Thomas Lowe Taylor -- IMAGE, MEMORY & EVENT

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The categories of reflection which apply to cases of acts, of which event is a singular disturbance, where the poetry of one’s life is arranged to generate states of information, when shyness outlasts its very presence, from style removed (at last) into its own doubts and sentences, among all the parts of its labors, where what is spoken as thing and demeanor has the quality of presence endeavored by all that precedes the name or act of anything else to its proprieties and actual resonances, where others include by the force of their humanness to the ceremonies underway, which they are always to the exclusion of arts and times, in the actual spaces they have before them in the offerings which have been made and done to the actual dimensions of pleasure, power and the illumination of moments to their included spaces, where it is throughout what one is doing and everything to its place.
So I think we are really at the relation of memory and events, where we are wholly attached to what we know already to be true and directed out of all that passes for what we are toward the simplicity of continuing and doing in the midst of experiencing, that where we have come toward all that we remember out of what is good in our lives, that we have in us always the mode and vehicle of our gestures and plans, but a drama as we might name it first of the place where we lived and then as the ceremony in which that life took its center and focus for its dimension toward movement, finally out of what happens through the calculations and proprieties of speech toward a behavior in which cleverness and intelligence are surpassed by the force and drive of the physical good toward its mirror in the eyes of others, from all their premises regained from the center of outward motion that the manifestos of energy around which we make our intense preparations contain the essential plans and motives of all that we are in the midst of our clamoring attention, toward the one and center of the community of acts from which the center of the universe is regained. As one is the center and touched place of all that acts in its eloquence of description, how the residues resolve all hesitation and discord toward completion, where all that is selective and compulsory in the selections of attention diminish even the visual pressure of location, that even as one remembers he knows his continuing, that one is never lost to thought, that those hypnoses of recollection are never total; the functioning of events is thus to load the situation to its resonant and utter dimension, and that at those moments “in event,” the shape of the possible occurs with the wisdom of what we all know together as a fact.
What has to be maintained is that there is no chance to it, and that must be qualified in the following way, first, that the notations of attention are direct and allow the very shape of the event beyond all dramatic possessions, that as movement is the absolute that it is only the permission of the good which follows the event through its surfaces to the center of acts, the person. And second, that while the manipulations and physical drifts of sequence, or time, remain fixed in their initial rhythms, the sudden as a quality of information, persists with its relation to cause paramount, that what occurs is not necessarily necessary, but that it occurs. There is some recognition in that, where the person warps to allowance, in an almost gratuitous gesture of familiarity, with the assurance that the ceremony is ameliorative, and that the choice is always insistent and correct, that way out of guilt.
The time of acts, then, presses toward an inclusion of each to his means, where the solid and elementary coincidences of preparation, for instance, contain the germs of response called for by the situation. The experiment, then, could become a model of behavior surpassing even a poem or a visual test (glancing), in its totally effective functioning as a metaphor for the whole. Dimensions of preparation are calculated toward the pressures of the particular moment when they can be revived out of the psychology and perfection, where they remind across insistence, of the forms at hand, since what is critical to the topic—memory and events—is a proper placement of acts and forms as they relate to cause and person in our hesitant theory of ceremonies. I mean, if we are to proceed to the village, whom shall we ask, anyone? And if he suffers from our speech, where could we assure him of our good intentions if not at home?
So there are the final considerations to make preliminary even to acts, the special deaths we imagine for ourselves which precede the history of any event in which we choose to focus our delicate and particularly detached sensations; they are carefully guarded, not out of particular fears, but through their maintenance and design, if it is not wholly abstract to determine cause from place.
Thinking and stillness advance through the isolations of the event toward our proper place and angle, in the midst of which some reminding would surround the antagonisms of space. Where we are mistaken, or taken for that, there is resemblance to cause rather than the state which results from movement, or a vernacular paradise suddenly called up by the notion of language or its plural. But even the style of a place seems to rest in the view we take, and the event locates to us without speed.
Where are we, then, if we are not, and when we are, are we there where we are and no place else; but reading, even, assures us of error, or we think so, so in seeing, we would have those same dogmatic lapses of demand and calculation which would hold to nouns. And images. But who are we in the image of what we see, and where is the knowledge that what we see is there if we come to it in memory, in that slow way of sequences. But we forget, too; I mean this seems to come way before the question about the sources of the assertive qualifications which lie in the realm of the act itself, or what a life could mean through its disturbances and variations to the one who suffers through its vagueness and interruption, though what presents itself, or what a life could mean through its disturbances and variations to the one who suffers through its vagueness and interruption, though what presents itself to a place, in recollection, has the force or drive of images, though we are still far from a visual reconstitution which has completion in its form or detachment from “the real.” The event in its location. The act in its purposes and persuasions toward action, where they are not so familiarly simple, where even a style outlasts its purposes and distinctions to meditation.
