birthday letter to the world

I am thirty-four. The news this morning was Hurricane Irene, bearing down on the Mid-Atlantic, on its way to my sister, in the evacuation zones of New York. Ocean City MD evacuated the first time in 26 years. Schools in Prince George County remain closed due to the earthquake earlier this week, centered in Virgina. Southern Texas is experiencing its worst drought in history. The Guadalupe river, and other rivers I don’t know by name, are dry. My grandmother’s lawn is scorched and she cannot save the last of her fruit trees. There are no mosquitoes because of the dry riverbeds and cattlemen, cattlemen like my dad’s dad, are sending all of their stock to auction because the land can’t support them. On the radio they had audio from the hot stockyards of the cattle, anxiously mooing.

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)

Louise Gluck, 1985

The worst this poem can imagine is "what happens to dreamers." The worst is to sleep through a life. By definition, it doesn't matter what the lover dreams; if he dreams, he isn't watching. Nor has the speaker's "weakness" been cured forever. Forever is, in itself, the dreamer's word. As for the peace passion gives: it could
be called courage. Among the residual gifts of love is a composure, an openness to all experience, so profound it amounts to an acceptance of death. Or, more accurately, the future is no longer necessary. One is not rash, neither is one paralyzed by conservatism or hope. Simply, the sense of having lived, of having known one's fate, is vey strong. And that sensation tells us what it is to live without the restrictions of fear. Such moments, in a way, have nothing to teach; they can be neither contrived nor prolonged by will. What they establish is a standard. Not forever, but for one it was possible to refuse consolation, to refuse the blindfold.

"Night Song" issues from, is made possible by, a sudden confidence. Whether finally or briefly, the soul can expose itself to "the revolutions," the massive cycles and upheavals of time. This is the greatest freedom we can know; its source, in the poem, is love, but the experience itself, the sense of being no longer "compelled," is an experience of autonomy. The lover's alert presence is necessary to confirm these sensations, since such experiences must be tested, witnessed.

What the speaker wants is PRESENCE, not union, dissolution, but the condition which preceded it. The choice is not between the dreaming and lovemaking (another escape of self) but between dreaming and watching. Simultaneous consciousness, in other words -- the exultant recognition of one soul by another. The ideal of balance has replaced the fantasy of incorporation. Contact of this sort seems to exist outside of time, beyond the laws of earth: all motion, whether toward future or separation, ends it. Motion is the first law. And as surely as the speaker's state dramatizes one of the soul's primary aims -- to exist distinctly, to know where it ends and the blur of the world begins -- so will the conflicting aim be asserted as the wish to dissolve, to be allied with, absorbed into another. The drive toward oblivion seems to me (as to many others) not a symptom of sickness but a true goal, and this wish of the self to do away with the very boundaries it has struggled to discover and maintain seems to me an endless subject, however we may try to subvert its grandeur.

I don't think of "Night Song" as a love poem. Love is a stimulus, and the advantage of writing out of situations of this kind seems to me an advantage of subject and attitude: one can write as lovers speak, of what is crucial in simple language.

The underlying subject seems to me to be individuality, without which no love can exist -- groups do not love other groups. Love connects one irreplaceable being to another: the payment is terror of death, since each person is unique, each death is singular, an eternal isolation. That we have common drives is consoling, but to dwell on them is to evade the issue of ultimate solitude. The relationships, in this poem, of the various forms of oblivion, of dream to orgasm to death, are less important that the perception of oblivion, in any form, as noncollective. ... "Night Song" suggests that the oblivion we ultimately achieve is an outpost of solitude from which the other is exiled -- your oblivion is not mine, as your dream is not. This last line makes a mockery of placation; it damns the wish it grants. Against the relentless pronoun, the verbs are drumbeats, infantile, primitive. If what we want is oblivion, we are all lucky.

A last point. We are given to assume that morality depends on a regard for consequences. To some extend, this is surely true. But the regard is felt as fear -- in this light, morality appears as a product of intimidation. If "Night Song" connects the idea of freedom to rejection of the future, what is diminished, emotionally, is greed. Not avidity, but compulsive acquisition, need projected into time, the self straining to predict and provide for all foreseeable deficiency. I think the word FREE has no meaning if it does not suggest freedom from greed. To live in the present must mean being unerringly decisive, but choice, there, is easier, not harder. I do not claim to live on this plane, but I can imagine it.

It was clear to me long ago that any hope I had of writing real poetry depended on my living through common experiences. The privileged, the too-protected, the mandarin in my nature would have to be checked. At the same time, I was wary of drama, of disaster too deliberately courted: I have always been too at ease with extremes. What had to be cultivated, beyond a necessary neutrality, was the willingness to be identified with others. Not with the single other, the elect, but with a human community. My wish was to be special. But the representative life I wanted to record had somehow to be lived.

Major experiences vary in form -- what reader and writer learn to do is recognize analogies. I watched my house burn -- in the category of major losses, this made only the most modest start. Nor was it unexpected: I had spent twenty years waiting to undergo the losses I knew to be inevitable. I was obsessed with loss; not surprisingly, I was also acquisitive, possessive. The two tendencies fed each other; every impulse to extend my holdings increase the fundamental anxiety. Actual loss, loss of mere property, was a release, an abrupt transition from anticipation to expertise. I watched the destruction of all that had been, all that would not be again, and all that remained took on a radiance.

These are, in the deepest sense, ordinary experiences. On the subject of change, of loss, we all attain to authority. In my case, the timing was efficient. I was in my late thirties; perhaps I'd learned all I could about preparation, about gathering. The next lesson is abandon, letting go.

jonathan richman, 1970

She'd eat garbage, eat shit, get stoned

I stay alone, eat health food at home

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.

me, from 1997 (ugh)

The reason, however, that Beckett’s style of restructuring is so useful is that language can be used to critique itself.