purple and Green
oil | wax on linen
2021

Goose
oil | wax on linen
2021

red, green, yellow and blue
oil | wax on linen
2021

Rose
oil on linen
2021

photogram
2021

There was a time when I lost touch with images altogether and gave up painting to watch the city from public benches until it rained. Then I sat or wrote in a café and this went on for a few years. I always made a living with pictures, but my skepticism persisted and developed into observations I hadn't made before. I noticed the points of contact between things, what might be called grammar or joinery. A wall for example is only attached to the frame by nails, and when the wind comes in, thousands of pounds trickle down through these points of contact, down to the brackets and into the ground. At some point between making furniture and writing I had room to move so I went to Cape Breton Island, cleared some land and framed a building. From there I could see an estuary.

In some ways it wasn't much different than Kurfürstendamm or the whirlpools around Großer Stern except the pieces of sky where birds appear before drifting back behind buildings, these pieces had grown and now I could see their condition, how they're free until a windstorm rolls in over the mountains and then they're like tiny sailboats trying to crawl upwind, separated from each other by miles or months if a big knock comes in. Then, at a distance, the birds are separated somewhere else beyond weather, not birds at all but colors that get lighter with distance and warmer when the sun goes down. Pink, a type of dark brown, detached from taxonomy, the classes, the order, the colors are arbitrary now, if not precisely meaningless. Although this too is just a focal range. When the sky turns green it means the clouds are condensing and that means most of my work will be done for the day.

In an evidence-based process doing the same thing twice with different results causes a level of uncertainty. For example, in a scientific process the results would be unclear. Uncertainty can be explained in another way using a homonym where the same shape means one of two things, either "Bat" or "Bat." The chances are 50/50. By 2020 I was confident that anything could fit this shape. The result was usually a bird. Sometimes a flower or a butterfly. Other times it was a crocodile or fish. Sometimes a mermaid or squirrel. Tulips were statistically probable but the results were variable. Now if the possibilities were limited, then the flower might be given a value; each thing would be one side and I could go on rolling the dice, knowing more or less, the probability of tulips. I had found however that the possibilities were not limited; that I could come up with new ways of seeing this shape, although it took time, will, patience and so on, the shape could be things I had not even imagined. The die had an unknown number of sides. The metaphor of rolling dice was therefore not useful. Returning to the homonym, instead of meaning only two things like bat and bat, this shape could refer to many things, possibly any thing, an idea that seemed at first to defy definition as each new thing further proved the uncertainty of what these paintings were about. In statistics, however, the uncertainty interval, also called the grain of allowance; the margin of error or the human factor can be given a value and in this case it is very high, if not 100%. By contrast, the confidence interval equals approximately zero. In evidence-based process this would not be considered knowledge. But, since our margin of error is ~ 100%, we have almost isolated the human factor. Similar to algebra, the fish or the bird are both arbitrary, they refer to a perspective. The possibilities, too numerous to count, are a product of the will to see things from another perspective. Whether it's the perspective itself, or the will to change this perspective, or the capacity to imagine things in another way; or the number of different ways you could see things, without knowing it, within the terms of algebra, I had been solving for the human factor.

From the Proof Paintings I had a chalk line and I noticed that it could be imagined in different ways. In the beginning I saw something new every morning.

With time, however, unable to repeat myself, the paintings became more rare and more strange. Sometimes it took weeks or even months to finish a painting. I began pushing the paint around before I had anything in mind until the material and color suggested something. Sometimes the paint suggested nothing. After three or four months I was pretty sure I'd met the end, but almost as soon as I decided to move on, new options appeared. This happened several times. When something new appeared it always brought others, one thing led to another and then to another, and with time, although it's difficult to prove, I knew the form would never be exhausted. I started to sense that it was not a form at all and instead it was a condition.

The paintings seemed to arrive on their own, they appeared increasingly strange, sometimes ridiculous. Let's imagine you're in front of a jury holding a chalk line. That's the evidence. Next the other side stands up and describes it in some other way. In this case you're the one laden with proof so you go home and study the evidence slowly and from the beginning.