So there is nothing left to remind us of anything and we almost stop breathing, while all we know refuses to leave. There is that muscular geometry to dance which we could resolve through intention and design without losing the particular source which we so desire to maintain, a strategy of special losses, not to respond to particular situations in a tactical preparation for the whole thing, where all opportunities for withholding are surpasses by the magnitude of the event; it is measurable by the organism underway, the disturbance or the perception occurring contains the possibilities implicit in its existence, and so expands through its course toward the means that are available. The active agent collects through all the evidences and names to its special quality or intensity as an illumination or presence, as is commonly noted. The generative absolute, doing, and its complement, continuing, where the event underway draws everything toward its center while the shadow of its parts flies toward the extremes of behavior and style. Things are invented, and ways evolve.
What I am reminding myself of here is the cosmos contained in the act, and as a remedy of attention which I mean to yield image to its particular style of being and behaving, that what we meant was just that, and not out of surprise, either. And where we come out is not the same.
As a furthering would continue the same through its processes, where is nothing mysterious outside the necessities of dimension to drive toward its palpable sensations in doing, where a familiarity of observation can delude through the sensual and specific back toward the same or to notation, in its simple reflection. True reflection would emerge from its necessary tendencies and elegance to the relationship of balance in action, and here the cause of the act becomes a relevant addition to discourse, where the abstractions of the movements appropriated calculate the nature of the disturbance, since the drama of cause will not seem in all cases to be the same. Words continue out of their very substance toward the activities of name and place, where all that we remember carries us to the center of the drama which we have caused to emanate from our interior in the sole procession toward reflection, or completion, or connection; and it is here that mask and ceremony “come to light,” come to the points of reversal codified, for instance, in manuals and similarly proscriptive, deterministic containments of the one: the preliminary limits of the image are defined by the imagination underway, and where they connect in the ceremonial drama, whether neophytic or initiatory, from whatever dimension the information settles in, from whatever source derived, the location of cause and image is nonetheless simultaneous, where the workings-out of phase, sequence and doctrine are mutually explicit toward the numeral of discourse in its predilection to balance and discrimination. Now, whatever difficulty becomes apparent in the attribution “levels of consciousness” could become related or displayed (either) through the momentary designation “levels of discourse,” whereby a same or an equal could distinguish to the nature of the event in its differences and allowances.
So it is not exactly an aesthetic that is in motion, since any back-view would normally eliminate the specific energies of distinction which are in playing the movements of assembly, the retroactive is usually a barren and wholly new phenomenon and impinges on its causes only through such items as medium, image and memory and are substantially attached to event as adjuncts or appendices of calculation, rather like filling the possible with its own data, where “extent” manages through the discourse under consideration to be an adaptive procession of the margin toward extremes, always encompassing the definition or visions under consideration (“in view”) toward the restitution of balance which is continuant through means to origin and in which the organs of the constituency cooperate through reflection to cause and through cause to origin, where image of the world reads image as the world and continues through the consideration of the specific events as images of the context of life at play in a special circumstance or word.
Similarly, the retrospective “vocabulary,” in its aspect of sign and demeanor, necessarily temporary, where discourse and movement contain the universe of their specific separations, so what has come down as the analytic and specially denotative, for us, must stand in its tactical position toward the thing-in-its-domain, where abstraction means to include the life of its processions always toward the special sensations of observation and relief, where memory holds through its specific qualities and emotive absolutes (eg., nostalgia, love, geometry, etc.) toward the gestural and permanent identification of the world. The initial location, for instance “here” or “that,” comes to equate the shadow and the light-source in a composition first through associative and mythic substance but finally at the level of attachment or origin and center; as any geometry would testify, that first cause and final cause, poetically, are synonymous with image, where the memory of the event itself is adjunctive to movement and continuing. So it is difficult in a relational discourse to specify absolute terms for a vocabulary which necessarily effaces itself in its definitions.
