How can I write in words the awareness of my visual lines that stretch past my body, thoughts and senses of listening, looking, speaking, and touching? The poetic text reveals itself as something I cannot grasp the complete meaning of. It unfolds in an open space of both intimacy and exteriority. After listening to voice recordings of the poetic texts, I understand Derrida’s connection between speech and writing. Here I can grasp Derrida’s critique of logocentrism. Derrida understands the difference of speech and writing as a play between exteriority and interiority. Writing is not just an external representation of speech, but both exterior and interior to speech, and speech is also both interior and exterior to writing. When listening to the poetic texts as speech and writing, I can understand this play and realize my own interpretation of language as something more than a logocentric realization of a text, and more towards Derridean interplay of a creative opening to the poetic text. In Spivak’s preface (Of Grammatology, Derrida), she explains Derrida’s understanding of how all signs are structures of differences and open for multiple possible meanings rather than closure. This is marked by traces of an absent but always present other.   “The outside, ‘spatial’ and ‘objective’ exteriority which we believe we know as the most familiar thing in the world, as familiarity itself, would not appear without the gramme, without difference as temporalization, without the nonpresence of the other inscribed within the sense of the present, without the relationship with death as the concrete structure of the living present.  Metaphor would be forbidden.” (Of Grammatology p.71, Derrida)

Just as the memory holds both visible and invisible traces, the textual and visual lines hold traces of the presence and absence, of the visible and invisible. In the traces I can sense visual abstract metaphors for this presence-absence, of being in- between or in a liminal space. One can see in this in-between presence-absence gaps, openings, and edges. The freedom of being in-between in this space is like pulling up a fast car, hitting the breaks, accelerating, spinning around, driving fast and slow at the same time, unable to control and control at the same time. Here I am able to play with the edges of my own interpretations, the infinite meanings going past any preconceived notions or connotations of the poetic texts. In the moment of creation, I can imagine what I see past the very edge experiencing the presence of the atemporal, past the ending scene of ”Thelma& Louise ”, and the opening of the soul existing midway between heaven and earth. These moments can come after reading or listening to a poem of Rilke or Milosz that leads me through the visible and tangible to invisible flows of the in-between liminal space.

As I continue working with my visual artwork, I grasp different visual spaces of both structure and unstructure that appear to co-exist. It is similar to driving on a snowy night. I see the evolving and ever changing visual spaces of snow. First, the snowflakes appear, my pencil or brush start to draw or paint, coming at me like a force of light. Then the flakes settle onto the front window, and the drawing and painting appears on the paper and canvas.  Only to be gone in a flash of a second as the window wiper tries to erase the traces. My eraser and white painting try to conceal or take away these traces as new flakes enter into this space again. I know this is an impossibility, as the traces also do co-exist with the presence. It is not the one or the other. I can never infinitely hold onto a snowflake or a line, and I can never entirely grasp what this is. The window shifts quickly into an image of presence-absence, liminality and in-betweenness and whose horizons stretch into infinite meanings of a moment. I cannot grasp this presence, but I can inhabit this space. Feeling the rhythm of it’s pace, like my own breathing, it exists just as much on the inside as the outside. Here, as I drive, draw, or paint, it frees my thoughts from presupposed structures and moves into the infinite and immanent power of creation of both the abstract and concrete, varieties and multiplicities. ”The infinite movement…frees (thought) from truth as supposed paradigm and reconquers an immanent power of creation”. (D &G, 1994,p.139) I can connect my senses of the passing snowflakes to Deleuze’s text where he writes about breaking through to the other side of representation past rigid and static boundaries of interpretation like a rhizome. ” A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo” (D&G 25). My intuitions are in an abstract sense assembled as a rhizome, connected to my understanding of in-betweeness and of my own abstract comprehension of language. The multi-layeredness generates a flow seeking to fill in the traces of my lines as the binding factor of breaking away.

My intuition is present.  The snowflakes come at me as if they are trying to speak, trying to convince me of something or the other. The small flakes touch my window and quickly disappear as the window shield wiper wipes them out.  They are effaced from my vision, but not from my memory. I still glimpse them. The small jewels are in front and around me. I try and grasp what I see. My multilayered interpretations have begun. They are at an edge between me on the inside, and the snowflakes speaking on the outside. Or is it the other way around? Or are there no edges at all? How do I reach what I´m after without effacing what I see? Or breaking the window of presence? Can I reach beyond my visions, my readings and dreams? The vision becomes blurred, as the road a head is my focus. When driving the road is crucial to follow, yet my eyes are longing to be somewhere in the midst of the beauty of the patterns of the incomprehensible language beyond my notions and senses encountering and encompassing my very presence of the moment.