the grain of sand which will be my world...

"my ear - whose ear? - harks to the rustle, the grating shriek and whistle of the moving sea - the solid liquid sea of the numberless grains of sand. but i - i am under the sand; seeded way in some still cell of my body, like the grain of the desert, biding my time. i am still and wait to enter the drop of water, the grain of sand which will be my world, my universe. from the center of me within the grain, i shall shoot up one bursting letter written in that air which is nothing until i write it."

brion gysin, unpublished text, 1960 - 63.

brion gysin comes from a long line of writers, who also spent a serious amount of time exploring drawing and painting (his doppelganger is probably henri michaux - both explored painting as writing under the influence of some serious hallucinogenics).

like most of the writers (and composers) who explored the visual arts, gysin's visual works are vastly underrated, and are generally mistakenly viewed as secondary to his writing. if you look at the things he made and the ideas he worked with, it wouldn't do his oeuvre justice to simply call him a writer. gysin was working within his own complex universe, where he continually experimented with writing, recording, painting, drawing, and light (with the dream machine). in some ways, the visual works developed more depth over time, than any other aspect of his work.

the small ink drawing above (which i managed to snare from a used book dealer ages ago), seems to encompass so many of gysin's ideas and approaches; but mainly i love how it connects with the short text above. the little rows of fragmented brush strokes are so evocative as fragments of other worlds, and seem to suggest that if one looks at them, and listens to them, long enough - they might contain an entire universe.

the sound of writing the sound of music...

it's nice when world's collide, particularly on the same object. here's a nice RPPC of a man playing some kind of zither, with some serious visual music on the reverse. no idea if the guy on the front made the marks on the back, but they certainly seem like they were generated by placing pencils between strings in various points on the instrument, and then holding the card against the pencil points as the strings and pencils quiver together.

in one sense, the backside reminds me of william anastasi's subway drawings, and some of tom marioni's drawings, where a physical action generates a scratchy and elegant image. i've done similar drawings with my eyes closed, using sound as a source for determining the movements of my hands; and i think of gerhard ruhm's recordings of the sounds of pencils on paper... as if these marks are speaking.

in another sense, they seem almost mechanical, like the marks of a seismograph or brain wave monitor. they resemble mechanical iterations of sound activity; and perhaps if oscilloscopes could draw, this is what they would make... broken sound waves fallen to the surface of paper like dried leaves...

and since this is the place of writing on a postcard, i see these marks in a third sense... visual, yet related to writing. i think of the calligraphic and scrawl-like nature of the visual works of brion gysin, henri michaux, carlfreidrich claus, ana hatherly, and others who have used their own relationship to the physical process of writing to generate visual images.

and lastly, of course, the marks could simply be a form of writing that we just can't read... perhaps with a depth of focus and concentration, one could discover within these marks a long lost micro story written by the gentle hand of robert walser... a whisper is only a whisper until one places one's ear up against it...