doubt zine
one of my projects at the moment is to write a zine about two people i know who were/are artists who stopped making work for a period of time. this project has a distinct relationship to the doubt project, because the power of doubt (both positive and negative) seems to have had a role to play in these decisions, and more importantly, knowing these two people has greatly influneced my thinking about doubt.
last night i think i found the epigraph for the zine: my bedtime reading at the moment is gertrude stein’s ‘everybody’s autobiography’, and in it she says of a period after the publiction of ‘the autobiography of alice b toklas’ and its success:
“all this time i did no writing. i had written and was writing nothing. nothing inside me needed to be written. nothing needed any word and there was no word inside me that could not be spoken and so there was no word inside me. and i was not writing. i began to worry about identity. i had always been i because i had words that had to be written inside me and now any word i had inside me could be spoken it did not need to be written. i am i because my little dog knows me. but was i i when i had no written word inside me. it was very bothersome. i sometimes thought i would try but to try is to die and so i did not really try. i was not doing any writing” (49-50).