The achievement, then, would resemble the thing that it is to become, would identify ghosts or shadows, then, as proscriptors of words to their targets or ballasts. The locale of the thing could allow a penetration from the “outside” to wage itself wholly in this enterprise of syntax and cooperation (what else is grammar?) whereby picture and thing are less visual than symptomatic of the age and time of their future, where they intend by all their means toward a definition of image which is hardly distinctive, less than hopeful but entirely real, where the desires for the world are transmuted in the course of seeing to a statement of being. Now there is nothing hopeful or tentative on my part in this, it is simply and utterly a matter of writing what is to be said, of determining a course an setting forth, through the nature of the disturbance to its cause and familiarity (the same) in the knowledge that any learning is identified by its styles and shifts, especially where they include the attentive and sympathetic toward their place.
But place is not exact. The learning is a responsive gesture toward situation and change, and it descends to energy to define the location of the image, first our of a convention and finally out of the thing itself in its domain and presence. “The problem of language,” then, is at once self contained and obvious, hence insoluble. But manifested movement carries syntax, where it is not after the fact, through to its success and practice, where what is retained by the retrospective is specially considered in its functioning to its station. The balance of initiatives, some of which are clearly dangerous, indicates the specific progress to the individual consciousness at its location, it is like that with respect to image, at that level of distinction; where color protrudes to dominate the field of attention and combination is more subtle, and the identification of the light or blank station of potential and definition carries memory to its extreme. So the business here, then, is to identify and set in mutual revolution several distinctions of same in order to permit the points, as it were, to incise their proper figures.
But the whole event is less clear here, the event of the writing itself which impinges through the intelligence of the choices which were made in the experiment itself, there are two times pressing forward in their attempts to mutualize, which properly descriptive (that is, no conclusion to be reached there, anyway) and what is central, centered, and specifically useful and especially to the nature of the discourse is to remind, dramatically, of the relation of the one to the same, in the pressure of style, in the medium of (of course: exchange) of the place around which revolves the memory of the two images, that’s the event, how to move from here to here, and where the specific and tactical information of the poetic is not movement but the precise and dimensional location of the center of speech, here! And that would be simple enough if the vocabulary weren’t continually effacing itself in its distinctions and placements, the autobiography of any painter. Especially that. The thing is to remember.
Now, what is a document in relation to the events of its creation; but that’s not entirely a definition. It is perhaps well to consider the uses to which thought offers itself, it is perhaps equally useful to consider the position of thought and song in their relations to rhythm and consciousness, sleep aside for the moment. The intentional repression of a progress of consciousness is insufficient, is too contradictory to a behavior, especially the one underway, to be even temporarily useful; the relation between repetition and the self contradictory hypnosis of the same is clearly accumulation, the buildup of energy for the sake of watching. Who watches the watchers? We all do, of course, and where we do, they are oblivious to the progress to which they contribute, but where the whole is clearly in relation to itself, these invasions of vocabulary and intelligence are not boundary disputes at all, there is no proper domain to motion, only its clear and legible tracings and evocations, like the problem of problem, of certain use.
A symposium of difficulties, directed by the will at play, a review. A work would consist in its play of forces, where our term style has means at its disposal to change pace in the interests of the energies available, where a display would constitute the specific reversals of intent, the categorical watching to which the discourse is submitted and approved, always in the advancement of difficulties. So the other would demonstrate its uses and proportions upon command, that the plastic inevitability of ideas would contain the secret initiatives of form out of which they are drawn, incised, geometrized, displayed, voiced, imaged, calculated and extended. So what we are always about is not necessarily only “this” or “that,” there’s the language to be accounted for, the temporality of medium in its accretion of contact which precedes the absolute of image, at our most familiar points of hesitation and reflection. But true reflection is less a reciprocity of exchange than a final and completed document of the event, the last connection which precedes “the lighting of the space.” We have entirely enough metaphors to precede the drawing of the chalk circle on the floor, and it is no matter at all ever to anyone who gets into the circle or who decides to get out, or whether he himself allowed the circle to be drawn around him, it is still, beyond all its variations, a cosmos that is defended against even the view of it that “is taken.” And the tenses of poetry are always tactically the present, the actual event in its generative possibilities, which it still is, definitely, in its arbitrary distinctions toward the place and name of what it wills to occur. Now that’s not simply the “present station of aestheticism,” because as we know it, it is finished, it has done its job, and where it is necessary to make certain rejections of form or of movement, styles of them, it is only because they are no longer at play. That’s not cynical presumption, there’s something in our responses to the absolute responses to the absoluteness of acts which has us “reading” them, when their synthetic uses are closer to motive than importance. The act to its uses, the event to its completion, both fragments of language which develop out of balance toward their music.
