Follow the Brush, Guide the Reading of Numberous

Thomas J. Harper
Afterward to Jun'ichirō Tanizaki In Praise of Shadows

One of the oldest and most deeply ingrained of Japanese attitudes to literary style holds that too obvious a structure is contrivance, that too orderly an exposition falsifies the ruminations of the heart, that the truest representation of the searching mind is just to "follow the brush". Indeed it would not be far wrong to say that the narrative technique we call "stream of consciousness" has an ancient history in Japanese letters. It is not that Japanese writers have been ignorant of the powers of concision and articulation. Rather they have felt that certain subjects — the vicissitudes of the emotions, the fleeting perceptions of the mind — are best couched in a style that conveys something of the uncertainty of the mental process and not just its neatly packaged conclusions.

* * *

the gesture she makes — this is her way of attempting despite the sovereign prohibitions to find again a place to reflect open space favourable for calligraphy with marvellous drawings with numberous incursions (infractions) accomplished as such with arrogance then following the course of what is written       fount of apprenticeship to pleasure and density — process of composition (vertically the pieces of chalk on the black board!) which she justifies field of action for new forms in the realm of consciousness

Nicole Brossard
Translated by Larry Shouldice
"Field of Action for New Forms, June 1971"
in Daydream Mechanics

Numberous - so many that it is numbing

And so for day 2413
22.07.2013