to: ellipsis
from: William Dragon
12 July 1996
subject: letter twelve L
attachments: for nothing is outside
(a meditation on the skeleton)
Greetings Tom and Jonathan
In the message I sent via Edwina about letter one
I said that if jcj ceases to write divisively
something lovely can emerge.
Well now I see that it has, or it did many years
ago in 'Beyond wheels', his writing about the
cinematograph. It really flows with the mind and
all the realities attuning themselves to each
other in an effortless way. Yes, I like it very
much. You can see that, once he got going, he
became free of the self-conscious worry that was
stopping him in the early letters but which I
think is now gone.
I like very much the idea of the cinematograph as
a machine of transition between the mechanical and
the biological - via the electric. I'm not
sure of his condemnation of wheels and circles. It
sounds a little too like what Edwina and I were
criticising at the start.
I'm remembering the waves that expand in circles
when you drop a stone in water and the naturally
circular forms of the eye and of the earth. And
the circles and cycles behind any kind of
homeostasis.
But nevertheless I like this piece, as I do the
ones about soft technologies, and I'm looking
forward to his reactions to the piece about the
bones within all of you that I'm leaving for him
to react to in the next letter - if he wakes
up in time to write it!
I like what you are doing at ellipsis -
setting precedents that others will value when
they find, as you have, that the effective way to
act in a new medium is often to do what in the old
one would be mistaken.
Best wishes
William Dragon