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| I Meant To Say, RTomens, 2025 |
This one almost ended up in the bin at the early stages but I decided not to let it go, not to give in. It wasn't even due to exist because I was only testing the printer and having done so decided to work with the result.
Earlier this morning, one did go in the bin. It wasn't going that well anyway when the doctor called, which broke my flow, my concentration (I do actually concentrate when typing, you know, despite results which sometimes suggest otherwise) - two more tablets to take - whoopee! Soon I'll be a walking dispensary with a body functioning purely on complex chemical combinations designed to give me more time on planet Earth - more time to make art - yes! Be positive! As a kid watching The Six Million Dollar Man I dreamt of having bionic parts like Steve Austin that would enable me to be a superhuman. Today, the reality is that my science/medicine-enhanced self will soon be taking seven tablets a day just to stay alive and be able to walk about.
So I start anew with what became I Meant To Say. A few loose lines, wavy lines of various letters. Those you can still just about see behind the dense slab of letters that form the main shape and they emerge above it. It wasn't going well. I had no direction, or rather, no sense of direction as I usually do, the kind born not of planning but in the moment, working as the act of typing takes over, towards something.
Oh, I may as well draw some circles. Why not? They can't ruin what isn't much to start with. Look for some text and find it in Paul Valery's Analects (Vol 14). Add that.
Almost give up.
I'll add a figure. Make him small. Careful about where he's placed. Yes, just right.
The typing that followed was a kind of manic desire to erase all legibility. Overtyping is a stubborn act, I know. It demands persistence beyond reason. Well, I was in that kind of mood by then.
Type
Type
Type
Type
Type
Type
&
Type
Then stop.
You'll note a mistake. That one almost caused me to stop right there, but I remembered Sun Ra saying something like 'Why don't you do something right and make a mistake?' Only yesterday I read a quote from Mark E.Smith saying 'With our stuff, I don't want to make it faultless like, cos then you've just blown it' (from Messing Up The Paintwork).
Some mistakes are good. Some are just mistakes which don't ruin whatever they occur in and some really do add to a creation. Compared to computer-created text/visual poetry, the typewriter is a mistake machine. There is typed visual poetry that is the result of painstaking perfection, each letter/mark placed perfectly to create a clean, complex, tidy image. I always think the artist doing that in on the spectrum. I have neither the patience nor skill to do that kind of thing. My work is probably littered with 'mistakes', by which I mean wrong moves which I manage to use to the advantage of the piece which grows organically as a result.
Life's too short to worry about small mistakes but if I keep on taking the tablets I'll have longer to make a few more.
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