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Some Notes


Kathy Acker writes in "The Seattle Book": "Content is non-replaceable values
(differences or words) in time." Such a concept made metaphoric in "Lust," one of her
voices there laments: "Every one-night stand or man in a one-night stand is like every
other one-night stand or man in a one-night stand because the sex in a one-night stand is
without time and only time allows value." Chris Kraus relates in an essay in Video Green
how this priestess of mine, amidst other writings in her diary, records a card reading.
These cues, signs and cites, to interpret within and through given contexts provide
watchwords and a shadowing, fore and aft, of sorting. These are poetries she works with,
too.

I have the positions of the cards, and I have the position of the phrases: different life
phases. Every one of mine would not be read in the same way or same register, flipping,
vacillating. They can help map directions too, in which some plot might further evolve.
Great Expectations, the narrator's cards, summed: "a psychic map of the present,
therefore: the future." As one stream of consciousness externalizes itself a bit, pictures or
some (unspoken) connections color more my interpretation, index root ideas attached to
my own. I wanted to create a design that could flex and work open as my understanding
of how to navigate it more fluidly developed through my limits and tested inclinations.
Movement itself through the medium is shaped by my read of Dr. Clinton on others.

Portrait of An Eye, Kathy Acker writes: "I'm simply exploring other ways of dealing
with events than ways my lousy habits–mainly installed by parents and institutions–
have forced me to act." Empire of the Senseless, a pack is thrown "to find out whether or
not I should kill myself or not." Janey uses a deck with her father in Blood and Guts in
High School: "[His] fortune is that he's gone through a bad time; now everything is
clearing up; in the future a close friendship/marriage? With a woman; final result; a
golden life." She wants to be the one to stay with him. But little consolation in My
Mother: Demonology: "From these [cards] I learned that I'm a dead man, devoid of
desire." I adapt my spread from one in this book. Some cards name the problem. The
guy stands in the garage with his gym clothes on. They are still sealed, he said of the
merchandise. Nobody was supposed to touch your deck without you allowing it, Bobby
said, talking me into buying these cards. I attach ones to names and entries through
sound rhymes and systems with unconscious draws. I use numbers of the suits to
correspond to permutations of page numbers. For larger forces, I attach to illustrations
provided on the cards, trying to magically think, mental equivalents. Haraway is one of
my figures I make, because animals; Deleuze because of a Focault reading group I might
stop; Ronell, meeting her again; etc. So the cards provide both shifting and some
supports. Another source text is Polito's A Reader's Guide to James Merrill's The
Changing Light at Sandover.

I deal many (three) hands until I feel the meaning has come up, that that's my real
question. Somewhere around my mind is wondering of the cat we're dealing with: her
name the name of a poem. Should we or should we not put her to sleep. That, and
something not so formulated about my life direction.

I supplemented the upstate garage sale deck with bits of another. I made my own deck of
cards back in one of my doctorate classes ("How To Do Things With Words and Other
Materials," Sedgwick, Spring 2004). The blank cards she provided and the pictures for
the fronts would be made from Eve's "library of over 1200 rubber stamps." I color in
with nail polishes I’d wear before when younger giving poetry readings. Accompanying
the pictures, to the other sides I tape meanings, things Darcey would write to me during
that time in my life, when it could be hard to get footing. The readings I do I interpret
over time.