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
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