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The Writing on the Wall

My words but someone else’s handwriting


In the midst of lots of activity and people (probably sangha), I am writing on a wall (just as I have in both the blackboard dreams—see below). The wall is glass or another semi-opaque surface. Like in a French bistro, where they write the menu on mirrored walls.

 

I use black ink and realize I am writing in someone else’s hand. I cannot make out the words. The script is ornate, Asiany. The sumi ink spreads on the glass, unevenly seeping—quite beautiful.

 

[Now that I think about it I’m not sure they are even my words. Or perhaps I am struggling to make sure they are mine…yes, that is it. My words but someone else’s handwriting from my hand.]

 

Frustrated and bored that I am both doing this again

&

dreaming it again.

 

Commentary:

blackboard one—I was writing someone else’s words in my own handwriting on a blackboard in a dark schoolroom; as I wrote, my arm smudged the words into unreadability.

 

blackboard two—I have no idea. If and when I find it I will insert it here______________________.

 

Perec’s Dream No. 82: July 1971

 

“All I can find to write on is a very large sheet of paper, which forces me to write vertically, since the sheet is pressed up against one of the lobby walls. The short text I compose is particularly violent.”

 


Dream of the Drawing for Everything alchemies dream-like things: images and texts and films and sketches and philosophy and half-thoughts and visions and moments and fragments of all kinds. Resting and exploring here may deepen your relationship with the oneiric and, therefore, all apparent reality. Resting and exploring here may augment your psyche’s healing tendency—as Jung called it—through highlighting and delighting in humanity’s hallucinatory creations. (Without them, after all, neurologists assure us we would go starkers.) It is time there was a potentially infinite, intimate museum to what cannot be seen. Welcome to the museum.

Dream of the Drawing for Everything is some of the collaboration between artist Nuala Clarke & writer Crystal Gandrud. Our work arises out of what dances on the edges of perception and our collective attention gravitates to the dream-like nature of human experience. We have been in collaboration since 2010. Our merged practices of visual and textual art unfold on a continuum, as part of an interconnected series evolving over time. Both performed “Fair Shouldered One” (a book which is not a book) at the &Now Literary Festival in Paris, 2012 and installed “Between Spaces”, a Yeats inspired dreamscape at the Hamilton Gallery, Sligo, 2013. Most recently participated in the Find Arts Project in Castlebar, Ireland. Our public art installation of words and images printed on linen, “Woven Found”, hung on Castle Street. The project won the best commissioning practice award from Allianz Business to Arts, 2014.

Nuala Clarke

Nuala Clarke, visual artist, lives and works between Co. Mayo and New York City. Educated at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, she moved to New York City in 1993. In September 2007, she received a fellowship to the Ballinglen Arts Foundation, Mayo and began returning to Ireland from NY to work every year. Clarke has been represented by Boltax Gallery, NY since 2005. Recent shows include, Amid a Space Between: Irish Artists in America at the SFMoMa Artists Gallery, San Francisco, (2012); to Tremble into Stillness, a WB Yeats related show at Hamilton Gallery, Sligo; RHA invited artist; and A drawing for Everything, Ballinglen Arts Foundation (2013). BLINK, a public art installation at the Westport Arts Festival, Co. Mayo (2014). Upcoming shows (2015): Impressions of Yeats, Hamilton Gallery, Sligo; Of this place, Sligo and Madrid.

nualaclarke@gmail.com

Crystal Gandrud

Crystal Gandrud, writer, lives in New York City and Normandy, France. She holds an MFA, Creative Writing and a BFA, Classical Theatre. Recent publications include “Yeatsian: Numberless Dreamers,” The Encyclopedia Project, 2014, “Here,” Lost Magazine, and “Idiom: Woodbird Flies Early,” The Encyclopedia Project. Her dissertation, “Murdoch: the Mandala Maker,” was presented at Kingston University’s Iris Murdoch Conference (2006), London. At the most recent Murdoch Conference, she performed a multi-media excerpt from a work-in-progress entitled “The Forgotten Man,” inspired by Murdoch’s philosophical writings. She is under contract for a memoire entitled “Astonishment: A Litany of the Uncanny.”

gandrud@actuallyorange.com

Tell us your dreams. Dreams are accepted by the editorial staff on the basis of aesthetics. That said, there are certain topics that will not be considered. Extremely violent or pornographic dreams will not be accepted on any basis so please do not submit them.

All dreams must have three components:

1) a title

2) a number of no more than 20 characters (subject to a request to reconsider if that number is already used)

3) your name as you wish it to appear

Dreams may be any length.

Please submit dreams in an attached word document only. If you, as the dreamer, are also a visual artist, you are invited to send one companion image in the form of an attached jpeg of a file size of no larger than 250k (no compressed files). If you are not a visual artist but feel a drawing you have done of the dream deepens the experience of it, please follow the guidelines for submission of an image above. In both cases, please specify if you are willing to publish the text without the image.

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