‘A parallelogram is a telegram from a parallel world,’
a being in a red hat says, taking out a little notebook.

‘Let me give you my coordinates.’ And instead of latitude
and longitude, as Space Gulliver expects, the being,

whose hat is now an obscure shade of ochre, reels off
a series of sounds like horses neighing, like vowels

and consonants, like numbers from a nightmare.
‘Whether you find me is immaterial,’ the being says,

sounding like himself again, in other words, sounding
like wind in the trees, snow on the grass, willows weeping

into water. ‘It’s the Houyhnhnm that counts.’
There are many beings here, roaming the ether.

Are they real? Is that a parking meter? A lamp post?
So this, Space Gulliver thinks, is what travelling means.

Sampurna Chattarji

(more…)

J. says to Realometer:

When I read I write. Something from the outside enters into my inside and remains there. So you have to admit the principal difference between outside and inside.

Realometer answers: I doubt that. What you say is an affirmation of the universal significance of texts. Outside and inside are variables which are produced by texts.

The debate on climate shift is a signal that men cannot program his actions upon nature accurately. It is also a signal that men cannot predict the behaviour of nature. He cannot find the program according to which nature acts.

(more…)

J: A post is not a book. A post in a blog is a way of agreement, an agreement to the programming of a social machine (partly programmed as a Turing Machine). A book (reading or writing) is a way of facing the power and the powerlessnes of subversion:

“There is no door for the blind.”*

and:

“God provides reading matter. He does not read.”**

* Edmond Jabès: Le Livre des Ressemblances [Paris 1976]. Paris: Gallimard, 1991, p. 195.

** Edmond Jabès: The little book of unsuspected subversion [Translated by Rosmarie Waldrop]. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996, p. 30.

Realometer gathers informations about the Turing Machine (TM).  Parts of himself function like a Turing Machine: He reads a sign in a certain state of mind; he accepts the sign or deletes the sign; he changes his state of mind or not; then he moves forward to the next sign or not (next click in yahooland).

D. doubts that. There are no discrete signs for a 20th century artist.  Signs are only vehicles (patrol cars) of the common sense. Of course discrete signs are part of the art game, but they do not match to the demands of an art which is interested in challenging borders of perception (where does a spot of color starts to be more or less than a point, becomes part of a tree (see one post before), of a hand (see other posts before)  or of something never seen or heard before (see other posts)?)

‘Food’. ‘Pickle’. ‘Chalk’. For some reason that
can be attributed to hunger of various kinds, maybe,

Space Gulliver finds these words floating before her.
She isn’t sure where they came from, whether their arrival

will be followed by the real things, food, pickle, and chalk.
She could use a little food, something to see her through

another night. She always liked picking out the garlic
from the pickle. Now, in a yahooland where no one

has heard of the Bermuda Triangle, she feels all tastes
are disappearing. Bitter gourd, sweet lime, sour plantain.

Variables, constants. Space Gulliver is looking for a line,
a chalk mountain, a little white sign on a black, black slate

Sampurna Chattarji

Pinned to the ground that is her shadow
By a thousand Lilliputian laughs.

Nothing can touch her.

Sing a melody that will untangle
The dark cloud of her hair.

Is this the box they will bury me in?
Her day has been rigid, and square.

Neither bone nor blood.

What she longs for is
The heart of a helium circle.

She sees patterns everywhere.

Sampurna Chattarji

Itinerant fragment

Rove the earth

Looking for blue snow

The cetacean’s song

The singular whisper of a feather.

*

Nomad of the broken syllable

Seeking the sky

May not lead to wholeness.

The flooding of air into your lung

The beginning of a difficult voyage.

*

Push your peripatetic beak

Into the magician’s hat.

Ribbons, scarves, copper wires, cathodes.

A ship in a bottle.

A mercury lake in the palm of a hand.

*

Link your lines

To the snail’s spiral.

Be unafraid of the opposite of speed.

Gather every gift

And walk across the untamed page.

Sampurna Chattarji

(more…)

D. is interested in seers. Seers see what others do not see. Swedenborg is a seer (Buddha of the North). D. questions that seers have different eyes than others. But what makes them see more, then?