HyperLife:
A
Life in Hypertext
On Painting Self-Portraits
Rule Number
One: Remember Thoreau.
Which is to say,
there is a place to say, "The life I lead is a worthy subject."
But carefully, now: the focus on Life at Walden Pond is not quite on
the person, the subject, the writer himself, as much as on the world
that appears through his semi-transparent eye/I. Henry Miller said it
best when he said, "Forget Yourself"—even as a champion of
autobiographical prose. How? By being so interested in the life around
him and in him: it’s not the him that matters, except as an unselfish
bringer of whole vision forward for wider and closer inspection: in
the sharing. What really matters is the Life at Walden Pond, the Life
in Paris. Not Henry, not
Henry, except as they care, as they are passionate and human and divinely
inspired to dance the dance for us.
My intention then
in following this principle is neither to project or reject myself in
the prose I present, but to indulge unselfishly and wholly in the vision,
the sheer jazz if it comes to that, of what interests me. In the mirror
will appear but fleetingly my image as figure, against the outer and
inner worlds I happen to experience, as ground: this World-mirror in
turn imaging my larger Self. The figure in focus shifts by the moment,
never taking on quite the character of a still-life,
except as a frame in a larger progression. From photograph to video,
painting to music, this composition ranges through the various categories
of art by turns. I exist here not in bodily reconstruction but in fluid
form of poetry, prose, fiction, nonfiction;
transparent in the middle ground, the center, where self and form, life
and art, become all and all-form, which is to say netwide, pixelated,
various: call me Continous Motion, Jammin
Fulltime Now.
©
Nowick Gray
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