Meeka Walsh

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  The Heart of Absence: Patrick Modiano

  Fleur Jaeggy is the most accomplished scribe of detachment. In her collections of short stories, I Am the Brother of XX and Last Vanities, and in the novels, SS Proleterka and Sweet Days of Discipline, there is a prevailing sense of isolation—readily recognizable as the epidemic condition of our time—an almost truculent inability to connect, and desperation without surfeit. And here is Patrick Modiano as heartbreakingly accomplished in these unfortunate states as she is, describing the daily coming into being of the abandoned child who builds a person from the sad materials of neglect, lack of regard, of never having been held, or insufficiently—and then overlooked and left behind.

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  Writing the Song of Myself

  In the beginning was the word and the word got fleshed out. That would be the opening line in Sean Landers’s version of his Bible, were he to write one. It would be a kind of secular new testimony because, for him, language is the medium and the message. When I say, the word gets “fleshed out,” I mean it literally.

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  Spiritualisme: Hilma af Klint, Paul Klee, Kai Althoff

  Before global warming and the publication of Gertrude Stein’s “The Making of Americans”, Paul Klee noted in his diary (“The Diaries of Paul Klee 1898–1918”) that in Switzerland the summer of 1911 was one of extreme heat.

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  Inspirational Embodiments

  In 2015 Valérie Blass made a sculpture called “La méprise” consisting of two porcelain objects in flocking, standing on a marble slab and facing a mirror. One of the objects is a black cat with its tail sticking straight up.

• Uneasy Bridges to Writing a Fine Madness

  The market is a mean destructive place. The motivation each day to lift the flaps, wind the blinds, unlatch the metal screens and draw back the locked gates in the the market’s shops is greed.
  

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  The Worth of Living and Loving

  A small new painting by Marlene Dumas in the first room of her recent exhibition “Myths & Mortals” at David Zwirner in New York seemed, by dint of its strange force, to pull all attention to itself.

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  Alexander Kluge, Arthur Danto, Ludwig Wittgenstein: What is Left Over

  It gave me no end of pleasure, a frisson of pleasure, to have come, many years ago, upon the fact that my grandfather, born on July 15, 1892, shared a birth day with Walter Benjamin.

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  The Space of Not-Knowing

  It’s my sense that engaging with Erin Shirreff’s work involves an act of faith. Her proposition that time is the elemental dimension in the embodiment of her works, that is, in bringing them into being, is one with which we agree if we commit to her work.

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  Fleur Jaeggy’s Gift of Detachment

  For this period, detachment is the state of things. Easier, safer, recommended. No noisy, unmanageable, untidy passions. No individual cluttered urgencies with ends and tags askew. Each her own island country, complete and selfsufficient, an isolationist policy in place for all.

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  Lovely Leonora

  With a head full of the Irish folk stories on which she was raised and her own adept young mind inclined to the metaphysical, to which was added the enchantment of a world filled with all the possibilities

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  The Weight of History

  Richard Serra told us that he came to a place in his work where he didn’t want people to be simply looking at a single object; he wanted them to experience the work by going through it.

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  Say, Bird: A Consideration of Interspecies Romance

  This story has been told before. It’s largely an urban romance, for a number of reasons. In one telling gold coins are involved and this implies structures…

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