notes on nothing

Jump-cuts.

Unrelated events
stitched
into a series
of unexpected meanings
that threaten
the predictable order of thought.
Just like Zen koans.

Like the nonsense fantasies
of Lewis Carroll
that defy intellectual study
because he uses words inefficaciously,
offering riddles
that reject rational answers.
As if to shake the mind
of acquired habits,
to break away from the logic
of established rules,
to move away
from ordered thinking.

The paradoxical nature of koans is that
they are expressed in linguistic form,
that they comform to the order of language
but only enough to disrupt it.
To shake the mind of its dependence
on language.

What a koan strives to achieve can only be inferred
by its denial of any doctrine that expresses Truth,
in its reference to emptiness (which has no relationship
to words) and in its realization that the limits of language
lead to the edge of alternative habits of mind.

Koans re-present problems
with more than one solution
as if to frame an excess of emptiness
which can't be translated into words,
and instead, privilege (the nature of) the problem
rather than (the determination of) a single solution.

If pedagogies present problems
that teach learners how to find solutions,
it follows that when solutions are found,
problems vanish,
whereas koans present anti-pedagogies,
problems that surpass solutions in their importance.

Deleuze's logic of sense paradoxically finds meaning
in the problems of language, in the elusive quality
of meaning that can never be fixed by language
but is best expressed by what precedes its frontier.

In the ninth series of Deleuze's Logic of Sense
(ironically one on humour), he writes

"...koans demonstrate the absurdity of significations
and show the nonsense of denotations."

because when one discovers object-events,
one discovers the Aion, the event as an identity
of both form and void, where the void is

"the paradoxical element, the surface nonsense...
the always displaced aleatory point whence the event
bursts forth as sense...the pure instant grasped at
the point at which it divides itself into future and past."
(Deleuze, 1990).

The artist's incorporeal sense of drawing a line
is a way of being; the notion that long before
the line is actually drawn, the space of it lies
in complete emptiness. To experience the immediacy
of sense is to draw without drawing, to draw without
denotation, to become the line.

Therefore,
an anti-pedagogy presents a portfolio
of koan-like problems, not to create a collection
of puzzles in scrapbook tradition like so much
static curriculum, but instead, as a vehicle
through which to engage the art of critique,
by moving in both directions at once across
the aionological line, as if to frame the time
of one's learning into a series of conversations
that overlap the events of one's life
until it flows both ways at once
into knowing and not-knowing.

Into one-on-one extensions.