You divide what you know into sections:
(§1.0) The chalk line is a missing body.
(§2.0) The evidence isn't going to change. Whether the jury is on one side of the room or the other,
(§3.0) we only ever see the evidence from one side, a chalk line can't be turned around in your hand like a tulip.

Now you're walking across the room with this in mind, thinking, if we see the same thing from both sides, then we must be on the same side of something. Having arrived on the other side of the aisle, the side unburdened by proof, the evidence seems lighter. A weight has been lifted and you start again.

The beginning from this perspective is slightly prior, a time just before the evidence; before the incident altogether, when anything could have happened. At this moment you feel more free, more agile and, with concern to your case, imagining the evidence in this way and that way proves the material can be seen in a number of different ways.

Having regained some youth; some sense of origin, you indulge in the possibilities for a pleasurable while before eventually deciding that a thing could be many ways, but it is, in fact, only one way (1). Touching down again, you choose something that fits and this is your case.

Then, much later, long after your case has closed, in the courtyard one evening and then again lying in bed, strange epiphanies come to you in clusters like berries, first one, then ten, then twenty possibilities you hadn't considered and each one fits the evidence effortlessly; obviously.

---
(1) counter-factual conditional V. simple past.

"Yellow Bird" was the last of the proof paintings. In January of 2019 I began to write down thoughts that became "Invisibility and the Word."

I'd been studying proof processes and materials with changes. One of these materials was a metal that melts in your hand then hardens again into a new shape. One shape looked like a donkey. Then it melted into the shape of a turtle. It was immediately clear at this time, that this pattern was something like watching clouds and it could go on forever. Thinking back, I believe it went donkey, turtle, dog, dove and then one morning the metal hardened into the shape of a tulip. I left it on the table. The following afternoon the same shape was more like a rooster. It was a few days before I was back in that room again and then it looked like a butterfly. It was difficult to know if I was imagining these changes; if this really was the same shape or if the shape had been changing slightly and because it was spring in Berlin, the weather was getting warm so I outlined the shape in chalk.

2014

2017

2018

medium one
oil on linen
2016

medium one (detail)
oil on linen
2016

medium two
oil on linen
2016

After "Five Studies" my suspicion of pictures grew and began to include visibility altogether. In 2014 I stopped exhibiting; continued painting privately and left the city to figure things out.

Chopping wood one morning I heard an accident on the road. By the time I got there, all I could see were rubber marks. Walking back through the woods to the water I had time to consider the way one material rubs off onto another. That evening, I used the materials from "Five Studies" to focus on the first step where one material describes another. That’s when I noticed some rules about evidence. It was the beginning of the Proof Paintings.

July, 2014:

"Rubber is softer than asphalt that's why it rubs off onto a road. It's like the process of rubbings where a material, usually chalk or wax is used to represent another material, usually stone. Chalk is a soft type of limestone. If it's going to rub off, the second material has to be softer or more fragile than the first material. In this process, there can't be proof of the softest or of the most fragile material. [1]

August, 2014:

"In photography the 'second material' is light. At first this seems to solve the problem. But look at the wire. [2] The wire looks like every other wire. Even the wire's shape is arbitrary. This fact, that it remembers a shape and returns to that shape when it's warm, this memory or program doesn't appear in rubbings or photographs at all. This would only be a small problem, but all materials have programs. They repeat themselves. Stone crumbles. Ice melts. It's easy to accept that water and ice are the same but that's surprisingly difficult to prove. Rubbings of ice work fine but not rubbings of water. Between ice and water there’s an evidentiary limit.".

1. the lightest material in the world (Five Studies)

2. photogram of memory wire

D

These studies went on for months. When I returned to the city, images were everywhere, their impact was enormous. It wasn't all the signs and shop windows or how people dressed or spoke but how everything changed overnight. By morning, a new word entered every conversation; a color or pattern appeared everywhere. Images were being passed around like words and it was a new language, an asemic, semantically open language; a language that defined things by appearance and resisted definition altogether.

The city and its language caused these studies of evidence to look different, as if they were types of images. (types of flowers or types of people.) What I had seen as proof took on the appearance of pictures and with time it became increasingly difficult to deny this tendency of the mind to invent; to imagine what isn't there: a turtle; a map; things with the appearance of words and numbers...

ink/canvas

ink/paper

ink on canvas

It occurred to me, at some point during the winter, that words might be a second material,
something in the order of light.

