Ideas, histories are built of parts. Combined, recombined. Taken apart for a gear here, there. A phrase, Tones. Related. distorted. We talk and listen to the past. The past we passed through. The past we are making. Nothing is purebred. This isn’t genesis. This is synthesis.

Cormac McCarthy forms words from his landings. Driving, looking, reading. His books holdout the anti-western. Not the formations of Carl Chiarenza, a PhD. worder of photography, photographers, those histories. The only thing McCarthy and Chiarenza share is my studio table.

Pictures Come from Pictures. We do not know who gave birth to the first — or why or how. We can speculate on the cave or on its source of inspiration; we can speculate on how the first pictures were perceived. But we can’t be sure. — Carl Chiarenza, Landscapes of the Mind, 1988.

McCarthy wouldn’t have punctuated it as correctly. Probably wouldn’t have said that much without making a new, better fitting word. That’s why his pictures are formed of letters not shadows.

“the ugly fact is books are made out of books. . . . The novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written.” Cormac McCarthy