Fugue

An ornate baroque escapade, a drift towards mania, a flight into fancy, laying tracks. In French the artist and the mad person are not so separate as might be suggested by Edmund White on Genet describing solitary confinements:

If the self is strengthened through intercourse with other people, it is diluted by prolonged solitude. Under such circumstances most people plunge into uncontrolled waking dreams to such a degree they can no longer distinguish between fantasy and reality, the imagination and its inventions. Though probably dismissed as a dreamer, the artist, paradoxically, gains a greater mastery than ordinary people over his imaginary conversations, he or she controls them and is not controlled by them. This mastery derives precisely from the lordly arbitrariness of the storyteller, who is free to abridge, rerun, recast, and otherwise edit his daydreams.

The syntax hints at a parallelism: fantasy is to imagination as reality is to inventions. Imagination may be a source of arbitrariness and inventions, of arbitrated-ness. Somewhere in all this is the work of judgement and the implication that fiction manipulation is contrasted with truth telling. There is another humble arbitrariness that does not indulge in the discourses of mastery, especially in its gendered aspects.

It is the image of the storyteller's freedom to retell in whole or in part that rings true. That way leads to escape and escape to both solitude and intercourse.


And so for day 67
19.02.2007