When You Insist on Finding Limits, You Always Find Them. Why Is That?

[Image: “Theory of Boundaries,” by Mel Bochner (photo by cliff1066 on Flickr). Click to enlarge. Each of the four rectangles contains text arranged like fractions, respectively: at/in; over/in; (blank)/in; and at/out. For the artist’s comments, see the note at the foot of this post, or visit cliff1066’s Flickr page.]

From whiskey river (which offered a particularly rich array of ruminations this week):

Day Dream

One day people will touch and talk perhaps
easily,
And loving be natural as breathing and warm as
sunlight,
And people will untie themselves, as string is unknotted,
Unfold and yawn and stretch and spread their fingers,
Unfurl, uncurl like seaweed returned to the sea,
And work will be simple and swift
as a seagull flying,
And play will be casual and quiet
as a seagull settling,
And the clocks will stop, and no one will wonder
or care or notice,
And people will smile without reason,
Even in winter, even in the rain.

(A. S. J. Tessimond)

…and:

The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tent show whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a muddied field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.

(Cormac McCarthy)

…and:

The Long Road

It’s one of those highways you come across late at night. No signs. No arrows. Just a road running north and south. You pause. You look one way. Then the other. Nothing. Only the hum of the engine, the chirping of crickets confirm you are here. You can’t remember where you’ve been. Where you are going. If it weren’t for the lines drawn through the middle, you’d think you were drifting down a river. Or stumbling upon a path through the sky. Remember. It is a moonless night. You are tired. Hungry. No one to talk to. Afraid what you were thinking might have come true. You look to your left again. Perhaps you see a mountain. An ocean. A lover you wish you hadn’t lost. Spirits that seem so familiar, drifting in from the dark. You wait in that silence. It may be years before it is safe to proceed.

(David Shumate, The Floating Bridge: Prose Poems)

…and:

Do You Know Who You Are

O you forever listed
under some other heading
when you are listed at all
You whose addresses
when you have them
are never sold except
for another reason
something else that is
supposed to identify you
who carry no card
stating that you are —
what would it say you were
to someone turning it over
looking perhaps for
a date or for
anything to go by
you with no secret handshake
no proof of membership
no way to prove such a thing
even to yourselves
you without a word
of explanation
and only yourselves
as evidence

(W. S. Merwin)

Not from whiskey river:

Through meditation one realizes the unbounded.
That which is unbounded is happy.
There is no happiness in the small.

(Upanishads)

…and:

The Sun and the Cave

One day the sun and a cave struck up a conversation. The sun had trouble understanding what “dark” and “dank” meant and the cave didn’t quite get the hang of “light and clear” so they decided to change places. The cave went up to the sun and said, “Ah, I see, this is beyond wonderful. Now come down and see where I have been living.” The sun went down to the cave and said, “Gee, I don’t see any difference.”

(Sufi tale)

…and:

Siesta
after Montale

You lie through midday in the shade
of a sun-baked garden wall, pale,
absorbed by the crackle of blackbirds, the rustle
of snakes in the dry sticks and thorns;

you try to decipher the red lines of ants that scrawl
through the climbing plants, down through the ruts
of the scorched ground, to break and braid
and break again over the tops of their little mounds;

you might see, through the leaves, the distant pulse
of the sea, the distinct green scales of the waves,
while the churning of cicadas rises,
chiding and fricative, up from the empty heights.

And then you will walk, sun-blinded,
into the slow and bitter understanding
that all this life and all its heart-sick wonder
is just the following of a wall
ridged with bright shards of broken glass

(Robin Robertson)

___________________

About the image: The photographer, cliff1066, includes this note:

…the work itself uses language to state the formal logic determining the relationships between the colored surface, the border, and quality of enclosure in each of the work’s four squares. These relationships are presented in the form of what Bochner calls a “language fraction.”

According to the artist’s explanation in a note-card study for the work: “The first term of the language fraction refers to the tangential relationship of the film–color in this case–and the border. The second term refers to its position (the film) as regards the sense of enclosure (enclosure considered as condition of position).” Using Bochner’s explanation, one can therefore see that in the far left square of the work the boundary of the color surface is at the border and in the enclosure; in the second square the boundary of the color surface is over the border and in the enclosure; in the third square the boundary of the color surface has no relationship to the border (this is why the first term of the fraction is empty) and is in the enclosure; and in the last square the boundary is at the border but out of the enclosure. Theory of Boundaries is in this way both a statement about the underlying formal principles of painting, and painting itself.

What to make of this? I think I’d best not limit the range of possible interpretations.