And why do we crave lightness so?
Lightness is a ’60s lie, it’s Pop Art, early Godard, The Nice Man and the Pretty Girl (With Huskies). Lightness is the ecstacy of communication without the irony, it’s the lie of disembodied cyberspace.
Through his medium John Ford, Kitaj is telling us that matter moves but you can’t escape its weight. The dead come back to dance not as spirits but as skeletons.
DD,
On December 3, 1994 I started loving you.
I still do.
SYLVÈRE AND CHRIS WRITE IN THEIR DIARIES
Pasadena, California
March 15, 1995
“Gave Proust seminar and first lecture today at Dick’s school. One more to go. Dick was direct and friendly, though in the car I suddenly had flashes of his hand going across Chris’ cunt. Images. The whole situation is so weird. In any case, Chris once again has pulled a fast one. Even though Dick’s rejected her, she’s managed to cover all the bases: She doesn’t need him to respond for her love to go on. She can maintain a relationship with me, draw inspiration from Dick for her work, and even put her film into a vault without pushing it any further.
Chris faxed me her piece about Kitaj, the “kike” painter she identifies with. It’s very heady, spiralling around his idiosyncratic life, critical rejection, East Hampton in the ’60s. I’ve never heard of him, but she manages to weave everything in, including her own present predicament.
I felt very moved by it, exhilarated. Chris now believes that the failure of Gravity & Grace was “destiny,” pushing her towards some further explication of all the emotion within her films. She’s writing without any destination or authority, unlike Dick, who’s off to give another talk in Amsterdam and never writes unless he’s asked to; unlike me, about to give my Evil lecture, collect my check and go home.
And yet Chris was feeling very sad, cut off from Dick, and I was sad too after talking to her. The situation was hopeless: she loved him, needed him, couldn’t stand the idea of not being close to him or communicating with him. I decided I will talk to Dick tomorrow night on our drive out to the airport. I don’t know how he’ll take it; after all, he’s been quite clear about ending this ambiguous situation. And yet if I happened to be heard by him, that would kill me: the idea of a strong connection between the two of them that excludes me. I ended up sobbing until 2 a.m., unable to fall asleep, feeling pretty down and desperate.”
Los Angeles, California
March 31, 1997
“I found Sylvère’s diary entry last night when I was searching all the backfiles of this computer for some link between Kike Art which I wrote that March and the last two essays in the book. Because I’d decided, and everyone agrees, that the only way to make this writing be a novel was to make the throughline very clear. But when I read his diary entry last night I was just so overwhelmed and moved. How much he loves me. How much he’s taken all my questions as his own.
On the phone this morning to Sylvère who’s in East Hampton I was talking about reading. How I like to dip into other people’s books, to catch the rhythm of their thinking, as I try to write my own. Writing around the edges of Philip K. Dick, Ann Rower, Marcel Proust, Eileen Myles and Alice Notley. It’s better than sex. Reading delivers on the promise that sex raises but hardly ever can fulfill—getting larger ’cause you’re entering another person’s language, cadence, heart and mind.
On April 9, 1995 I saw Dick alone in Los Angeles for the last time. We took a walk behind Lake Avenue. On April 20, I phoned him from upstate New York. I was upset and wanted resolution. The conversation was long and messy. He asked me why I made myself so vulnerable. Was I a masochist? I told him No. “’Cause don’t you see? Everything that’s happened here to me has happened only cause I’ve willed it.” On April 23, I met John Hanhardt, then curator of the Whitney Museum, to talk about my films. I was expecting John to offer me a show; instead, he wanted to engage me in a dialogue about the “failure” of my films.
On June 6, 1995 I moved permanently to Los Angeles.
The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote in his diary, “Understand or die.”
That summer I was hoping to understand the link between Dick’s misapprehension of me as a “masochist” and John Hanhardt’s judgement of my films. Both men admitted that though they found my work repugnant, it was “intelligent” and “courageous.” I believed that if I could understand this link I could extend it to the critical misreads of a certain kind of female art. “I have just realized that the stakes are myself,” Diane di Prima wrote in Revolutionary Letters in 1973. “Because we rejected a certain kind of critical language, people just assumed that we were dumb,” the genius Alice Notley said when I visited her in Paris. Why is female vulnerability still only acceptable when it’s neuroticized and personal; when it feeds back on itself? Why do people still not get it when we handle vulnerability like philosophy, at some remove?
Today at Barnes & Noble I bought a new book by Steve Erickson. The jacket blurbs, placing him within a new and all-male canon, offended me. “Erikson’s a major player,” the Washington Post crowed, shades of Norman Mailer in the ’50s, “up there with his contemporaries Richard Powers and William Vollman, the spokesmen of the chaos generation.”
“Dear Dick,” I wrote in one of many letters, “what happens between women now is the most interesting thing in the world because it’s least described.”
MONSTERS
El Paso Drive
June 21, 1995
DD,
This letter comes to you from Eagle Rock, Los Angeles—it’s 40 miles away from where you’re living but it feels very far away. I got to LA two weeks ago, seems like forever. Constant loops from one mood to another, loneliness and optimism, fear, ambition… Do you know the meaning of those roller coaster billboards that you see driving round the city? A black & white slightly blurred photo of some people on a roller coaster, a red circle slash for “No” printed at the center? Don’t know if it’s some kind of public art. It’s a poor attempt at menace if it is one. In New York on 7th Street between Avenues B and C there’s a plywood hoarding nailed like a canopy to some scaffolding above the entrance of a crackhouse. Someone’s wheat-pasted a poster of two men in loose black clothes leaning with their guns against a high-rise patio balustrade. It’s very scary: war-time reality slammed up against the image of a new-wave ’60s futuristic movie. This is no movie, the poster seems to say. It’s Beirut, these guys are serious, and so is thug business. Walking east towards it your eyes perform a double flip—the image of the patio seems to be protruding from the building, very trompe l’oeil, but by the time you’ve finally unravelled it you’re already walking past the armored door.
God what a hoot. I’m moved to talk to you about art because I think you’ll understand and I think I understand art more than you—
—Because I’m moved in writing to be irrepressible. Writing to you seems like some holy cause, ’cause there’s not enough female irrepressibility written down. I’ve fused my silence and repression with the entire female gender’s silence and repression. I think the sheer fact of women talking, being, paradoxical, inexplicable, flip, self-destructive but above all else public is the most revolutionary thing in the world. I could be 20 years too late but epiphanies don’t always synchronize with style.