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COPYRIGHT SCHLEICHER & SCHULL GMBH, 3352 EINBECK Bestell-Nr. 667155, Nr. 365 1/2 MADE IN GERMANY Beide Achsen logar. geteilt, eine von 1 bis 100, die andere bis 1000, Einheit 100 mm

[[strikethrough]] today [[/strikethrough]]

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july 13, 1987 [[?]]: to New York h.d.

words from their usual treadmill and recast them as plastic entities: "Once started expressing this thing, expressing anything there can be no repetition because the essence of that expression is insistence, and if you insist you must each time use emphasis and if you use emphasis it is not possible while anybody is alive that they should use exactly the same emphasis.... It is exactly like a frog hopping he cannot ever hop exactly the same distance or the same way of hopping at every hop." [[footnote 4]] Similarly, Stein wrote that if you listened intensely to people saying the same thing over and over again, eventually "you could hear it rise and fall and tell all that there was inside them"; [[footnote 5]] this could be the perfect description of Darboven's upward and downward strokes, and of her use of numbers, which rise from one to ten and then fall, only to start again. This repetitious rhythm has a music quality, as Stein's work does, and Darboven has in fact written music. In 1971 she incorporated a German version of Stein's poetic line "Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose" in one of her "Ein Jahrhundert" (One century) pieces, preceding it with the remark "blumen verblühen" (flowers wither) and adding to it the proposals "1 ist 1 ist 1," "eins ist eins ist eins," and so forth, and continuing, "ich beschreibe nicht-ich schreibe" (I don't describe-I write). Her work always has its basis in reality, the actual time it takes to do the writing. And that writing has grown much larger than herself; it has become a proof, one of "write, write or die," in the words of the American poet H.D. [[footnote 6]] For only in these continuous daily writings that constantly prolong the present with repetition as a welcome pause for breath (rose is a rose is a rose is a rose) can the losses forces on us by the inevitable passage of time be faced. Once again, today has to be crossed out.

Coosje van Bruggen is a writer who lives in New York. She is preparing a traveling exhibition of the work of Hanne Darboven. 1. Unless otherwise noted, the quotations of Darboven are from a conversation with the author in Sept. '87. 2. André Maurois, Proust: Portrait of a Genius, 1950, trans. Gerard Hopkins, New York: Carrol & Graf Publishers, 1978, p. 158. 3. Darboven, "Artists on Their Art," Art international 4 vol. XII, 20 April 1968, p. 55. 4. Quoted in Carl van Vechten, ed., "A Stein Song," Selected Writings of Gertude [[?]] New York: Vintage Books, 1972, p. xxii. 5. Quoted in Richard Kostelanetz, "Introduction," The Yale Gertrude Stein, New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1980, p. XVI. 6. H.D., "Hermetic Definitions," in Hermetic Definitions, New York: New Directions, 1972. p. 7.

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