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| when i asked paula why she chose the name [atoms-dust] for her website,
she said that the name mirrored her fascination with the idea that everything
is made up of the same basic building blocks that were infinitely small
"and the poems deal with the actual collision of primordial things," she
explained, "life events, feelings, emotions, and the debris they leave
behind - that's the 'dust'. the hyphen represents the writing, in the sense
that it provides the connection between the collisions and their outcome."
in the text 'levels of edit' the speaker states: 'no! this writing is not
exempt…' and the firmness of this 'no!' articulates the double binding
of words that are not exempt on two levels: on the one hand they are filled
with traces of other texts, they are fueled by lines, by songs, by other
writing. most of the texts collected here have started or ended as mails
to 'undertow' [the suzanne vega mailing list] and it is mainly the writing
of suzanne vega that echoes in them. the connection between text and sound
has always already been within the [act of] writing: combining the music
and the writing in these recordings [and in the act of listening to them]
initiates a mutual contextualization that might give new meaning to familiar
songs and familiar meaning to new lines. on the other hand 'this writing
is not exempt' of an aim, of a purpose, if only a very personal one. the
line from 'levels of edit' continues: '…it remains | like all writing |
a pathetic attempt to make you understand | that *my heart is breaking*.'
the impossible attempt to record|capture|describe a feeling|thought|intensity
is attached to the words and surfaces as reoccurring theme in an effort
to communicate, to make 'you' [a lover, a friend, a father, a god] understand.
'take this word | wind it twice around your heart | once to hold it together
| and again | so it won't come apart' suzanne vega writes in her book the
passionate eye describing a twofold motion as if to make sure to capture
both: wind it once for the signified and again for the signifier. and thus
the words end as pathetic attempt to suture a life that keeps falling apart
faster than the writing could stitch it back together. however, we hope
that they might have a significance beyond this personal level. maybe they
are just like some of the images in this website - snapshots of collisions,
maps of the discharge of energies, traces of intensities that travel through
an infinitely small cosmos as well as through an infinitely large one.
thanks for listening. paula|philipp |