WRITING AS DRAWING

And drawing as writing in the work of William Kentridge: the potential, I surmise in listening to this brilliant lecture and conversation, to reintroduce provisionality to a stultifying historical record,

just as it's constantly introduced to the Johannesburg landscape of burnt felt (charcoal terrain that draws itself) and mounds of hollow-fallout in crusades for gold:

the image (here, of the Villa Aurelia) "sandwiched," as he puts it, between color elaboration (to make water for instance where there's none) and preexistent text:

in this case, mine ledgers that inventory the lives that passed into and out of these blasted funnels in the digits of gold, as well as those spent in the process:

plus the scrawls and erasures that will stain and revise, from the outlook of more tender consciousness, dark history stratified.

Against all myopic programs for living, this gift, kaleidoscopic, and lasting beyond the provisional arrangement, one wishes, of being neighbors.