klein, Ernest. A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language. Elsevier. 1969.
Olson, Charles. Projective Verse. 1950.
Poincaré, Heni. Papers on Topology: Analysis Situs and Its Five Supplements. 1895.