On the radio was Mitt Romney in New Hampshire, saying he can’t speak to human impact on climate change, he is no scientist. He said something like “what is warm is the movement of this clock, showing our national debt.” Some awkward not quite right not quite even mixed metaphor. Apparently he has a giant clock.
Drinking birthday coffee in bed, one of my favorite things, I looked with my fuzzy eyesight at the clear sky, at the lull before the storm. Dan’s coworkers left early yesterday to buy water and batteries; I speculated about when my surfer friend Birgit will head to the beach. She has a good route she takes to the Rockaways by local roads; the key would be not to get stuck in some traffic from the mass exodus from the shore, if it gets serious.
What do I have to say to the world? I remember a meeting I went to once of artists interested in sustainability, because the work my friend and I make is tangentially relevant. One person announced that the thing everyone in the room had in common was that we were all activists, and I objected. Heidi and I are not activists, I said. That is not why we do what we do. Another woman claimed she had been an artist until she learned about climate change, and then she stopped making art, because this issue is the most important thing. I never went back to any meetings; it irked me that the participants in the group believed that art only mattered if it was instrumentalized; and I felt that instrumentalizing art took away its power. I was thinking that people like that woman are neither scientists nor really artists, kind of acting as consciousness-raisers through media tactics. This morning Dan and I talked about the fact that climate change does not really need scientists as much as it needs consciousness-raisers, or rather that he could do more for the Earth in the public sphere of communication than through research, so maybe that woman’s thinking was right.
I live in a place where almost no one knows my face or name, and I moved from a place where almost no one knew my face or name, particularly not in the neighborhoods where I lived, where I felt comfortable as a visitor embedded in a particular layer among layers of visitors. I guess the exception to this anonymity were small spheres determined by work and school – the reason I continue to work in the arts being traceable, maybe, to the pleasure of recognizing like-minded people and re-encountering old friends, even in superficial ways. Certainly I do not recognize in myself the same sort of ambition that many of those friends share.
This morning I woke up wondering a bit about my old old friends, the ones I lost touch with when their lives ceased to resemble mine (and wondering whether mine will resemble theirs eventually, and I am operating on some sort of delay). It is not rocket science, staying in touch with people. It is work, it takes up a routine place in your week, it requires compromise and being a grownup and valuing connections for connections’ sake even when they don’t really make immediate sense.
Despite losing touch with these people, and seemingly for self-centered reasons, I feel I’ve lost touch with my own subjectivity. That somehow being more self-centered is the answer; maybe it is possible to do more in the world but be more self-centered. Yesterday, in the library, I skimmed bibliographies of books on Conceptual and post-Conceptual art, on books that theorize art economy and shifts in labor and training, trying to identify an area of study, something I could work on and call my own. I do not often get hungry these days (I am always close to food), but in the library I get hungry, my eyes get bleary from reading. Late in the evening I landed on Yvonne Rainer’s “Statement” from her program for The Mind is a Muscle, written in March 1968, in which she writes about the relationship of her choreography to her awareness of the war in Vietnam, as a kind of non-relationship that is defining, her energy and interest in her own body and her own subjectivity are activated by their contrast to a social world in which she (at least at that moment) felt she had no bearing or effect.
After reading this, I checked email, and wanted to send Heidi a picture of myself in the library, and took a picture of myself with the computer. This is the closest thing I have to mirror-time, a collection of computer snapshots. It made me think about watching Miranda July’s movie The Future in the theater with my sister, and a particular scene where she is trying to film herself making up a dance to post online on YouTube and keeps getting up to stop the camera. I had just shown my sister a video from vacation in the Adirondacks where I was doing the same thing. Lindsay and I talked about her friend Paul, who claims that Lindsay doesn’t have the type of weltschmerz (and deep-navel-interest) that such a dance implies, being a positivist and a generally happy soul, whose reaction to pain and problems is to set to work fixing them.
According to the email I checked, the word of the day is “colloquial.” The tone of this thing I am writing started out so formal, like my mom’s writing when she sits down to mark an occasion, though it has been somewhat modulated by the fact that I am prepping my multimedia content as I try to conclude, checking which of my ten protean secret blogs I can use to post the content, compressing the videos that illustrate what I am writing about. I would be annoyed with myself for my lack of attention, but it’s the first time in awhile I’ve brought a thought like this to any sort of resolution, even if I didn’t really resolve anything. So I will leave my thoughts in this place, and conclude with Rainer’s text, and two videos.
The condition for the making of my stuff lies in the continuation of my interest and energy. Just as ideological issues have no bearing on the nature of the work, neither does the tenor of current political and social conditions have any bearing on its execution. The world disintegrates around me. My connection to the world-in-crisis remains tenuous and remote. I can foresee a time when this remoteness must necessarily end, though I cannot foresee exactly when or how the relationship will change, or what circumstances will incite me to a different kind of action. Perhaps nothing short of universal female military conscription will affect my function (The ipso facto physical fitness of dancers will make them the first victims.); or a call for a world-wide cessation of individual functions, to include the termination of genocide. This statement is not an apology. It is a reflection of a state of mind that reacts with horror and disbelief upon seeing a Vietnamese shot dead on TV – not at the sight of death, however, but at the fact that the TV can be shut off afterwards as after a bad Western. My body remains the enduring reality.
(the idea is press play on both videos at once)
