Twenty years worth of journals are a double-edged razorblade. Looking back, some cut, some shine. Ten years ago I wrote, “Here is a blank page, waiting for whatever I turn it into. This would be a good way to expunge the “me” from my writing, as Anne Carson said on Writers and Co. She was studying John Cage and attention to one thing…the colour of blue of the lines on this page? November grey blue. Slate. Sharp as the sound of true chalk on true slate. The colour of blue on lined paper varies, but not the maraschino cherry red margin line. What if I write only in the margin? Marginalia on a blank page”
And “All that comes up (visually) is the empty-mind-room of yesterday morning’s not-dreaming-sleep. There was something indescribably attractive about that waking dream state’s familiar emptiness. It was grey-blue-green. That’s all. Maybe it was more a feeling than an image. Maybe it was something between the two.”
Ten years later I am again working with white, with absence, this time fabric, prototyping a setting for a poem (yet to be written) with fabric instead of paper. It’s been two years I’ve been off and on this piece about the hibakusha, the “explosion-affected people” of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and their dead compatriots, reduced to white outlines on the ground.