Hair Shirt Chronicles

“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.

Dear Sarah:

I was reading in Suzuki the other day and he attempted to translate sabi as attaining to a primitive uncouthness. I would like to know if your vortices would bear a family resemblance – if rounded edges and that line from Malkmus about wanting to look poor when you’re 15 resonated, at all.

I won’t deign to stoop to aggrandize. For a bit, at least.

I wrote a letter once to an author with whom you are socially acquainted. This was back in the early-aughts. I had designs on having coffee with her. She may have read, if not gave an imprimatur of approval, this layered utterance: “She was privileged enough to feel at home anywhere, and to equate squalor with authenticity.”

Being alone without feeling alone, and speaking a kind of silence that might otherwise prove corrosive. I wonder if your partner takes that on in reading poetry. Or writing it. Also if the nostril hairs in his nose get to you yet.

Vortices and concatenations, the currency in which you traffic, carry so much of the meaning that sits behind my tongue, like dammed water, and I don’t know where to begin to let it seep. It is said that your mind guillotines this from that without having to think too much, an accordion of separate, but connected concepts, that you cogitate and cogitate and cogitate away. Is a sculptor a monkey grinder? Does being awarded something for being a genius lessen the dull cramp of envy that pulsates inside even so generous a heart as yours?

I like that you like tangerines. That procreation neither defines nor obstructs what the next work may be. That the foxes you depict are both ravenous and sprightly. That you can be precise and accurate, simultaneously.

Did you ever read the Inferno? The souls whose heads are munched on by other souls, in a kind of circle-jerk of carnage and sin – sometimes I think of that. I wonder if I would have better spent my time drawing birds in the upper branches of cottonwood trees that cling to the shores of the Missouri. Does the Renaissance and its piquant humanism ever read out of steam?

Do you have in mind a tree that clings to shores of a middle-American river? Is that part of your native taxonomy? I watched a ten-year old lose a toe to a snapping turtle once, in what we thought to be an idyllic swimming hole, in the Big Sioux. It was an angry brown river – too brown for the red blood of the severed toe to graduate to spectacle.

In college I had a friend who used to go into a media library and randomly pick out recordings to copy. I assume some were music, some were advertisement, some were found sound. And part of the process was the unknown of the discovery. What if . . .? seems a good an approximation of a spur to make art’s horse gallop or buck, twirl in circles to get you off its back. Have you ever been thrown into the dust? Ridden a wounded horse?

If art is a thief, isn’t what you give it also stolen from you?

Sarah, now I shall stoop. I like your quiet confidence, the active mis en scene of your art, and its reflective boisterousness . . . . then its chaste but not melancholic poise. I think your art is a kind of innocence found. I wish I lived in big exotic cities and knew people who worked for you assistants, who might gossip about the sparkle of your brilliance and the quiet sophistication underlying your semiotics. That smell of turpentine on a cold-water walk-up, back when it was possible to paint in rooms that were not up to code. The past is a different country.

I am not far from the Spam Museum, it should be said.

Sometimes I want to have access to a gallery to walk through, and a person to walk through it with, from whom astounding insight and delight will unspool. To know the context, I suppose, is more than half the battle. And when it seems like maybe the future has the upper hand – that the years that have not landed will trounce the present or wash it clean, like a frenzied squall – the next thought rejects its alibi. That forever deferring function, flinging us out into the sweep of the future’s scythe, is the opposite of the kind of observer’s intimacy I want to occasion in writing you.

Faith is the substance of . . . it escapes me.

All I can say is that I got this way be being this way. What is your story?

Endeavor to show the true more than the real because it is, outside the camera's view, more real than true

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

As if the priesthood was the sole remaining repository of joy