November, 2015

Image as Noun

'Image' is a noun like 'dog' or 'truck' but it's difficult to imagine an image, without imagining an image of something, an
'image of a tulip,' for example. The tulip could be anything.

If the image is x, and the tulip is y, as in 'x of y,' then y could be a fish...y could be any thing but the 'image' (x) could be something else too. For example, evidence is 'of' something and 'thought' is of a thing.

December, 2015

OF (i; ii; iii)

‘Of’ phrases often make more sense in one direction:

                i.    'Thought of a tulip,' makes sense but not 'tulip of a thought' (y of x).
                   It's easy to think a tulip is 'in' a thought, that 'tulip' is smaller than 'thought.'

                ii.   But, in 'image of an image,' x and y are the same and still, the second 'image' (x) is inside the first image (y).
                        The syllogism is not decided by a word at all.

                iii.     In 'part of an image,' something else happens. 'Part ' is in the first position (x); the part is inside the image (y)
                        and yet the phrase makes sense. Exchanging the values of x and y, we have an 'image of a part,' the part is no
                         longer inside a larger whole. The image is confined now to the edges of this part. A small part limits
                          the whole; has made it small and defined the image.

February, 2016

Image and Name

A 'thought of a tulip' makes sense but not a 'tulip of a thought.' When the tulip appears before thought, 'thought' becomes redundant. The tulip is thought when it's named. Returning to 'thought of a word' and to 'image of a word,' both make sense. We can see the 'image of a word' (x of y) looking at a foreign language. Words have an appearance, it's one of their properties, words appear like everything, but the word is not a type of image anymore than actual images are types of words. Indeed 'image' is a word, it's a noun like 'dog' or 'truck' but to imagine the image we need a word that is like an image, not alike in its meaning however, because images don't define things like words at all. We need a word that is like an image in terms of what it does. Dropping down several classes, notice that words are not 'of' things at all. Nouns are not of things either but proper nouns are of things. A 'name' is 'of' something. Take the name 'Lucy.' Lucy, being named, appears now as a thought, yet she has no specific appearance. Lucy might be tall or not; brunette or not, indeed 'Lucy' might be the name of a friend or a boat or a cat. With such variant properties, a name approaches taxonomy from the side. 'Tulip' is the name 'of' a flower; 'flower' is the name of a plant; 'plant,' of organism and so on, names neither ascend or descend. Although they're used for putting things in order, names don't classify and neither does the image classify. A name is a window.

Spring. For the first time in my life, I struggled with painting and entire days were spent sitting on a park bench, watching the city. One morning a man asked for a cigarette then he sat down beside me and started to talk. As I realized he was talking to himself, it occurred to me then that I was involved in something similar. I had been seeing things. The insight came to me casually at first. I observed that this had been a long hallucination; a delusion I sustained for over fifteen years. Then the thought grew into an epiphany that receded briefly and came back again much stronger as a burning behind my eyes and waves of nausea. As I watched my sight change in front of me, the epiphany became enormous, a revelation arriving in waves.

I soon realized that my loss of vision, was actually an immense oversight. It was not just that appearance is arbitrary, but that it distracts from a much greater blindness: the smell of a flower doesn't resemble a flower. Neither does a taste or sound resemble anything—and why would the sense of sight be different? Why would an appearance resemble what's there at all?

Having made it through life on appearances, I struggled to make a living and spent increasing amounts of time on benches, writing, doing jobs, cleaning; then welding, construction and mechanical work, painting privately from twenty years of habit. Once alone, the work was sovereign from any significance. I noticed then that the fumes of this freedom could be ignited by even the smallest spark, shedding light on something I had never seen before. At first it was only a glimpse, just my imagination, I thought. With time, however, these sparks brought more light and soon the view opened up into a much larger field; where everything is said to appear, and all, it's said, is vanity.

