The Poetics of the Remix Wants To Be Rediscovered

If I see an object, my perception of it is focused on how it can be used. If you tell me that it’s not about how it is used, but rather how it is observed, then I understand that what I can come up with is a description of it. But then, you tell me that instead of describing it, I can draw it. To me, that is a prompt for rethinking the meanings of the modal verb can. If you mean that I am permitted to draw a picture of what I see, then I agree and say: “I know I can, but I won’t.” If you think that I am capable of drawing a picture of the object,  it makes me think of the word capability. I can certainly use a pencil, crayons, or, other tools and create something. Whether it can be called a drawing, or, more precisely, whether it can meet the definition of a drawing by the standards that I take to be the determinants of what a drawing is, that’s another question. If the former, I say :“I can, but I won’t.” If the latter, I say: “I can’t.”

But I can think about what the site of that object does to me, how it mobilizes my imaginative and cognitive potentials, how it sets my sense of definition in motion. I see all objects as motionless images, frozen in time, forgotten, waiting to be rediscovered. I see objects as the remote corners of somebody’s memory that has run out of its vital powers. To me, they are hibernated gems alien to everybody’s awareness…well, perhaps except for the awareness that detects their beautiful presence in the midst of the world that is resolutely, persistently acknowledging their absence as the given. Wrongly so.

I see that hibernated beauty as the memory hidden from its holder, tickling imagination from the pockets of the mind, smiling from afar. Traces of memory. Inspiration for somebody’s stories. A gateway to the awareness of the world within worlds. The abundance overflowing from beneath the reminiscence frozen in Chronos’s diary. Time is covered in snow. All memories are ice sculptures. Immobile. A monument to the moment of its coming into being.

(A thought of you is a summer night by the river. Full of dark green smell. Saturated with dampness of the drizzle coating your face with a thought of me.)

I like the language I can understand and speak. It’s called the poetics of the remix.

If all memories are ice sculptures, one of them is standing. It is bending the knees so that the back is slightly bent, too. Its thoughts are long roads. Roads that meet railways at the crossroads of desire. Long years. If time could erase experience, this imagery would be something else. Traces of experiences in each thought, each movement, each breath. Sometimes that’s what time is : the experience condensed in the frozen moment of the memory of the dark green summer night. When I only knew that if I had had only two words to describe the universe, these two words would have been warm velvet.

A thought in the mind of the ice sculpture is another ice figure whose position of the neck directs the face towards the horizon. Its look is the clash of colors before they melt in the thawing rigidity of the crumpling, welding hindrances from Chronos’s diary. If Chronos’s obstacles were omnipotent, all experience would be on the pages of its diary. It would be the same as a thought of an ice sculpture. Sometimes, the whole dark green universe of the night when the warmth had a velvety touch to it is a plethora of frozen moments at the crossroads of desire. The crossroads where the horizon speaks in the language of two colors : Yo majestic gerberaness! Open up & do mafotherfucking speak!

The eye of the ice sculpture is the ribcage tightly held by the spine. It is in alignment with the angle the face forms with the thigh. The only reason why it does not lower all the way down to meet the knee is because there are things that one doesn’t do despite the seeming appeal. In the language called the poetics of the remix, it is called hic & nunc : sweet fruit and freedom fromeverything, but not for anything. If all emotions could be reduced to the shamefully restrictive choice between sadness and anger, or, some such banality, the world would be populated by the memories of dreams of ice sculptures. If it were so, there would be no room for reminiscing the glorious smile that brought into my life something that I recognized as a reawakened sparkle of my own ember : the glow of my own smile.

If an ice sculpture were music, it would be the whisper of the river on the night when I didn’t know how the universe speaks, but I knew that it spoke to me. It had a voice of the biggest, brightest sky that touched my heart with such intensity that I thought it was a song whose lyrics I could not interpret, but I recognized something that I knew so well, just as I know it now : the sunny clime.

I look at those solid lacy formations. One at a time. Each of them fills my eyes with the amount and kind of stillness that I cannot move. Paralyzes thoughts. Emerging again. Makes me want to immerse myself totally in the chasm of emptiness. And I do. I look at the lifted forearm and the angle the elbow creates and it opens up the whole wide world for me. The universe speaks. It says: ”goodRA! i mean holyshitfuckwhadever…Do you draw eine kleine, or, digitalen arbaiten thou prefer? Preferably, thou, little eine, are learning, have been learning---gedafuckouda here and emancipate YO good self from the enslavement by tenses!”

Point taken, yo rocking majestic wordness!

How on earth can one think the site emotionally? How to think ice with the mind of the fire engine fueling the words as they are popping up and out from their secret storage. Me hereby refuseth to be immersed in the process whose valences are strikingly opposite to the chemistry of playfulness.

(My thought of countless light years sustained in a smile. The whole universe gleaming in the sparkle of the eyes aflame.)

I like the language I can understand and speak. It’s called the poetics of the remix.

Dapoltri!