i never knew what time it was

by way of a preface

by way of a preface a number of years ago i was giving a talk very much like the talks from which the pieces in this book took their origin and i was trying to think my way through the difficult issues of what it means in this culture to be a professional and why i was never quite comfortable with the term after about forty minutes of this talking and thinking feeling i had done as well as i could for the moment i came to a provisional ending and as soon as i was done a woman who had been following the course of my talk with apparently intense interest rushed up to me and said with a strong sense of relief thank god i was so afraid youd forget your words but there were no words my talks are not lectures theyre thinkings and meditations i come with concerns and reflections with questions and matter for thinking even obsessions but there are no words not ahead of time i could use the word “improvisations” ive used it before but ive come to distrust what most people think it means the idea of starting from a blank slate nobody starts from a blank slate not charlie parker nor homer nor ludwig wittgenstein started from a blank slate each in his different way going over a considered ground that became a ix new ground as they considered it again so thats what these pieces started as when i talked them reconsiderations of a ground an old ground the experience of time of repetition of remembering and forgetting so much for origins but the pieces in this book are texts texts starting from two places transcripts of the tape recordings i always bring a little tape recorder with me and memories of the talking these are not the same a tape recording doesnt record everything the audience hears and sees or fails to hear or see and it records what they dont hear room noises slips of the tongue or irrelevant hesitations while the raw transcriptions dont catch meaningful intonation patterns or shifts in vocal quality so composing the texts involves a restoration from a memory but its also something more there are occasions when the allotted time for the talk or the circumstances are too limited for the material and i feel a loyalty to the material an obligation to take it further to articulate it more sharply so i do but theres another loyalty to the audience that made it possible and helped bring it into being and to the performance situation it was part of so in composing the texts i work between these two loyalties its not an issue of polish sometimes the pieces turn out to be very close to the raw transcripts and sometimes they can be twice as long but always i hope bearing the marks of their origin in talking and thinking at a particular time in a particular place and to ensure that these texts preserve their traces as talk ive tried to distinguish them from printed prose by dispensing with its nonfunctional markers regular capitalization most punctuation marks and right and left justification which i see as merely marking propriety and making a dubious claim to right thinking and right writing as for the book its an assembling of pieces that have come together by way of a preface x in my mind as a kind of open work structure i hope to offer as provisional housing for a number of elusive bright colored migratory meanings david antin 12/1/04 by way of a preface xi This page intentionally left blank ...