"Sign, Word; Word, Name:"

Summer. A year later, driving north again from Halifax at night, I saw a green sign off the highway near Truro. If the sign had been anywhere else, or even if it was in the same place but turned around, it wouldn’t be true. After a period of uncertainty a second sign appeared across the causeway and, identical to the first, this second sign was no longer a prediction, now it was a name for the hill and for the island. Driving back into the night, I considered the space between signs and imagined that the length of this road; the distance between the first sign and second sign, was removed, so that doubt wasn't so long and winding. I realized of course that this is exactly what had happened. Arriving on the island, my doubt disappeared from the middle and, no sooner had it happened, than the portion shifted to one side; doubt sprang up again between the name and the hill. I drove past the sign considering the way doubt is resolved between signs (A) but not between a sign and hill (B) and recognized B as both a 13th century problem and the dogma of painters. With a few hours left of driving, thoughts returned to the road between signs again and to the doubt, always so central to evidence.

In paintings that summer I had intended to focus on ways that one material becomes 'of' another but getting started, I could no longer find the fracture, it had disappeared or healed somehow and there was no longer any correspondence between first and second materials. The center was missing. Really, the missing center was missing and this surprised me. I went over my process [the text you're reading here] which as you can see involved analysis; periods of solitude; lyricism, song and elements of vanity. Then, the description becomes very simple, something like folk art or problems from a high school physics book: "a blue truck is driving north and meets a red van driving south..."

photograph of Aspy Bay

September, 2017

[...] snow melts down from the mountains, into a pool. The air gets warmer. Fog hangs over the pool until it rises around noon and disappears. At 4pm there are clouds. It rains. The pool gets deeper and higher for a week. The pool pushes a channel through the sandbar and empties into the ocean. The sand is carried back and forth when the tide changes, mixing with water, the sand leaves a line, evidence of itself on the beach when the tide goes down.

October, 2017

coloured stones are ground into sand and mixed with linseed, paint is a mixture of liquid and solid, it’s a first and a second material. They [paintings] are not images at all.

by 2017 the ground was combed over. I returned to this surface over and over and found, to my surprise, that something was there, in the centre, something rather than nothing. The Proof Paintings were like a soil that turned over for about four years and then one day they fit into a tulip.

I had always thought painters' issues were outside their paintings, so I was surprised by the severity of problems that followed from these studies. It began very simply. I'd been visiting Earl on and off for years. After the portraits he sat for me and sometimes when I was drawing, he'd forget what we were doing. Earl was already without one sense and now almost without sound and I remembered painting portraits before, how it was like looking in a mirror, looking at someone, then looking for the person until you find them in the drawing. I wondered what it would be like to lose every sense, one by one, until you knew the world with only one sense as it is known in images.

With time Earl stopped recognizing me and eventually we were meeting for the first time every few weeks. Both happy to meet somebody new, this common sense between us; between his sense of touch and mine of vision, this is familiar to painters. The eye can't after all do anything but watch; can't help but be charmed by the hand fumbling colors, thumbing them into pictures in the dark. Earl always remembered the fifties and sixties but not the portrait or the song we played every week so I started to make notes of our conversations and each page read like a script, as if we were rehearsing or practicing a tradition.

When the world is exactly as it's remembered, there is no need for memory. In the spirit of amusement we focused on finding materials that Earl had never touched before: A metal that melts in your hand; a material that is 99.99% air; a wire that remembers its shape and returns to that shape when it's warm. My reminders became videos, something like studies that replaced the drawings and that's when the problems started.

I noticed how touch sometimes interrupts a material's program or obscures its consistency. Or, when a material with some kind of change, for example the wire, dropped out of contact, I could often see what Earl had missed. At first the eye seemed particularly good at noticing changes. But then, looking out Earl's window, I started to notice how things drop in and out of appearance all the time. These changes or repetitions are what define one thing from another. In fact, the word consistency is a synonym for the word material. Then I began to see these consistencies as programs. "Five Studies" became a study of the world and its programs.

