A Line
Original text (translated)
It’s not the word perfect that matters in the statement, but the immediacy in which it is uttered.
If I draw a line on the page, right now, in the present of the drawing act, it is a line that exists.
It didn’t exist before, and you won’t know what becomes of it after. But now, right now, there is a line — and it’s so extraordinary we no longer even notice.
The brain may seize the line — its image, mostly — for it can’t grasp the line itself. It will interpret it, endlessly, and in time grow tired of failing to find it a reason, a meaning. It will reduce it to banality. Just a line. So what ?
Let’s return to the origin of the line. At its origin, there’s only a point : the contact point of hand, pencil, and page, in a given instant. That’s where it begins.
The start of a story. A point set in motion by the hand, moved by a gesture, travelling — along a straight, a curve, a mood.
To consider this is to become very small. To reach, if one can, the microscopic scale of graphite and feel carried by the power of that journey.
Is our life so different from that wandering point, cloning itself in the spacetime of a movement — here, then there — the same and different, always, along a simple pencil line ?
What is doesn’t need to be more than that. What is, is perfect, for existence, faced with nothing, is both banal and wondrous.
Trouble arises when we try to assert an existence in relation to anything at all. For then that “anything” is born from contradiction, and grows stronger the more we try to reject it.
If I erase the line to return to a clean surface — if I seek the idea of cleanliness — the smallest speck will infest my brain.
Holding to the in-between, like a half-open door in the moment when things are born and die, demands great self-denial. And none. It is a mystery.
Reduction
A line. There. Wasn’t. Is.
Nothing more. No before. No after.
Hand. Pencil. Paper. A point. Then the point moves.
Straight, curve, mood. It goes. It splits. It forgets. It returns.
We look. We think. We tire.
The line need not be. It is.
Erase ? Nothing is clean. All dirties.
Stay. Between. Between before and after. Between nothing and nearly.
No meaning. No sense. But still, there.
