Medium - 4

1

i’ve been following Medium for more than 3 years -
about 3 years ago i wrote 3 posts and then decided that Medium wasn’t appropriate for me (i’ll repost these writings in the future) — I put it aside for a few of months and then rejoined and since then i’ve only read -
Medium is not the right context for my writing but the best that i could find

i’ve thought for a long time that i need some sort of introduction to what i want to do before actually writing something on Medium— but i keep reaching the conclusion that too many things need to be at the beginning or before the beginning — an impossible situation
so i’ll just start in the middle of things — here and now (which will soon be there and then)

i’ll be working from a different ‘philosophy’ from that of Medium — the idea of Medium is to focus on content creation without ‘worrying about formatting — my focus is on content formatting

i plan on using Medium with my primary interest not being ‘to say’ something but to experiment with alternative ways of saying things

to articulate new ways of apprehending art

looking and seeing
listening and hearing
reading and understanding —

i don’t have any stories to tell —

the main locus & focus of my art — textual - visual — whatever will be my website
i’ll be using Medium as a sort of metatext to the site that will both surround it and be inside it
i think of the website as a book - an illustrated book - a text with images
a book that is a continuous process not a finished product[ion]

i — here and now
age mid 70s — too old for this — married - fortunately & happily
living in a suburb in a house that is suburban on the outside but not the inside

at times an artist
at times a writer

best defined as a collector or gatherer — or hoarder
(i’m interested in transvaluing values -
hoarding is a positive activity for me)

not artificial but m-dashes are my favorite punctuation
interested in many things but most things don’t interest me

i have a deep down desire / drive to write and make art
i also have a deep down drive to just stop — thinking why bother

the problem is not that i think my writing isn’t for anyone — it’s that i think it’s for almost no one
optimistically thinking i can ‘publish’ something - optimistically thinking there are at least a few people who would like it
pessimistically thinking they’ll never see it —
but i have no basis for being optimistic or pessimistic —
v so i’ll go on
to reach no conclusions —
with

no center
no beginning middle or end
no story

everything i write will probably be a failed attempt at writing something else which is what i want to write — the only success is failure

“rhe only work which succeeds is that which fails”

Jean Cocteau
quoted by Susan Sontag Under the Sign of Saturn