A friend of mine is in love with an anomaly, a person she sees the light bend through in a way that represents something she needs in her life. His person is not illusory, but she has conjured what he means to her out of a wish to see him as the fulfillment of her lack. Desire requires linear time. Linear time is a beautiful and sometimes oppressive technology that has the potential to play out in its fullness everything we need and want, so that if we could hold both ends of the line—but we can hold both ends of the line because linear time inheres in our bodies and begins and ends there. Desire requires not the future but a projection of the future. If you allow yourself to know yourself as the projector you already possess your desire (though you might not enjoy it).

Sean Bonney told a story about trying to take photographs to capture the unusual light he saw in a dark room. When he took the photos, the camera’s automatic flash kept going off, so the photos revealed a room he’d never seen before. The flashlit room was invisible to him till he saw it in the future. A poem is like the photo of the different room, the one Sean didn’t mean to take the measure of. It is accident until it is intended as poem. Maybe, in artworks, intention is wave and material is particle. It is impossible to force a wave through particles that don’t already compose it; that is, intention can only be expressed through the material that generatively limits its potential.