Memory

Dispatches from an earlier time.

No doorways, just places to move between. The ocean smiles open for a picture, much less willingly with words. A picture smiles a moment but when a human is present the moment becomes strained with pretense, a contamination. Somewhere between point A and B, between Mexico City and Rome, Zion and Moab, I was changed by the accumulation of sights and sounds, the life-data that some might call experience. If only it was easy to replicate the sincerity of a prepositional phrase in a handshake. I would extend myself eager as a fisheye. See how words can be strung together like half-weaned daisies—gold nothing green streaking coins fall pollen downstairs into leap—for meaning to emerge from sudden exposure, a poetry of miscellany.

Now, what Bernadette Mayer wrote on July 1, 1971

a completely blue face continuing on he was living in the
I thought he had died how many times have you died in films
country where we
in humphrey bogart’s suit?

as part of a project called Memory, shooting a roll of 35mm film a day while keeping a journal of July’s goldfish glow. A conceptual catalog of dailiness in and around New York. My favorite page shows Bernadette in a Cadillac driven by Ed’s wind-whooshed hair. She was freshly 26 here; I am reading her on the cusp of 27. “It’s astonishing to me that there is so much in Memory, yet so much is left out,” Bernadette wrote in 2019. “I thought by using both sound and image, I could include everything, but so far, that is not so.”

William Carlos Williams

Life drips from the faucet. I want to put a mason jar in the sink to safe-keep the days.

Already reminiscing the year, I feel the heaviness of things not recorded and remembered, the moments left behind in the doorway. To write something down is to contaminate it with feeling. Still there is sustenance in the browned avocado. The compulsion remains to dig out, beneath its aerated epidermis, the large pit. July is a turning. On the day that will become my birthday, Bernadette wrote, “& as I write all this stuff down I know it comes out of nowhere goes nowhere & remains, nothing leaves. It’s almost a truth. I set myself up.” I like the idea of writing into the nowhere. In mid-July, I will spend a week replicating what Bernadette did for a month.

For now, some journal entries and photos from earlier in the year. I leave them undated and uncategorized; it interests me what might be revealed in opaque juxtaposition.

… Impossible to convey the scale and magnitude of the scenic overlook, some 6,000 feet above sea level, the Colorado River snaking past. What’s revealed here is geologic wisdom, time’s ancient handprints. There was so much to see and take in, the eye becoming hyperactive, bouncing from rock to rock, never staying still. The longer I spend here, the more I realize the impossibility of seeing it all — the only way to bear witness is to be, and yet we (humans) are mere specks of dust or maybe more like a swarm of flies — our bearing witness is a blip in geologic time. The canyon will persist long after we are gone…

… The city reminds me of the utter insignificance of our supposed “roles” and standing in civilization — how even the “greatest” societies led by “great” men were fallible and demise is the most natural progression of all, but while I am here, living, for however long, I should treasure the analog potential of memories: film negatives, handwritten journals, letters, tangible and tactile representations of life…

… Spring on the cusp of summer, the scent of orange blossom or is it jasmine and citrus? Heaven sent, heaven scent. My favorite trees are the stone pines, resembling a thin stem of broccoli, lining the cityscape with their regal, umbrella-like bushes…

… “It doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this world.” Bogart plays it straight — he’s an enigma — you can’t really read him nor extrapolate his motivations as Rick, hence the drama of the film’s final 15 minutes…

… I tell her it is related to identity — to find a way of going-on-being in the world after the [redacted], which increasingly feels abstract to me. She said it was a turning point for me — I return to thinking of it as a moment of shattering, of great uncertainty…

… he is a caged beast, domesticated in its repression, uncertain of how to express its untamable ways, shyly burrowing his/its head, maybe it knows how to mimic other animals but never does it truly inhabit itself, at home with its animal instincts — it is like a pet, beastly under direction, too afraid of its own freedom to wander off the premises…

… I’m distracted by a very loud gentleman sitting across from me with an elderly spotted dachshund named Freddy. The man keeps remarking on the “new” menu with an air of bewildered distaste, as if he can’t make up his mind about whether he approves the changes or not as a patron. These kinds of over-familiar regulars are the worst; they expect special treatment for their unremarkable routines…

I was always circling its relevance — I never felt like I denied it but I wasn’t intentionally engaging with its centrality in my work — I think I feared it, I closed myself off to it…

Bylines from earlier this year:

• “The heft of [Lee Kang Sheng’s] performance is found in slight gestures and unmet glances…” (Little White Lies)

• “In Rome, it is easy to feel out of time…” (Dirt)

• “Our modern attention spans are simply overheated.” (ArtReview)

• “[Laura’s] necklace is both innocent and incriminating, an iconic symbol of teenage love that simultaneously encodes a betrayal…” (Dirt)

and more to come,