Response to the Double Bass and Black as a Color
What the dog wants and what the poem wants are maybe the same thing – to be let out, to eat, to be paid attention to. But various moments have various demands and so often it feels like one is just pushing paper around, rearranging things.
But then one wants to be let in. Or left alone. And what one had put down a moment ago is now impossible to find.
Execution of the thing itself – one feels the dis-ease of having to say something, having to speak. The question is how to include the parentheticals, the italicized thought, without actually using parentheses or italics and perhaps without even including the words themselves.
One is reminded of that long-ago figure of Rilke before his Cezannes – the ordering of words to mean what words had not been made to speak in order to meet this strange new use of color.
Just this morning I saw a woman stretch her perfect angular body this way and that before jumping into the pool and swimming lap after lap after lap. Later, another woman bent into similar angles in the kitchen of a house for rent, painting the cupboards black.
Standing before any thing one wants to be the thing left out. Resistance, attraction, agitation. The mind won’t stay seated for long.
If I moved this chair or this color would it change the whole room?
I simultaneously imagine telling my friend on the phone “Something tremendous is happening to me†and finding a big fat flea on the belly of the dog.
What is one in relation to black? Having to be the absence of that.
The way one resents having to eat, move, touch taste, fashion a response, act – when nothing else does.
The recitation of a list of names as incantation against ending. Think of it: any names, all that one can remember, baseball players, jazz musicians, actresses, presidents, recited silently in the mind while making love.
And there are different kinds of black. The infinitely long arm of the boy in the picture by Cezanne. What impels the dog to get up and move one spot to the next? What makes one stop before this color or that?
With white it’s different. All you can do is divide it with a line or a gesture or a remark.
Even to say white – what does it make one do? Makes one want to go outside, wave one’s arms in the air in imitation of a tree against the light of the sky.
Black as diction. As subset of words one might choose if one were to say some such thing. And then to step out of that both as deliberate shift in tone and the resignation of throwing up one’s hands. To be then told: no, this doesn’t fit, you should’ve stayed in black.
Awkward silence. Not merely the bird in flight but its path of flight and precise distance receding.
It is precisely because one wanted to use some word that it must not be uttered, one must press it down in the mind until it is not even thought but still there behind and above the others, informing and as it were uttering them.
