Introduction

The Project

"The only thing the reader will see marching past him are inadequate means: fragments, allusions, strivings, investigations. Do not try to find a well-polished sentence or a perfectly coherent image in it, what is printed on the pages is an embarrassed word, a stuttering..."

Andrei Biely

"When a language is so strained that it starts to stutter, or to murmur or stammer...its entirety is submitted to a pressure that makes it fall silent."

Gilles Deleuze

"You would do no better, no worse, to obliterate texts than to blanken margins, to fill in the holes of words till all is blank and flat and the whole ghastly business looks like what it is, a senseless, speechless, issueless misery."

Samuel Beckett

Tensile is a book that results from a performance art and writing experiment. It was created to discover if a book could write itself using an index for which no book has been written. The index used was Douglas Blau's Index (*), which has 730 terms listed for a book that, if it were created, would be at least 750 pages long. In 2004, I decided to see if this could be done. Going to each term's definition in the Oxford English Dictionary (**), I followed a simple rule of selecting the center line from these definitions, one line for each of the 731 terms, 731 lines. Not trying to make sense of the combinations of these lines, they were placed in the book according to the page numbers stipulated in the Index. Because each term can be found on multiple pages, repetition of these lines is a strong characteristic of the project. When I couldn’t find a good definition for a word, I used an image in place of a line of text. Finally, a glossary was created so that the reader can match lines and images with their corresponding terms from Blau’s Index to see what word they represent. This 14-year performative writing project, The Index Project, as it was called before there being a book, is divided into 7 phases with the first 6 documented and considered rough drafts that evidence the meticulous nature of the project’s long process. Samples of these phases and the finished book can be viewed at http://www.beverlynelson.org/ or http://myhypertension.org.

A Few Notes

Douglas Blau's Index consists of 731 terms.

Tensile consists of 705 lines and 26 images substituted for the 731 terms.

Lines and images are determined by following devised constraints which are applied without thought to the compositional outcome of the words.

A considerable number of pages are blank because no terms were listed with those page numbers. The book, without front or back matter, totals 750 pages, the highest page number found in Blau’s Index.

The Book

The finished book comprises a collection of found texts selected by following simple mathematical rules designed to keep the collector distanced and limit their ability to compose text. By working "backward", by undoing Blau’s Index and methodically expanding its terms, the collector is prevented from knowing what the book would read like before it’s completed, which also limits opportunities for creative writing. The text is contingent on the machinery of syntax and words to produce meaning for the reader.

* Blau, Douglas, Index in Alexis Rockman (published 3 times: University Galleries of Illinois State University, Normal, Illinois, 1995; Thomas Solomon’s Garage, Los Angeles, 1992; Jay Gorney Modern Art, New York, 1991). Can also be viewed at http://www.beverlynelson.org/ or https://www.myhypertension.org

** https://www.oed.com/