Prokofiev composed his Visions fugitives between 1915 and 1917. The cycle is made up of twenty piano miniatures, each about a minute or two in length, sometimes less. The shortest is twenty-seven seconds. They are, among other things, whimsical, dissonant, jocular, digressive. They refuse elaboration and are happy merely to gesture this way and that. They speak in a kind of short-hand. They, paradoxically, linger in their freedom. Then get away as soon as they can. I like that Prokofiev wrote a number of these pieces for his friends.
I’d like to aspire to do something similar here. Miniatures in prose, playing around with language. I’m not really sure what it’ll look like, but there’s the fun of it. The main thing will be to get stuff down and share it with you all.
A few things I like and which may or may not guide this project as it goes. Contradictions and fragments. Digressions. Self-negating thoughts. Thoughts that are provisional, that turn against themselves. Thoughts endlessly revised. The idea of a thought being on the lam. Hiddenness and obliquity. Lists. Collage, not continuity. Syntactic glitches. Silence and the limits of language and music, for that reason. The idea that a thought or an image is sometimes better incomplete. A fully elaborated thought or a perfectly painted image (impossible) being a thought or an image under arrest. Letting the most of a thought or an image get away. Repetition. I like it, lots. Language out of context. Language as material. Cézanne’s obsessive lines in his watercolors of trees. Brahms papering his ceiling with drafts of his first symphony. Bernhard’s circularity. Also writing that cuts off (or away) abruptly. Writing that leaves open a range of possible routes free for the taking yet never taken. Beginnings, not endings. I like the constellation of meanings that gather around the word fugitive, which is a fun word. I like the conspiracy of friends implied by Prokofiev’s miniatures. They are notes passed among friends. What else, I don’t know! Well. And okay. I like the idea that certain things are better shared in writing rather than speech. Obsessions, for instance. At any rate, every post that follows this one will find its formal limit in this one. I count 397 words. That’ll be the most I write. Anyway, Please share with your friends and enemies. And thank you for reading. Actually, I prefer the number 402.