Update
I have not been writing much, because I feel like I’ve needed to spend time “getting my life together,” which has meant working more hours and staying in bed more, determining my life by what I can afford or not afford. A lot of my little goals (learn lap steel, play music more, do another photo project) are clouded by a bigger project: “afford to live well.” I think of Mary Oliver foraging for her living, writing poetry, and held up as a model for a life-well-lived.
So I woke up to the sound of the rain today. I stayed in bed because my blanket is too big. I pretended to be depressed, although I do not think that I am. I am just a bit lacking in motivation, which is frustrating (although an essay by Felix Gonzalez Torres motivated me, and so I know where to find motivation). I need to print, to get something printed, to work on a project: I need to do something to get started, and I bought a roll of paper to feed into a printer, and plan to buy another. I wonder more than I think now and have lost the focus of a long-term project. I work at a church and get to decide my hours (how many and when, as long as I can justify them, although the service times are not flexible), and so it’s a good gig except that I need to wake up early on Sunday mornings, and it does not pay as much as photography.
I woke up and drove the Geo Tracker today, which, after almost a year of being in the shop, has passed smog and only has some minor work. I drove down the street, as the rain cleared up. The morning light turned sharp and a blue car drove next to me. I thought of how we were both driving blue cars, and inside of the car window I saw my old priest from when I went to Episcopal church. I work at a church now and cannot spend time with the Episcopalians. But I looked over briefly, and he slowed his car down right behind me, and stayed in that position so we could not look at each other, until we both stopped at the stoplight. I looked over. He looked intensely at me, in an ambiguous recognition. And I smiled at him. I wonder if he has his life figured out.
A few years ago, before I worked at a church, I grabbed coffee (him: hot chocolate) with the priest. We wandered around the block, talking about the holocaust. He made it clear that he had no agenda; just an open-ended walk to dream a bit. We were just on a walk talking about the different literature we read, and I think he suggested a graduate school for me to go to, that the Episcopalians would fund. Maybe I would be religious one day, or at least religious like that. Once in a while I open his email newsletters, which quote Annie Dillard or an announcement of a church member dying, or a celebration of the season. I know the priest and his husband watch reality television; I saw them at Orange County Pride last October.
In many ways, I am doing better than I was doing last year. I read and write less, and I think I’m taking life a bit slower now, or closer to heart. I have a lap steel guitar shipping to my house hopefully soon, although I do not know when. Now that I can fit a guitar in my trunk, I want to play ambient music on the dobro for Tommy.
Felix Gonzalez Torres writes an essay that I talked about with the office admin at church. I realized I was out of her depth. He writes about a work titled by Roni Horn entitled Gold Field: a sheet of gold laid onto the floor in an art gallery. It is not a formal exercise, it is not merely “pure formalism,” not some empty purity, a reference to minimalist sculpture, but “A place to dream, to regain energy, to dare.” And I stood talking to the office admin at church, after the pastor mentioned the sociopolitical situation we are in, and how he is becoming more bold talking about “living love” in a world that seems to be full of so much hate. I told the admin that, quoting Gonzalez-Torres, “the act of looking at an object, any object, is transfigured by gender, race, socio-economic class, and sexual orientation,” and all of these categories sort of held a tension with a religious sensibility. The minimalists, who aimed for some abstract objectness, or a “pure object” that could not be conceptualized, seemed to have religious goals to me, by mystifying objects into ineffability. And the categories of gender, race, socio-economic class, and sexual orientation become the opposite of ineffable, because they are often very clear conditions that articulate and determine people’s lives. And the practitioners at church, some of whom are reluctant to face the sociopolitcal landscape we are in, also aim for the divine; the pastor is trying to bring them down to earth when he quotes from their Bible.
I asked the admin what it would mean to make a sheet of gold foil and lay it on the ground, borrowing from a heritage of purity, abstraction, and minimalism, but does the opposite: for Gonzales-Torrez, his lover, and Horn, provides a bit of rest and possibility in a world of despair. She said, “huh,” and I said, “maybe the pastor would like to think about this,” and we said, “oh well,” and I left.
If I have no motivation, it is because that sort of project, a minimalism engaged with a very historicized act of looking, is so ambitious to engage with. An act of looking that is a motivation that is not mine yet: it is a long-held commitment, a religion for the non-religious. Maybe I will be religious one day.