Cuyler Page wrote:

> *Maybe we could start a BP Skype chapter?
> Brian
> *
> Oh, wouldn't that destroy the elegant mystery of only knowing people 
> through words on screen.   For those of us with have never shaken 
> hands, we would then have to live with two images of the people with 
> names we already know.


 From a recent correspondence regarding our sense of images of each 
other....

I have a friend who is a fairly famous artist, leastways the most famous 
artist that I know is a friend. I have known him since the 1970's. Our 
lives are very much different. I may not see him for 10 years or so, 
even though he often operates a storefront studio in NYC. A while back I 
got ahold of his gallery as I wanted to get back in touch with him. He 
contacted me in time to let me know that he was shutting down his studio 
and going to South America for a few years. We did not see each other then.

One of the reasons we had kept seperate was that when I went to one of 
his art events at PS1 there were so many people swarming around him with 
cameras and such that I felt that I was an intrusion. I mentioned to him 
that sometime we might have lunch or dinner together and he remarked 
that he did not think that we knew each other well enough for that. I 
took that as a rather odd and putting off comment and went back about my 
business... and for a whole lot of reasons it is our being about our 
business that makes us not spend time with people that we would like to 
spend time with. Recently he came back from South America and sent me an 
invitation to his latest opening to show off the work he and his partner 
had collaborated on in Brazil. I decided to go and on Saturday night a 
few weeks ago went in on the train to Chelsea. (The gallery was near to 
Gehry's new glass building on the West Side highway. I took pictures of 
broken panes of glass in the rain. Yesterday I read that Gehry wears 
Fuck Frank Gehry T-shirts and sends them to his friends.)

I was at the gallery early. My friend's work is to make full body casts 
of people in a community and then to mold them in fiberglass, paint 
them, and hang them on a wall outside where they can be seen in public. 
So I stand in a room with replicas of full size Brazilian people hanging 
on the wall. The art is as much about the static figures as it is about 
the social collaboration of the community of the individual subjects who 
undergo the body casting. An attractive woman was looking through a 
photo album and she pointed at one of the figures on a bus (it was fully 
molded and replicated on a wall) and said, "That's me."

My friend he has a twin brother. So I stand there as the gallery fills 
up and wait to see my friend. Nobody knows or recognizes me. First there 
is one of them. I watch. I watch everyone with an idea that I want later 
to be able to write and describe the scene. The brother that is there 
wears a funny street hat and looks to be bald. At one point I overhear 
he introduces a young woman as his daughter. I do not even know if my 
friend has a daughter. It is hard for me to tell if this is my friend, 
or not. The other brother shows up. He has a full head of gray hair and 
a nicely trimmed beard. Now I am even more confused. I wait and I 
listen. The brother with the hat on asks someone where the bathroom is 
in the gallery. I now know which one is my friend.

I go over to my friend and say hello. He had not known who I was. He saw 
me with a baseball hat with a red crab (Mastic Seafood) on it and that I 
was watching everyone and he was curious. He had not expected me to come 
to the opening. He asked me why I had not come up to say hello right 
off. I told him because it looked like he was busy. Besides, I said, I 
am watching and working... he knows me as a writer. He introduced me to 
everyone as a guy he had known for thirty years. He told me that he 
wants to keep in touch and stay friends. I told him that I also wanted 
to stay in touch.

He remarked how he has in his possession the first novel that I wrote. 
How thick it is and how incredibly surreal the writing is. I am 
thinking, "Oh, God... how the garbage of our youth continues to haunt 
us." I tell him, honestly, "I do not even have a copy of that 
manuscript." Suddenly it becomes for him the point of celebration and 
cause for our connecting that he will make a copy of the manuscript to 
share with me. He tells me that he loves the writing but does not 
understand it. I tell him that there are people now who would say that I 
still write in a manner such as that. The next day I went and looked at 
some of my more recent writing thinking that I might send some to share 
with him.

I come away wondering why I had written what I wrote. Sometimes I come 
away wondering who actually wrote what I know that I wrote. In one sense 
it is nice to look at something that we have done and see it as fresh, 
but there is always also this constant disconnection from ourselves.

One of his friends, an attractive black woman, asks me if I am also a 
painter. I tell her, no, I am a poet working on a novel. She says 
something to the effect to ask how long it takes to write a novel. I 
tell her that I am always working on a novel.

Though I also tell her that I have been busy building a business fixing 
old buildings and not working on it as much as I would like. She wants 
to know which NYC Borough has the most old buildings on it. I mention 
Weeksville... I kinda get the impression she thinks of old buildings as 
being sent off to a collective somewhere to keep them away from the new 
buildings. Like lepers?

She asks if I have writer's block. I tell her that my protagonist 
started to eat a baloney sandwich and that suddenly I had no idea where 
I was going with the project. [My correspondent in Austria writes back 
that he had to look up baloney.] She wanted to know what the novel is 
about. I tried to explain, sort of muddled explaining, that it is an 
anti-war book. She wants to know if I am a pacifist. I say no, the next 
person that tries to punch me in the face I will kill them... and I try 
to explain my policy on psychological deterence. I try to explain that 
the book is not an anti-war book as much as a book that explores how we 
can have meaning in our lives without the violence of war. She says it 
sounds like a Utopia. I do not exactly see it as a Utopia as it became 
fairly clear to me early on in the writing that a whole lot of the 
characters were dropping dead. Hmmm... just now it occurs to me that 
possibly the way to continue forward is to have all of the characters 
drop dead one by one. Anyways, the basic premise has to do with the oft 
repeated comment in our literature that for an individual they feel the 
most real in their lives when faced with the prospect of their death in 
the war environment of violence. For many veterans of war their 
experience of war - it is said but not verified - is the most vivid and 
enduring, if not actually tormenting and haunting, core experience of 
their lives. What I want to explore is how one can live a fulfilled life 
without that violent core experience.

A premise for a novel is supposed to be no longer than one sentence. My 
novel writing project seems to be reduced to figuring out the one sentence.

][<en

--
To terminate puerile preservation prattling among pals and the
uncoffee-ed, or to change your settings, go to:
<http://listserv.icors.org/archives/bullamanka-pinheads.html>