Three pieces of writing for Via Purifico
⊙
It started by tracing gently across the mineral sand, drawing its tools widening the soil and marking its movements aiming to start forming and compiling its idea of what it should look like, what would best represent and house them, to make them feel comfortable and entertained, warmed and safe; its marking would make a building out of something–it would draw up its materials from the earth and summon scaffolding to make a wall and some doors, a roof and a ceiling: that’s what makes a house, or a stage or something and it was hot on the sand, the red direct setting-sun refracted itself across the water-edge the horizon framing its great power on the lines that serve a blueprint in the sand; despite the heat, the lines continued, they grew and amounted and gathered textures and points of entry and install that is to say where the walls should go and how high they should reach so that the ceiling might be fixed and the roof best cover them from this damn sun keeping the heat off their back and neck, keep the rays out off of their eyeballs, reduce this harsh afternoon sun bouncing off the inlet’s water, a beautiful mirage that signals an awful and terrible heat and despite this heat the building kept being built, well traced and drawn out, despite having had forgotten something of its intentions since it started earlier this morning, memory fading in the sun replaced by thirst and the need for walls to reach high, walls that can afford to support a ceiling and a roof shielding our sweating bodies from this sun
even though the walls met the ceiling with its delicate architrave that it had sketched out earlier with a sense of delight, even though the roof met the ceiling with the best intentions set in its ceramic tiles, the sun and the weather beat down on my drawings, sunlight like a cyclone, twisting and piercing the solid walls of my ideas and my drawings, a twister of tropical pressure, but pure sunlight, pure heat battering down on my drawings, a red and yellow and white blinding glow, god’s neon sign, fading all my silly drawings I made in the sand…
⊛
“I’ve found that thinking about symbols—particularly their origin and providence—leaves me feeling a bit overwhelmed. In a giddy and warmly anxious kind of way.”
“You feel this way despite all the analysis and discourse available to you? Symbols have been spoken about to a literal death, by which I mean that in the visual political realm, symbols have been demystified in favour of the Logo…”
“Their ‘death’ is easily digested, it is rather the persistence of symbolic architectures beyond their death and damage that overwhelms me. I can’t help, for instance, thinking about the alphabet as some kind of cypher that unlocks not only the single dimension of a story or essay, but the polylingual universe of stories and ideas fully grounded by these lines, squiggles and shapes.”
“Are you confounded by the number of stars in the sky, or by the size and distance barely captured by the number? The stars in the sky represent for me a distance I have not—and cannot have—walked, which only contains a negative meaning, and therefore no meaning. It is the same with symbols: their profound combinatorial scale only matters in respect to what can be traversed, and in respect to a human life, that distance is short, sensible and ultimately predictable. By that I mean I’ve read a few stories, and I’ve read a few more essays, and I will read a few more. But at no point does the scale of all the stories and all the essays overwhelm me, so why should the symbols we use to construct and travel such stories and essays do so either?”
“There is a poetry to the act of reading, and it is our cypher of symbols that unlocks this sensibility. I arrive at any text with this universal set of tools, and in reading I begin to unpick the words that then reveal the worlds shared and linked in this cosmology of stories and ideas. Pure and lifeless, merely calculable “distance” is never profound on its own, it is the implied possibility of worlds, and the possibility of passage between worlds that overwhelms me, and imbues me with my passion for reading. The grand connections of narrative—thousands of romances, unending inventions of terror, adventure, horror and grief—cannot be other than a universe of thought, grounded by nothing but our symbols, spoken and written”.
⊜
… hasten those who cry and pour their tears for the affection of others. The glow reddens the path, sobering the path taken by friends that travels toward an unspendable cup of the raspberry future. Or:
“Cheer then—life strides
Into eternal life;
Widened by inner incandescence
Our sense is transfigured.
The starry world will turn into
The golden wine of life,
We will enjoy it
And be the light of stars.”
- Hymns to the Night. Novalis. 1800.
I’ve been thinking about how the problem of scale—arguable differences between ‘local’; ‘global’; ‘cosmic’; ‘terrestrial’—can be considered alongside the meaning, ceremony and architecture that constellates around the word ‘romance’. Novalis’ contemporary, J.C. Friedrich Von Schiller, wrote prolifically about something he called ‘aesthetic education’, which carefully hinged the difference between beauty—“when his form lives in our feeling, and his life in our understanding, he is the living form, and this will everywhere be the case where we judge him to be beautiful”—and the sublime—“a sublime situation, which exercises upon the faculty of the will the more immediate action; for the second, it must first be transplanted under another sky”. Is romance something that escapes both words, or is it the combined domain of their interaction? Romance draws from a ledger of artifacts and symbols, giving birth to their own continuity; the colour red emanates through a trans-historical situation from the first blushing of cheeks to the very last red heart emoji typed.
Stories of love and adventure often set out to respond to multiple contextual questions at once: if one character loves another, is this love something given or something shared? Take for instance, ‘love as resolve’ i.e. as a memory formed in resistance to any danger that threatens its erasure. This trope could apply as easily to our most recognised stories of love and adventure as it can to what is left behind by something built or made (the use of tools that carve and construct)…
∴
Paul Boyé is a writer and artist living and working in Boorloo. They are currently working on: PhD at UWA School of Design; Cool Change Contemporary.