On going

The mind cannot be led at every point; teaching (reasons; my control) comes to an end; then the other takes over. And the object of my instruction (my assertions, questions, remarks, encouragements, rebukes) is exactly that the other shall take over, that he or she shall be able to go on (alone).

Cavell, Stanley. The Claim of Reason : Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy, Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 1999.

Dear mountain, 

It has been a few weeks so naturally my mind has been filled with absences. The stresses were the first to g[o. Winter really being the hardest of months along with those mornings which seemed empty o[f whatever it is that makes birds sing their melodies, these things I can unwittingly recall in relief, their powers are now like a breath of penalty let go into the winter air. Gone but once mine. T[o say it thoughtfully, it is a strange exercise of the mind to commit at all; what is not here? For if it were truly gone, I would not have been able to say it. Jazzarett ties her hood tight around her chin. A current of machine air floods from the stoniest walls. There we g[o. 

Searching for what you don’t know you are searching for i[s an activity of feeling your way through the blackness of your mind. I let my hands die first incase there is anything that is to kill me along the way, but when I find what I have touched i[s not a morbidity, the scales of cold fish blue hike, but rather the cotton of Brandon’s graphic t-shirt, the loveliest of fades and worn, I know what I have gained i[s one more thing I will one day lose. 

I want to draw a space here on the page to contain all the emptiness that naturally comes to be, with the general commitment that, you will feel the force of that loss, and even i[f I cannot know what that lost is, this being one of the very conditions of its disappearance, we may still fall into its gravity: 

 Trip

Eventually we will be good enough at this act of speaking to talk about those things that have nothing to do with speaking and yet need it to be ascertained by that speaking, without speaking. I think there are things that are already experts. Sugar. Spice. Cotton. And Korean Celadon. We’re just not always the best students or listeners. 

I’m thinking about all these absences and the imbrication of a proprietorial language t[o acts of memory because I like Cavell’s reading of Wittgenstein, suggesting that somehow instruction is really an act of truck deliveries. We carry a crate filled with the things t[o be delivered, but whether or not they are buried, worn, radialized, forgotten or, beloved, THIS is all incumbent upon THEM. A file delivers itself on the screen. Dear Mr. No One. 

Is it heavy? Or just flight. I want you to carry it for longer. To do with it not what I hope, but what you need. It may have been my responsibility to gather the sky, but only you can notice the clouds. That is the frustrations of taking the brick road of your path away and forcing it into the river of someone else’s go. I may never have been able to step twice into the same you, but that i[s where my feelings go. Pass over it big, and laugh along the way. Because together, we look up at the turning in the sunset so bright, its force across the meadow in the way, Tuscan green and the sky country of a world on fire, yes there, in that valley of hills between which starlight falls, I can see i[t, right at the crest of all this yellow change, that just maybe, you are not the negotiation of ice, but the constance of arrival. 

    yours,

    Hyungtae Kim