Immortal Invisible
Reminders evolved into formal studies, these became models and the models were applied to the process of learning; of observing natural changes like the seasons. A person passes through these cycles in one direction, through the repetitions, across a field of snow and back through a field of flowers every spring. I began to look closely and although I couldn't always see a full program, it was easy to notice how materials had directions. Some things look the same forward and backward; a rock can be looped or played in reverse and so can a blade of grass or tree, even some waterfalls and rivers look the same in both directions and yet the motion of other things can't be reversed. When a bee, a seagull or any living creature enters the frame, certain rules emerge, "living animals move in one direction and are difficult to loop or reverse"; "A tree in the wind, or anything with roots, might be reversed but not looped without a seam" and so on. These seams appeared to define the edges of programs. My focus became this line where elements in the world are inconsistent with one another, seams where something could be removed the way a plant is removed by its roots and put into new soil. These visual observations, in combination with Earl's stories and songs led from "Five Studies" to the film "Immortal Invisible," a film about putting the world together, made shortly before his death.

I had discovered something very simple. and when the opportunity came up, I agreed to paint portraits for a university.

Starting with an oval, eyes are always in the middle of the head. At this stage you could be looking at anybody, heads are always the same. It's best to look at the thing head-on, as if in a mirror. Then the process is like recognizing someone on the street except you're hoping to run into them in the lines of your drawing and, similar to the street, this meeting happens almost by chance. Your model is supposed to be still and you can't move much either, if you slouch the chin looks long; stand up too high and the eyes drop down on the person's head. Once you encounter your subject in the drawing these rules about where to put their eyes and mouth aren't as important anymore. Drawing is like holding someone in your memory, if you can hold them this way the portrait is easier, you can step to one side and see them from another angle.

There are two schools for mixing colors. Some painters mix colors on the palette, others thin the paint out and put it down in layers called glazes. Light bounces around between glazes as it does in layers of skin but each layer takes time to dry and this matters because formal portraits are often commissioned at the end of a person's life meaning the method you decide to use might depend on how close your subject is to dying. If you're working in glazes you might be invited to a funeral. Here the eyelids and lips are more still than they were in the first sitting. The eyes and mouth are in the same place but every line seems different. The face is difficult to recognize. It's as if the subject of your portrait was replaced with a new subject, something that used to be called haecceity.

When the portrait is finished it gets photographed, then printed and the glazes disappear into a single layer. These prints move around between rooms and they're vulnerable to trends in décor and rules about pictures that come and go. The rules don't last long, nor do prints but the paintings are put into an archive in the basement and could last thousands of years.

When I finished the portraits and each of the subjects had died, I continued with portraiture in what became Five Studies, and later, Immortal Invisible.

Taste Test
2013.
150cm x 150cm
oil on linen.

"The Havana Paintings" had been moving around sometimes into galleries and universities and the arbitrariness of these paintings surprised me. Along with the costume and skin tones, the paintings were described as props in a type of theatre. It made no difference what I painted and this arbitrariness became a freedom, it meant that I could paint whatever I wanted. While the Havana Paintings were moving around, this panel on the left was photographed and sent to be considered for a prize. Hearing nothing back, painting A went to Cuba; B to New York; I painted over C, then B went from New York to a gallery in North Adams, Massachusetts. That was about one week before I got a letter, "Taste Test" might receive a prize and the photograph was printed a hundred and seventeen thousand times, put into a book; sent out with a national newspaper. It would be exhibited in a few museums; a bank considered buying the painting and a truck was coming to pick it up.

I considered going to Havana to find the small paintings. By now they'd be in Cuba or perhaps Spain. Then I thought about making three new paintings using the photograph as a model. The idea that this new painting might be false didn't occur to me. A tree or a blade of grass can be green but a tree can't be true, only a statement about the tree is true. If I used the photograph as a model, like the model of a building before the building is made, it was promissory like a vow or prediction; like telling your son you'll be by the fountain at eight, a statement that isn't true or false until later. It was getting late though and what did occur to me is that the painting had been bound to itself and whatever I decided to do, its appearance was no longer arbitrary.

