White Trees
Having written about the trace in prior posts, it is time to expand on its place in the creative process, to point out how the trace is related to but is not quite memory. So here goes.
The trace is the division between past and future. On this sense the trace is that which remains after the infinitely short NOW. All human activity exists as a bookend of the trace but each action begins in a trace and concludes at the moment of a trace. Ongoing creative acts are ongoing because the trace is actively impressing memory of the ongoing event or accounting for the active ability to make decisions, plans, judgements about the active future.
Completed action belongs to historical time. Only during active or ongoing events does an action occur in both the present and the past as it moves through the trace as a function of time. Some activites are so constituted so as to be extendible with no right side boundry save the death of the one engaged in such an activity and have a determinable left side boundry which may be any time from birth to the NOW.
Other activities are bound by tightly defined beginings and endings. Creating is a bound activity. It is bound on both ends. For each image creation begins in a trace, proceeds through existential time to a finality ending, at least for the creator, in some form of publication. Only while the creative process for a specific image is extant is there a chance for alteration, adjustment, processing so that the image is still subject to potential change. Once published the process ends. Any further adjustment produces a new image perhaps one derived from the first but a new image nonetheless. Once publication occurs the image is no longer one in which the trace is active. The image becomes static so far as the artist is concerned. The image is no longer able to induce a response, an alteration, editing, polishing. What now exists is an image with potential for an observer to, while viewing, retrun the image to the trace. Even the artist viewing his or her own work becomes, not a creator, but a viewer, an observer engaged in constructing meaning from the finished image.
The White Trees by Roger Passman, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
