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Palimpsest, HAN ZHANG, Ink on paper, 26″ x 40″, 2009

Palimpsest, HAN ZHANG, Ink on paper, 26″ x 40″, 2009

Writing gives grounds to thoughts

December 14, 2015

Who doesn't think while doing nothing? If you try to meditate, you will understand how difficult it is to freeze your thoughts, or even to let them swing by without leaving a trace. But the fear of not being able to put these thoughts into the symbolic structure of language always overshadows the importance of thinking. Like an artist in front of a white canvas, the fear of putting down the first stroke could already dispel all the wonderful visualizations conjured in the mind. So nothingness, as the origin of any beginning, could be as powerful as the things that follow.

Artists do sketches on the canvas as a way to eventually arrive at an ideal composition. As each stroke builds onto the previous one, the past is already being redefined by the present, as the present seeks to define the future. It's a circularity that connects every beginning to a past that is always already constituting the future. 

This circularity of the beginning and end is never perfect. Things leak. Traces, palimpsests, marks, scars...as every action conceives its uncontrollable consequences, the loop of the making of the thing is always leaking. Ideas leak from words. Images leak from the eyes. Thoughts leak from the absent-mindedness. Can we preserve the leaks? How do we come to terms with the inevitable disappearance of these traces, often even without us noticing? 

How do we conceive writing not as a formal practice of putting thoughts into fixed symbolic structures, but rather as a practice of sketching, of meditation, of making a promise? What does this promise look like? A ghost gesture? A piece of cloud with an ephemeral form? A shore? Can we conceive writing as kids sketching in the sands, knowing that the next wave of thought will ruthlessly wash off whatever is written there? 

Writing gives grounds to thoughts, even if it is temporary, ephemeral and shapeless. That is why I write, whenever I get a chance to transfer my thoughts into a sketch on my shore of ideas. 

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