TUNING

“Understanding is a literal idea based on a geometrical notion of congruence, and tuning is a notion of a negotiated concord or agreement based on vernacular physical actions with visible outcomes like walking together....” —David Antin, from A Conversation with David Antin (Granary Books, 2003), a dialogue conducted through electronic mail with Charles Bernstein from which the excitable reflex to quote, indulged, would overtax the patience of digital space. Glorious to be in a culture oriented toward the latter, where a walk to the supermarket or request for coordinates of a decent slice's a topic not just for communal discussion but for passional participation (accompaniment, chatty digression, & the inevitable co-losing of ways, as it was always only an experiment in sociability offered up as opposed to expertise), & never restricted either to a single generation. Rubs off on transmigrants from so-called literal cultures newly absorbed into the climate: negotiating an outing to the fountain to hear arias eking from its mouth whenever the buses and cars, between lights, abate; & taking the road, instead, of shapely wall that from bird's eye perspective baroquely inclines otherwise.

Passion's all in the curving away. In tandem, tuned to not imposed.

To transfer this process to allotments of language—& feel, of a sudden, compassion for the would-be geometers of the twentieth century, with their grids, their cubes and their squares!