A.
Taste Test (detail), 2013.
150cm x 150cm, oil on linen.

B.
Taste Test (detail), 2013.
150cm x 150cm
oil on linen.

In Havana the paintings had become souvenirs. Anything can be a souvenir, a spoon you had as a kid; a cup; chair; carpet; flower; boot or sock, dish, rock, stick, chestnut and a souvenir can refer to anything; to any person or place. For example these souvenirs were paintings, floating around Havana, the paintings were made from pictures, often of Nova Scotia and usually taken by my father. In 2008 I started to look to the pictures for clues, evidence of what happened to him. Looking more carefully, I noticed how the same forms repeat. Students step in front of the same background; different people step into place, the chin is lifted slightly, turned to the left; each one roughly the same shape draped in different patterns from different decades as if they were not people at all but adjectives filling in a form. Stock images don't seem to change but in fact they're constantly updated and otherwise obsolete. A lapel or carpet; boot or sock; dish; chair; haircut; stone becomes dated. It no longer refers to the child on an eternal beach, it refers to a specific point in time and to the passing of time, no longer a picture of the past it's a picture in the past, caught up in the passage of time.

For example, looking through the albums I found a black and white picture of a room. In the room there's a cat. Behind the cat, two photographs on a shelf: a sunset and a flower at dusk. Then the 1940s and 50s, a formal decade where the whole family is dressed-up and lined up beside a row of corn; a man is photographed twice, only ever in a suit, once at his wedding, once at the baptism of his daughter, a few pictures per decade increases in the 1960s to hundreds per year in the 70s and the man is now shirtless, unshaven at breakfast next to a blurry foot or a small dog, it's impossible to tell whether he had changed or it was photography that had become more casual, accidental less caring amongst thousands of pictures from the 90s, the same bodies still in the same rooms and there it is again. The cat.

On a chair this time and again in the background there are two photographs, a sunset and a flower but now, somehow, they're both in color. This was my clue, flipping back through the decades, through thousands of pictures back into the fifties it became clear the black and white photo was taken in the 90s and mistaken for the 1940s. This was my clue: in a black and white photo everything is black and white. A newer generation of images can photograph an older generation of images but not the other way around.

In these years I sometimes painted from photographs. On a personal note, probably embarrassing but nonetheless true, when my father was lost at sea; when there was an investigation I looked through his photographs for clues but nothing was found, no body or note, just pictures of flowers; a wedding, children, sunsets and so on. It occurred to me then that there were no formal differences between these and other pictures. They were something like stock images. I continued to make paintings from these pictures, sent them to Havana where the subjects were not as important as the reds and greens. An obsolete red from Kodak sold best and a green hue, a popular accident of exposing outdoor film to indoor light. These colors were nostalgic, not only involving the passage of time but also a distance in time, a lapse between countries that made the colors quaint like old American cars that still move around Havana.

There was typhoid and a civil war so I was taken from Sri Lanka and offered a job teaching French and English at a high school in Cuba.

2005-2006

The Havana Paintings started by sitting in a chair and drawing a cabbage. At one time Cuba had two currencies, one for locals, the other for tourists and the currencies didn't cross. I was part of the local system, we had rations for beans, rice, oil, necessities but not ice cubes, popsicles, pizza, vegetables and so on, and so there was, at that time, a thriving black market. The man who happened to own this cabbage wanted to use my drawing as a sign and I soon discovered it was possible to trade a drawing of lettuce for actual lettuce or a drawing of ice cubes for real ice cubes. Then one day a black vendor sold one of my pictures to a tourist.

The vendor had crossed currencies. He sold my drawing as if it were his. He owned it after all and we eventually learned the drawings were almost arbitrary, as long as the person selling them looked Cuban. After a while I had a lot of drawings and some paintings and I decided to put together a portfolio for the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. To my surprise the application required a drawing of a cabbage. I already had three cabbage drawings. Two had been sold to tourists so I sent the last cabbage with a few other drawings and received a scholarship to study painting in Halifax.

2008-2011

At the art college Garry Neill Kennedy liked my stories from Havana and he encouraged me to apply for government funding. After graduating, I was given a grant and by combining that with the vegetable stand, a few exhibitions and some talks at the university I was able to keep painting.

In 2003 I was told I wouldn't graduate. My grades were good but my attendance was not and I remember walking down the hallway to the guidance councillor's office. It was empty. On her desk I found a pamphlet with a picture of a young woman drinking from a coconut. While waiting I decided that if I was valedictorian they would let me graduate and a few months later that's what happened. Cleaning my room one day I came across the pamphlet again and called a number at the bottom of the first page. They offered me work in Sri Lanka. I found Sri Lanka on the map and that's where I went.

