Clouds, Grass, Hair, Petals, The Moon
I focus on images and processes that persist for me over time, treating them as clues. I combine and arrange them, not necessarily to give them a story or to bring them to light, but to let them appear in the darker peripheries more natural to them. Not unlike a naturalist trying to make observations in an undisturbed setting, but in this case, understanding the setting to consist in disturbance, in being affected.
These are my notes. While the usual methodology requires that they be edited, arranged, and selectively emphasized or discarded – brought into clarity through artifice and craft, these notes, being fragile, wouldn’t survive that kind of translation.
“Intellectual freedom depends on material things.” - Virginia Woolf
Material Mantra
Transformation happens at the intersection of vision and material experience.
This is really the stuff of all violence.
The crux of this endeavor may be memory,
or rather, cultivating memory: some combination of (I am so tempted here to be sloppy, to write “a combination of fiction and facts.” Wouldn’t that be so typical? So penetrable? I think everyone would assent without another thought, but only because it is so imprecise as to be unobjectionable.)
There really is no fact and fiction, just attention and interpretation. Style.
When it comes to memory, we confuse attention with fact, even if we, when called out, admit subjectivity. We harbor a nasty little faith in our own stories. Our memories are two extremes, they are our precious shared things and then our deeply private things. The former is confirmed and corroborated and the latter gives rise to extreme attention because of the committed work we do for privacy and the feelings which sustain that work, usually of the negative sort, like shame and fear.
It’s foolish to believe the mandates, professional or otherwise, that insist on the proper negotiation of these terms: self and other. Foolish is too kind, of course, because that so-called negotiation is the heart of violence. The fallacy is in the notion that if it is true for me, it must be true for others, or it is not true. Therefore, the way I choose - the way I am comfortable, the way I have earned (not by merit, but by rote or by process: ontological inevitability) to see my life will be in peril, until of course I conquer the narrative structure in others. (No photographs please.) Until I force all of the stories to assimilate, to correspond, become commensurate with my story.
White Girls. It is not the first time Als has intimated a real story or real memory. He seems fond of the analysts couch, in that respect. A kind of owning one’s past to self-integrate, become whole, etc. The language is familiar enough to find on any given podcast or episode of Oprah: “Not remembering, or misremembering one’s childhood is a way of allowing oneself the notion that the past does not exist, that it was not lived through in quite that way, that somehow it did not make one different than the rest …” (WG pg. 334) The very notion of misremembering and the causality implicit in how we were involuntarily created, differentiated. And further: “But we condemn ourselves to self-disgust if we insist on not remembering, because memory’s always there, no matter what.” (WG pg. 334) Where is the memory that is always there? Where is there in this case? Should we assent to that paragraph and move on, just nodding, as if we get it? We intuit the multivalence? I am curious as to the proper home, the correct there, for these apparently forgotten memories. Where would Als have us put them, if we could find them?
I have a friend, she remembers things. She admits them, goes over them, pays the therapist to in some way process the images and stories, to ward off that “self-disgust” and the “blood that eventually appears as the result of this repeated violence to the self” due to “misremembering or not remembering at all.” (WG pg. 334) In her particular case, and as far as my myopic vision of others could ever penetrate, this publicized remembering does not quell the disgust. Perhaps the indulgence is quite the opposite. No, indulgence sounds pejorative, I simply mean the attention. Attention.
"… we fall disastrously at times, when we can no longer be—quite—the fascist-minded custodians of our past that we’d like to be, as in: I don’t remember, I can’t, and so forth. In censoring our past we censor ourselves—a not remarkable observation." (WG pg. 334) Als does not say, but I wonder if this "real" memory (which I suspect is real solely because of the emotional weight inadvertently attached to particular events resulting in our viewing them as events at all (we could have been hungry, not had our nap that day, forgotten to do some push-ups for Christ’s sake.) It is like a description I read of Jane Freilicher’s paintings in Poetry Magazine: "O’Hara noticed this then when he wrote that her "responsibility seems to be her perceptions rather than to painting," as did Schuyler, writing in one review of her work that "the emotional force of an object is allowed its compositional weight …"
There are such extremes, on the one hand looking for facts and adhering to them, to the idea that they exist, in order to create use-value. In science and in law. They hold the apparatus together, they are sound footing from which we can make progress, in the realm of that sort of thing. Terrifying to give up that kind of assurance, that stability. Fact finding is utilitarian and power seeking, it allows us a measure of control over our bodies and the pretense of communication. We have believed in it for so many years. On the other hand, we have, in opposition, this place where we give truth value to where our attention lies, singularly, instead of communally. That is, we pay attention to what we feel or, “the emotional force is allowed its weight.” It is too pervasive to be called pervasive, that we allow the emotional force of events, of memories, compositional weight in our life’s narrative.
Fifteen Years
I read an article in the rampant stream ostensibly (I love that word, it tempers the invocation of causality) emanating from Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death. It was a description of brain disorders like addiction, and described at length and with some antagonism the notion that a person is whole, but instead, invoking neuroscience, that parts of the brain functioned differently with various effects on our actions and interactions. In some way, the article represents the conflict between “the emotional force of events,” our memory (which in this case can be considered the interpretation of who we are, our unity) and the facts of neuroscience: isolating our brain into ordered and disordered sections, based on their understood roles. (Roles of course being defined by jobs or tasks, they are practical, and practicality requires a context, or ends - what is the implicit end here? Function? To not die of heroin? Maybe. Doesn’t it seem as childish as candy to persist in the notion that life is the ultimate end?
We just can’t figure out whether we want to be singular or communal.
