PLANE CAR TRUCK WHITE DONT PAY ME

Another lightly-updated category for my writing-prompt needs. What’s on My N: Drive? My N: Drive has about 130,000 pictures on it, a mass of images taken with Nikon Coolpix 900, 990, 5700, 8800; Canon a640, S5 IS; and Sony a550 cameras from 1999 through the present. This N: drive does not include anything from the various camera phones I’ve used, or the film photos that I scanned. Many of these images have never been seen by any human eyes, including mine. I may have lost a few folders of pictures from the Nikon Coolpix 900 (wouldn’t that be tragic?) but for the most part I think everything from the last 11 years is there — and backed up elsewhere.

I thought of this hoary accumulation this week when I sorted out the monthly pages for my Big Pictures. I’ve never done a good job of archiving or linking up those pictures, but the little dropdown list of links to monthly pages from 2005-2010, and the yearly pages from 1999-2004, is a start, and it will fill in automagically from now on. Why do I bother? I do not know. I am neither a great nor an above-average photographer, and lots of my stuff flat out sucks. So where do I summon the pompousness to believe that a day unphotographed is a day wasted, or that my output merits cataloging?

I should write more. I know this. Any time I start writing I remember how this realm of sentences and words is one in which I feel both comfortable and in control. I remember an anecdote about Elvis. That’s right, you read correctly, I just implied that I have something in common with Elvis Presley. Toward the end of his life, when virtually everything spun out of control, Elvis took to the recording studio for hours and hours at a stretch because it was the only place he could go where he felt he had control over his life.

“Control” sounds off to me, though, in this context. I don’t feel “control” here any more so than while dreaming. My dreams invoke words that do not exist but which sound elegiac or intellectual to my tongue-depressed mind. Call it asemic scrawl. Asemic writing is something I explored in college (the word “asemic” is derived from Asemia, which sounds like a name of a town I’d like to visit but which is actually a medical term defined as “Loss of power to express, or to understand, symbols or signs of thought”). Somewhere, either here or back in the house where I grew up, is a box full of papers, and on a few of those pages I wrote asemic lines of linguistic and semiotic confluences, or conflagrations as I imagined them at the time. I thought words and symbols should depart from conventional lettering to express the meaning using colors, shapes, and even movement. “Wiggle, words,” I commanded. “I command you to WIGGLE!”

I knew not that asemic writing, while not a particularly well-established genre at the time, was nevertheless nothing new. But then nothing is new, not ever, all things have been done before and the only trick left is to rinse, lather, repeat; rinse, lather, repeat; rinse, lather, repeat.

The above picture (from March 25, 2007) reminded me of Asemia, and asemic writing. This graffiti is not asemic, (it is perfectly legible, if lightly inscrutable) but at a glance I find that its shape and visual drawl looked like something from the asemic genre.

I played piano for several hours yesterday, playing dangerously into the too-late-at-night zone, but not wanting to let it go. I have been remembering my college conservatory piano professor. He retired several years ago and, coincidentally, moved to a house in Florida just up the road from the above-mentioned house where I grew up.

I do not remember much about college but it has crossed my minds of late as I dig deeper into my old magazines project. The old magazines are music magazines from the early 20th century, and reading through them is reason enough to remember my music education, which included thousands of dry hours burned at practice room Steinways. My college professor was himself a protegé of one of the 20th century’s finest pianists and pedagogues, and that pianist’s name appears with some frequency in these old magazines, either in articles or in advertisements. I do not think it is too opportunistic or gratuitous, then, to say that I feel a connection between myself and some of these old publications. My teacher in college brought the same fundamentals of the art to his studio as did his teacher, and I often heard the elder’s name evoked.

My conservatory professor and I were friends both within and outside the studio. We would go bowling together, an activity which for some reason amused my peers to the point of chortles and guffaws. I remember how easily my half-formed instincts about piano-playing meshed with his aesthetic, which I would describe as an ease of craft in which the pianist feels he is one with the instrument.

I think there is a connection (suitably abstract) to be made between asemic writing and playing piano. The mental industry that goes in to learning or creating a piece of music would be unintelligible if it were somehow intercepted and expressed Kandinski-like on paper. It would be the stuff of those tongue-depressed dream states where non-existent words rise up at will as a tonic for the lost jumbles of unconsciousness.

Julian Jaynes uses the pianist as an example to illustrate what he called the “introcosm” and the difference between consciousness and awareness:

“Here a complex array of various tasks is accomplished all at once with scarcely any consciousness of them whatever: two different lines of near hieroglyphics to be read at once, the right hand guided to one and the left to the other; ten fingers assigned to various tasks, the fingering solving various motor problems without any awareness, and the mind interpreting sharps and flats and naturals into black and white keys, obeying the timing of whole or quarter or sixteenth notes and rests and trills, one hand perhaps in three beats to a measure while the other plays four, while the feet are softening or slurring or holding various other notes.”

Then, a few sentences later:

“Consciousness is often not only unnecessary; it can be quite undesirable. Our pianist suddenly conscious of his fingers during a furious set of arpeggios would have to stop playing.”

I could do without the word “furious” and other silly terms in the excised sentences, but then again it’s a long way from “PLANE CAR TRUCK WHITE DON’T PAY ME” to Jaynes so maybe a lapse in sturdy word usage can be excused.

I think the above photo was taken in the Blissville section of Queens, in a graffiti-heavy area near the Long Island Expressway. Some of the graffiti is sanctioned (which means it’s not really graffiti at all) while these bedraggled, world-weary lines of poetry seem to be legitimately illegal.