“It’s the form that creates meaning, it’s what we do everyday without thinking that is the main event.”

Dear Godfrey:

That the pontiff might serve as your personal Che Guevara reflects you as anachronism. You affirm an obligation to tell young people that they must walk on water, must become heroic, and must ignore whatever attraction respectable, protected, stable middle-class living may hold. This obligation bespeaks exactitude, without austerity – demands joy that need not be underwritten by consequentialism – and an audience that isn’t looking for instruction as inspiration or preemptive approval at the ecstasies of living life as an experiment.

“The imperialism of the trivial sets limits on what seems possible” is me, not you, but it’s me trying to ape you in the same way you try to ape phenomenology from a god’s eye time-lapse view. The same way that you marshal a great ape to hold up a mirror to the viewer (that unbroken, unbreakable gaze).

From the top floor of the hotel where I write this, I can look down on the cages of the baboon exhibit and the monkey (of various species) exhibit. They are hemmed in by netting that must periodically be reset, as the trees that sit within the enclosure grow by the inch and expand by increment the space in which the monkeys are encaged.

Who’s on first, mutatis mutandis

I showed the first movement of your trilogy film poem to a class of 15-16 year olds with whom I lived at the outer edge of the end of American civilization, though right in its geographic center. I wanted to convey the idea that there are ways of naming the craziness of the world that apologize for it or accept it as the baseline of consensus reality. You don’t cotton to didactic aesthetics, but embedded in the trilogy a theme – rejection of normalized ennui – shines through. One among many themes, tropes, conversions, offerings. And these shine through, as a form of how images gather and disperse in sequence. Insomuch as the viewer agrees to have faith (as you insist), this sequence of images aspires to function as half of a conversation that is worth attending to.

Covert activism and naïve DIY enthusiasm. I think it an underwhelming interpretation to see the trilogy as working in the mode of the therapeutic or diagnostic – e.g., whereof one cannot think, thereof one should not speak, or scorn for Mittledt and amor fati – because there is a viewpoint expressed that is much more radical, that would require an overthrow of basic assumptions and not just a shift in who pulls on the levers. “Direct montage” in the Armenian vein, filtered through Godard, filtered through St. Augustine. You show that this is may be more than a skit of improvisation, that we are come to be at play in the fields of the Lord whether we like it or not.

“[Technology] has become the environment of life, it has replaced nature as the host of human habitation and the rest of nature pays the enormous price for that.”

On the cusp of going on a trip, I laid out my assembled grab bag of chargers, cords, camera, batteries, and cases/bags for carrying the same. I walked miles, my cellphone logging each step, and kept the camera in one zipped-up coat of my jacket and a charging bank in the other. As I looked at my phone to tell me where I was in relation to the monuments, eateries, and whatnot noted on the phone’s map application, I periodically plugged it into the charging bank in my pocket to make sure I could forestall the leakage that would led to the phone going temporarily dead.

I will cede to you the penultimate word:

I think it’s endemic to the way we live that “war” is the predicate. But it’s beyond the war of the battlefield. It’s much more insidious, much more pervasive, and a war that appears like not war, it looks normal. We’ve gone to ware with the entire rest of the planet, the animal kingdom, the vegetation kingdom, the very air of earth itself, the vibrations within the planet, the relationship between the outer-core and the inner-core where we’re exploding nuclear devices underground for 50 years, I mean, we’re really messing around here. We all have within our bodies elements that didn’t even exist a hundred years ago, they’re ingested like the air we breathe. It all seems normal. I mean, just to support this war of living, the price we pay for this technological happiness is off the charts and our life becomes predicated in speed, faster and faster and faster and faster. We’ve outrun our future. To me, the end’s already occurred, we’re living in the aftershock of the event, and to me that’s what I mean about being hopeless about this order, so that one can have the veracity of hope. Hope is the substance of what you hope for, it’s the only term in theology that uses the term to define itself. So it’s not just, “I hope things are fine,” that’s just willy-nilly. It’s the substance of what you hope for that makes hope. So I’m hopeful, but I’m hopeless.

Grab it by the thorns and pull, come what may.