Or that the obverse of acts is their sudden transparency into context (life), and the rapid diminishing of attention from lapse to data, as the styles of memory, which is where style is, extend a language through its relatives toward the darkness that hovers at the edges of the event-cosmos. Enough is hidden in speech, so it falls to seeing to revive dimension through the style of acts to their locus of ceremony, and it is here that I fall into myself on the occasion of a celebration of contact, where all festivals emerge from the psychologies of time and utterance into their muscular and eventual destiny, where I am possessed by the information I have brought through the activities and preparations to the place of the play, in response, readiness, stillness and completion, not events, but of the play, where it opens toward the chalk circle and attains the parallel dimension of spece which is its actuality, where the knowing and the learning coincide in their sureness.
The constitution of acts is their assumption of cause in their very preparation, where it is entirely in the aim of saying to relate the scales and influences of propriety through a geometry or arrangement of energies in the image, where knowing and moving become the context of the energies of light and dark, where the size of things comes down to place and data, where completion relates through the skill of arrangement within the ceremony of choice, that as one is looking and seeing he is also the act he performs, where the space contained in the outcome of the event supercedes the measures by which it has “come about” or turned to itself for the final and plastic definition we assert in such reductions of purpose as “art” and “history,” where any lessening of the whole to its summary follows from and only from the attitudes of being-audience. Now there is nothing intentionally legible here, it is exactly what passes through the net, what we come to as information.
But the final accusations of purpose and demeanor which distinguish the nature of the thing from its own attitudes are the ranges of behavior to which one is subjected in his capacities as witness and co-author, it is where seeing completes the course of time to its own sequences of response while the activities of the subject follow the course of the view through all that can be assumed as “observable data” in the potentials of discrimination and allowance of a particular density or name. It is the swiftness of the motion which calls stasis forth, lodged as it were in the iconic registry of dreams, where all the assumptions relate to their cosmic dimension as the layers and striations of the subject’s own latitude, or what is called “here.” The specific density of the present reduces energy to its diversity and continual tendency to objectify or lodge in the “things of attention,” in the psycho-historical qualities of use and skill
For if one remembers and constitutes his image with causes or tactics, he can be said to be the subject of the image, and the skills and styles of the community develop precisely from the other side where the matters jof decoration reinforce the surface in its perpetual designs of elegance and sensation. But to break through the screen is not to enter darkness, nor to lose the topic orf consideration, it is simply to reduce to the centering of attention and the fact of the drama all that is not truly informative, to persuade all that is not subject to enter into the sphere of definition which allows relation to exist, and it is exactly here that the other half of the set displays, where act and event conjoin to their mutuality and end the sequence with the finality of a simple, gestural falling off. The nature of the transformation is achieved before completion, the residues of response constitute the passage or the transition “across,” while the subject arises through the variations of his particular costume to the necessities of action and stillness. While memory constitutes the style of the image with its particular legibility, the other arouses thought in its continuity of the registration of what is crucial to the outcome of the event, the coordinative releases of posture and act which complete to the final stations of attention and arouse the datum to their elementary circuitry, as points and orders of behaving through which the eventuating and celebrations derive their specific lessening of tension of which the definitions themselves have been contributory. The thing enters its content as participant and center, arriving at the particular surprise by the shortest possible trail, where there are no longer any distinctions to which the particular descriptions obtain in their actual densities.
What arrives through its hesitant names is the vocabulary of the sequence, the muscular and invisible domain of spatialities of the image, where it is totally public and absolutely available. The whole doctrine of secrecy must here be viewed as something more than a strategy, but as something of the incompleteness of argument, as a metaphorical utterance refuses to surface before it is needed in the history of the progress underway: the names of events do not ever occur, they are always simply the achievements they are, and in all that they become to the attention of the subject, never coerce or repeat with the solemnity of prescription. The point throughout of the availability of information lies more in a theory of accumulation and class than in the specific tendencies of individual cases, but through the visually inductive elegance of specific countermeasures, one can find the means of speech at hand.
What is possessed in such a disturbance? Only the facts available, far from “error” but in the relation to the visible spectrum of possibilities, as it were, where a shift of attention indicates the whole range of behaviors available to the subject, where the proper choice can be made without confidence or despair. So it is more in the realm of making decisions that the image comes to light, and the only hesitation worth considering is that which increases information, eg., accretive or perseverant awaitment. The final thrust of the real is hardly an explosion of unmitigated light or energy, those terms precede ease altogether. What we can notice in our responses to ourselves is the gradual and circumstantial continuing of ease through its very attributes, the one continuing through the one. Image is cause enough. The event is its memory, the intersection of thing and world, a relational ceremony of life and energy, conjoined in the progress underway.

Sacramento, California, 1972