““I will write down my thoughts here in no order, but not perhaps in aimless confusion. It is the true order and will still show my aim by its very disorder.”

— from Pascal’s Pensees”
— Jacqueline Lichtenstein, “The Fragment: Elements of a Definition,” in The Fragment: An Incomplete History, ed. Williagm Tronzo (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2009), 125.

prelude

 

We learn as a child that every snowflake is unique. Crayon drawings of blue scribbles with scattered white dots grow up to become kaleidoscopic cut-outs that cling to our windows like magnified talismans. Snowfalls assume a more magical aura. All those snowflakes, all those billions of individual, distinct snowflakes, if only we could capture every single one so we could see the wonder of each, before they melted away.

 
Amanda Clyne, "Rebecca", video stills, 2012

Amanda Clyne, Rebecca, video stills, 2012

““ I have lived so much in foreign lands, mute, terrified behind the curtain of languages, would I have really tasted life if all I had done was listen and speak? The most precious things I know are embedded in silence.”

— Michel Serres”
— Michel Serres, The Five Senses, trans. Margaret Sankey and Peter Cowley, (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2008), 105.
 

Amanda Clyne, Untited (Portrait of R.G.), 38” x 29”, oil on canvas, 2015