Reflection on Sabina’s notation (on “temperature”)
Two A4 papers hang in the open doorway and move vividly in the wind. They are dancing. The tapes holding them hanging make sticky sounds. Now one of the papers sticks to the tape of the other one. Contact. The papers obstruct the doorway. A passer-by needs to take them into account. On a closer look I can see that there is handwritten text on the papers, on both sides. Now one of the papers falls onto the ground. I take this as a sign for taking the papers into my hands and start reading.
The words are arranged in lines, longer and shorter ones, with empty spaces between the groups of lines. This could be a poem. But I know it is a notation referring to something beyond the text itself. It claims to carry traces of an experience, an experiment. In accordance with the conceptual framing of the notation task at the workshop, these pages show handwritten observations of the agency of temperature.
The first page has a date in the top right corner. The notes were written yesterday (19 September 2022). The first line states: “it is too cold to move” and the second line continues the movement of writing: “if I would move, I would feel warmer”.
I imagine Sabina experiencing the environments and the temperature by moving. The text triggers emphatic imagination. Every turn of the head counts. Every blink of an eye matters. Every line connects. The arms reach out and hold the paper, the whole body feels. The grass is green, it was green, as were the trees that accompanied the heart, the most intimate that is now written down. The green glitters in the sunlight because there was a rain. Wet feet, shoes of. Die Füsse eingewickelt in eine graue Decke. Vague memory of the summer heat.
I imagine a hand holding a pencil, drawing, writing letters, words in lines. What a precision! The same body that steps down the stairs and walks around in the garden now sits down and produces these minuscule traces, still readable for my eyes. Like breathing: first gathering, then producing lines (as Tim Inglod told us yesterday). These phases cannot take place simultaneously, or can they? Dialectics at a standstill might be an option, image-thinking. But this is about moving (as much as it is about temperature): moving further and exploring the space, its volumes and surfaces, textures and shades. This writing is a shadow cast by a moved body. Complex patterns of shadows emerge as the fragmentary observations of the temperature are fine-tuned, tempered. The weave, the tissue of the text is a temptation. It draws me into its shadows. “Stay (close), stay (close)”, it repeats. I am convinced that if I would manage to move in its pace, I would feel warmer. As the shadows grow deeper, I become a reader, just another reader.
Then I stand up, walk, feel the ground, and lay down. I have been invited to do so. Where the text was is now the body.
