I Love Dick (14 page)

I chose the fence: walked to the left, because I knew the Beagle Club stretched down the right ending up several miles down Lanfear Road in Stony Creek. I ripped a forked branch from a tree to mark the spot. The fence didn't follow a straight line. In order not to lose it I jumped over fallen trees, crawled through piled up branches, thorny frozen weeds.

I started running through the woods, profoundly grateful for having started taking an aerobics class. The sound of the chainsaw got fainter, further. I ran for 10 or 20 minutes, not thinking so much about death or deals with God as how many hours there'd be of night, and how it's possible to survive it. Finally through the trees I saw a clear snow-covered slope, then farther on, a trailer.

I came out on Elmer Woods Road, a one house lane that cuts off Mud Street and walked a couple of miles down Mud Street to Smith Road. There weren't any cars. I thought about a story told by 9 year old Josh Baker, who lives here in a trailer, about his mother walking alone down Mud Street one winter night when a demon-ghost leapt into her throat. This story, always colorful, now seemed not at all improbable.

xxo,
Chris

PS—Dick, Now it's Wednesday night and all week I've been thinking about calling you: knowing that if I'm going to do it I will have to do it soon. By now you'll have my note express mailed Tuesday and you're leaving, what?—tomorrow, Friday?—for ten days overseas. I can't remember what I wrote but Ann Rower promised it wasn't too drippy when I read it on the phone. I think I said I was embarrassed about the ninety single-spaced pages of letters. Then something like, “The idea of seeing you alone is a vision of pure happiness and pleasure.” God now I'm really cringing. Anyhow I know I lied about “having” to be in LA at Art Center alone on February 23. Sylvère and I are going there tomorrow to do studio visits Friday. And I want to make it casual but the telephone's so brutal. What if I reach you when your head's a million miles away? Could I handle that as well as being lost in the woods at dark? No. Well, maybe. I'm torn between maintaining you as an entity to write to and talking with you as a person. Perhaps I'll let it go.

Love,
Chris

New York City

Thursday, February 2, 1995

DD,

I'm sitting here at the West End Bar on Broadway having a coffee & a cigarette before going over to meet Sylvère. Have already been travelling most of the day: left home around 10:15, drove down to Albany through snow squalls, and then the endless train.

After talking to you last night I didn't fall asleep 'til 3 a.m. Heart & sex chakras pounding, mixing themselves up 'til sex feelings are overwhelmed by heart. Or perhaps it's more like sex feelings pumping out of heart. Anyway it was a kind of excited bliss, & I haven't felt this way for 10 years, since I fell in love with Sylvère. At that time it went so badly—those feelings were barely expressed and never accepted. I had to resort to other stratagems, like being the most intelligent and useful girl.

My personal goal here—apart from anything else that may happen—is to express myself as clearly and honestly as I can. So in a sense love is just like writing: living in such a heightened state that accuracy and awareness are vital. And of course this can extend to everything. The risk is that these feelings'll be ridiculed or rejected, & I think I'm
understanding
risk for the first time: being fully prepared to lose and accept the consequences if you gamble.

I think our telephone call went well last night, despite the ambiguous archness of your question: “And you only want to talk, right?” I can't remember what I answered, the answer just flowed out, but I think we understood that we were talking about the same thing.

Chris

Fillmore, California

(The Condor Preserve—

late afternoon, 94 degrees)

Friday, February 3, 1995

DD,

Art, like God or The People, is fine for as long as you can believe in it.

Things To Do With The Person You're Having An Affair With:

1. Take photobooth pictures of yourselves
(Note: finish this list later.)

What I was thinking about in the car:

That I don't want be the person who always knows anymore, who has the vision for two people and makes the plans. I never understood before people who would do this (i.e., turn their whole lives around)—I thought it was idle, self indulgent, another way of just avoiding doing things in the world. But will, belief, breaks down…& now I do.

Here's the formulation: I got together with Sylvère because I saw how I could help him get his life together. I'm drawn to you 'cause I see how you can help me take my life apart…

Pasadena, California

Saturday, February 4, 1995

“Maktub” in Arabic means “it is written.”

Write a narrative in which the speaker starts to understand that events, as they happen in her/his life, can be seen not as surprises but as an uncovering—the systematic revelation of fate.

DD,

I am sitting in the Art Center library and starting, systematically, to read your essay on
The Media and Magic Time
in the Zurich Kunstmuseum catalog that I'd come across here last trip. I think that I am your ideal reader—or that, the ideal reader is one who is in love with the writer & combs the text for clues about that person & how they think—

(Through love I am teaching myself how to think)—Looking at the text as
the way in
. Given that disposition no text is too difficult or obscure and everything becomes an object of study. (Study's good, because it microcosms everything—if you understand everything within the walls of what you study you can identify other walls too, other areas of study. Everything's separate and discrete and there is no macrocosm, really. When there are no walls there is no study, only chaos. And so you break it
down
.)

I think that in that essay you (perhaps a lot of other people too, but since I'm in love with you I'll pretend that you're unique) were on the brink of a very important discovery: how to bring some politics to bear on the visionary ecstacy of Levi-Strauss, the ecstatic nihilism of Baudrillard, without becoming an old stodge. Politics means accepting that things happen for a reason. There's a causality behind the flow and if we study hard enough it's possible to understand it. Can politics be articulated in a way that's structural, electric, instead of being dug up again, the boring bit at the bottom of the barrel? I think the clue to this is simultaneity, a sense of wonder at it: that the political can be a
PARALLEL SOURCE OF INFORMATION
, & more is more: adding an awareness of politics, how things happen, to the mix can just enhance our sense of how the present is exploding into Now Time. I'm thinking of the quote you cite from Levi-Strauss—“a universe of information where the laws of savage thought reign once more.” As if the instantaneous transmission of information can return us to the time-based, finite and deliberate magic of the medieval world. “The Middle Ages were built on seven centuries of ecstacy extending from the hierarchy of angels down into the muck” (Hugo Ball). So when you introduce political information to your texts, it shouldn't be a matter of “And yet—” “But still—”, as if politics could be the final countervailing word. (I'm thinking of the essay on postmodern retro camp in your book
The Ministry Of Fear
.) Politics should be introduced: “And and.” Breathless, keeping it afloat—how much information about one subject can you juggle in two hands?

You write about art so well.

I disagree with you, obviously, about the frame. You argue that the frame provides coherence only through repression and exclusion. But the trick is to discover
Everything
within the frame. “Think Harder” as Richard Foreman used to blast out over the PA in his early plays. Or just Look Closer.

New York City

Tuesday, February 7, 1995

The sweetest tongue has the sharpest tooth.

DD,

I woke up with a start last night after maybe 20 minutes of cramped airplane sleep with a very vivid dream.

I was out for the night with Laura Paddock, my best (only really) friend among the Art Center Students. We were at someone's place (a student's?); a bunch of people having dinner, & Laura & I'd planned to leave early so I could hook up with you. I was supposed to call you to confirm, & I did that from the party, & when I reached you you cryptically called the whole thing off. And I hung up the phone, & in front of this roomful of art students in their 20s let out a huge & uncontrollable sob. No one looked at me but Laura, who instantly knew, & I collapsed into her arms.