a friend, 4.21.05

Cooperstown, peevishly bored with baseball, I was skipping stones on the lake and a duck, amazingly, unthinkably, landed in the path of one that I had already whipped out. It got hit thunderously in the head, and sort of faltered, bobbed, but then seemed fine, went about its duck business. My dad promised me that it was OK, but I've always had the feeling that the moment my back turned, that poor thing just sank & bubbled. sounds like a scene from a truffaut movie. And then I went to reform school. And then I ran away to the sea.

I think that your topic, what you're getting at, makes perfect sense and is really interesting. In a way, I suppose, it is artists turning away from an impulse, but you seem interested in why, and how, and how that's represented in what IS created, which is very different from just accumulating stunted work.People, especially when they talk about literary minimalisim, which was interested in staying on the surface as a way of representing what's below (different in intent from what your talking about) often talk about a frozen lake, and how it is that the depth & danger, the seriousness & size of the lake, can be felt & made to haunt us just by a walk along the ice on top. But then, a lot of art has been interested in breaking through, in making that plunge through the ice, and you're interested, if I understand, in art that feels the impulse to dive through, to deal with those depths, but that, for some interesting reason, decides to stay on the ice. There are some classic writing exerciszes where you put yourself in the role of, say, someone who has just watched a murder, or someone who has just watched a miracle, and then you describe something quotidian, something like a game of duck-duck-goose, but without mentioning the murder. And the idea is that the murder, if you're writihg well enough, and fully, will be there in the duck-duck-goose. You know this shit. So these artists, some pepys would say, that you're talking about, who are consumed with large issues, but only work on the 'surface', they're probably pulling the issues with them to the surface, whatever their intent.

(The aesthetics that I've always been interested in reject the boundies between the lake and the ice, the ice and the sky--all is surface, so nothing is. A game of duck-duck-goose can evoke, say, a murder or a miracle, not because of metaphor or ironic tensions, and not becuase the issue was brought to it, but becuase the game already is murder and miracle itself.)

I'll look through my books for things that might help. Off the top of my head, I remember a Louise Gluck essay called, I think, "Disruption, hesitation, silence" that might be useful.