And I see it’s all material, sure, that’s fine, again material, more material, immaterial and otherwise and with depth, yes, of course, I’m not mad, of course, not quite, not yet, of course, but I just can’t let the idea go, not quite yet, because I like to start things strangely and because where would it (go)? That’s unclear, sorry. I mean the idea that it’s all stuff all here and always has been and I wonder why I used to wonder how we’d break free from context, from the maybe not so barefaced subjective that stuff-makers like Eliot and Frosty Frosterson believed would impinge upon one or both aspects of a dual identity I’m not sure I believe in, the day-to-day sufferer, on the one hand, and the artist creator on the other. But why? And here again I go wondering stuff, taking stuff and doing something to it and wondering what and why and how and in the end just saying.

I wonder what I’d say to Parks and Ellison about visibility if I could skip the silly confines of time and meet them out for drinks or food or just talks and if they’d scoff and sneer at the suggestion that art—or anything—can ever be anything but personal. Even the impersonal is personal, I might say, and that’s just how I’ll take it, thank you very much, straight. Maybe they’d laugh, maybe they’d smile, maybe they’d go stern and think it over and shake my hand or pat me on the shoulder before they left and maybe I’d ask them to stay, please, stay a while longer and tell me what they thought about the idea I just had that material is a word that spells out utility, or at least that’s what our time’s minds say.

It’s all material, I might say, but I don’t want to use it, I want to do it, be it, middled again like stuck and duration, endurance and lasting, wedged in again, still, on the idea stuff of spans and spaces and gracelessly-conjured images of hundred year chandeliers hanging over college kids, drunk and dancing, the music too loud for respect and what’s that anyway, history? And images of starry nights hung room-central behind taped toe lines in grand institutions with photo flash crowds swarming for a piece of static proximal action before they wander into the grand institutions’ grand institutional boutiques to do the commercial thing and buy a mug and a t-shirt on the way out. And images of her, last but most, outlined and no lines, no restrictions and all being and all the lights beyond and sky around and colors and touches and contours and sounds within because that’s what it all looks like when the heart is on and the music plays nerves and optics for being felt and seen.

What’s the right thing, with all this thisness, what’s the approach, the angle, the thing? Take it and do something to it? How bout with it, for it, in it, something sinking and certain, how bout, something right there but just beyond reach. And what does that say for transcendence, though, for drifting out of For Now? For, yes. Well? Well, why would I. I don’t know about that anymore, leaning back to someone else’s before, because some elsewhere before isn’t striking the iron hot anymore, and I’m finding it instead heated to molten and flowing by other means, now, now means present and that means historics, it means that historics, whether considered exalted or discarded or just plainly separate, now feel confined, delimited, arranged and textbook measured with an air of suburban claustrophobia, too safe and innocuous, too squared off and pigeon hole pegged to be anywhere near as dangerous and deviant as the past brought to now, rather than the backwardness of now brought to then.

That, that might really be something, and I guess it has been, plenty, the then brought here, mixed into this like it always is already and I keep thinking that’s why I keep lately finding purpose in repurposing, in the retrieval of strings and currents and stuff that flows more like respiration and subjective thought patterns that could only end in death, and maybe not even then, and now I’m just being coy because I know how I feel and I feel the rampant, time-tentacled thisness of Parks and Ellison as much as Eliot and Frosty as much as Basquiat and whoever and the list goes on—it all defies that this vs. other and says yes, this and other and other and more is all this, all us, all now, and it edges in with blurred boundaries and cavernous dichotomies with history dripping from the cave ceiling like those hundred year chandeliers are tites and the drunk kids below are mites and it’s language and image, stasis and movement, past in the graceful-graceless moment with room for the taste of being and scent of bodies wrestling with themselves as much here as in 1971 or 2 or 3 when these thoughts I just paraphrased were phrased first.

Our singular multitudes, chance and fortuity and the magic formulae of the unforgettable and there I’m stealing again but I think, incidentally, about mistakes, accidental and with intention and how they say such and such is the mother of invention but I’m ok not remembering what because nothing is neat and tidy and there’s no running away from day, no hiding in night and it’s ok if it sometimes becomes hard to see who really gives a fuck about telling the truth and who just wants to tell while we all reach in our own way like Tantalus done did.

Well I’ll tell you this: gimme what’s left as much as what’s made, gimme the chips and shards and dust on the ground left over and lemme make something, do something with it, then lemme take some more and do it all and make it all up as I go and always make it all the way back, I see, carving and cleaving back to identity, back to voice, back to “me,” found, found like when she said her simple beautiful plain truth piece and I heard it as you, not “you.”

Why would “you” be in quotes when you are you? In this dream “I” am the dreamer and the dreamed and I think of making and being remade like that Titian, you know, the one those fuckers painted over and some other fuckers “had” to later unpaint to recover the plain people beneath overpaints of archangel and Tobias and there, right there’s the parable of necessity with “had” in quotes because it had to speak just like she did and I forgot to breathe because I had to too.

What a dream that is, this is, no longer looking back at the past with a suggested capital “P” in order to step out of now and dislocate a little, distantiate a little, defamiliarize a little and make the now strange when it was/is really mostly me. No need to make strange—it already is, by virtue of the mixed moment truths we are I am, selves uncovered from beneath someone else’s time-bound myth like Titian’s unfinished refinished definished because fortuities will dictate the necessity of liberation so we can lose our found selves in that conditionless condition of Frosty’s “tantalizing vagueness,” that dream-rendition, lost and located, invaded, in fact, paired up and pared down to the kinds of things that come in threes, like like yes and no and maybe, like she and me and us, like beauty and electricity and ardor, like past and future with present wedged in the middle, right where it belongs, watching over the rest

and to take it all and do, that’s what I think, and then do something else and in that doing and doing and doing again not just find freedom but be it, personally, subjectively, presently, completely incomplete and -ing.

And how’s that for visibility, how’s that for identity and voice. Gordon, Ralph, anyone? I know you didn’t ask but I’d do it for you as much as for me, and for me as much as for her and we are as much for us as for everyone.

Well, almost. Just saying.