At the age of eighteen I'd never really left Nova Scotia. It was very exciting, I was seeing the world. Then one day after Christmas there was a tsunami and, looking around, I thought the world was ending. This thought lasted a few days. Eventually I noticed that it was difficult to distinguish between my world and the world. That was the beginning of my interest in appearances.

("As it was Written" unknown date)

My father practiced law. My mother was a journalist. My older brother was better at everything but when I started to draw something happened. They looked at me differently and for a short time they spoke to me like an adult. It happened again when I started to write stories. It was as if I gained a few years with each paragraph and with time I preferred this older voice, so I wrote a lot. I had many ideas then and it was difficult to keep them in order. I can see this in notebooks now, how I wrote constantly as if I saw thoughts everywhere. Then there was a phase when thoughts slowed down or were not written down or I had no more ideas. They didn't come to me. I can see this by looking back at notes too and how, later in notebooks, my earlier thoughts begin to reappear; to repeat themselves years later in new notes as if I was either copying my younger self or else I was observing the same things again many years later. Eventually reading these books became fascinating to me and with time it was clear that, rather than going out to encounter new thoughts, as one would encounter different friends, new women or new places, I was going out less and had become less of a writer and more of a reader.

Going back through piles of notebooks took years. At times I was jealous of this young man. Unhappy with my modest position as his reader. Other times I saw his genius as I imagine he did, as sparks and epiphanies, fireworks in a dark and perfect night:

"It's as if there were two selves. One is enormously productive, the other works almost as fast organising, hiding things, putting things away. One gets ahead of the Other by causing the Other to hesitate."

Now, taking on the task of guiding and putting his young thoughts in order, it seemed to me that I was the Other and that this Other had somehow gotten ahead. How many years ahead, I'm not sure but organizing this young man's thoughts I felt as if I could be his father or at least a father figure. Sometimes I wished I could say to him that many of these ideas aren't going anywhere. Many hundreds of thoughts and phrases are not his genius. "Maybe there is an idea that would contain the others. Maybe it's difficult for you to commit," I would say knowing that he wouldn't and couldn't hear me. I also, more privately, believed that perhaps it is right for a young man to encounter many thoughts over many years and only then should he stop to organize these thoughts.

Then there are other times when I feel I'm not ahead at all but behind this young man, trying to keep up with him, with so much more reading left to do. Even then my thoughts tend toward the advice of most editors. "It could be much shorter. Much easier to read" if only because I have so much less time now and increasingly less. I imagine his response-- really what do you know? What have you accomplished? But still from here I do know certain things. I can see he's not going anywhere with many of these ideas. He will end up in a small room with a table and a green chair in the corner. Still, as it is with young men, he's just compelled to write and watching him do this is at times difficult if not embarrassing or even painful, not only because of the many hundreds of thousands of misguided words but because I have so much time to read his ideas, many of which are silly, and although I am compelled to do so he seems indifferent, even to resent my guidance. Sometimes he says so outright in the language, in notes about an editor, a teacher, about those who can't do, those who coerce his young words. And yet here I am. I can't help but agree. He is afterall doing most of the work.

Some days, in dark passages I wish I could tell him not to worry, to take the day off, go make some money and take her out for a cup of coffee. I wish I could tell him that there is a bigger picture, a condition, and if you keep working exactly as you are you will not have to decide, it is already decided. You will not have to commit. You are already committed. Your writing is a way of waiting. Your writing is a way of watching; of watching how things happen without you. Your words will be polished by the passage of time. There is no need to worry. Your writing, your waiting, your distaste for submissions; your failure to submit, I am rooting for you.

As I near my conclusion, I am grateful to this young man whose words have reached my desk today. He leaves small citations as if they were designed for me like one from the poet Virgil who wrote that "Wisdom doesn't come with age but modesty might." With time I am learning to accept my position as his reader. I find some of his paragraphs see beyond their years. In this case, I've left his words exactly as they were written.
1997 or 2003