Friday, 5 October 2007

‘Tensile strength’ are the first words to hatch out.

Saturday, 6 October 2007

Tensile: capable of being stretched; susceptible of extension; ductile (OED). Like writing, obviously enough: indefinitely, if not infinitely, extensible (I promise I won't forget about breaking and cutting, that'll come soon enough). And ductile: see what he says about the ductus in The Truth in Painting, a kind of artistic signature, but ductile is also not far from duction and even seduction, leading astray, going wrong, getting off the track, errancy.

Sunday, 7 October 2007

Tensile to ductile, ductile to (se)duction: many other words in ‘-duction’ could work for us here too; there's a swarm of them multiplying: induction, deduction, reduction; adduction and abduction … An early example has the word ‘duction’ mean multiplication. And multiplication is of course one of our questions here: un ver à soie, a silkworm (of one's own), one or just a countable few in the shoebox; very many silkworms hatched in your cabinet, multiple worms squirming, or so I imagine it, in my multiple words for worms here, tensile or ductile enough to make it round the globe, destined for your inimitable ductus litterarum as you write them up on the wall.

Wednesday, 10 October 2007

Back in my cocoon here in Atlanta (I was in Paris for the first hatchings, around and about the third anniversary of Jacques Derrida's death), just now picking up the thread that seems, more or less incredibly, as always, to have made it across the Atlantic, six hours further away, six hours earlier than it was. I want to start thinking about size and growth (such a strange and difficult concept, growth), the sleepless insatiability that makes them grow to ten thousand times their original size, the molts along the way, what gets left behind.