– (Blake, Nov 18)
Hey guys I almost had this mini little breakdown. Mikey and Greg gave me more pup drama and seem trapped by their attraction to Axxle, who brought them, in a way that was triggering for both of them, Frozen Cream Puffs. I laughed. They both said “what do we do” and I said “you broke up with him like months ago, stop talking to him, cut him out, he’s really controlling and can’t handle being out of control and you don’t need that in your life,” while recognizing that telling someone to cut someone else out is a bit controlling. And then I kept thinking, feeling this slow crushing feeling, like the walls were beginning to gray and swell. I realized that my original position at church was one of pure apathy, where I could just be there without being mentally present, and watch religion function on the ground below me; and now I began to think of the headache of care (aka control) that the gay intern has brought to the church, and to my position; and I thought of how I feel so enmeshed in these whole things, like caring for things that seem, in my mind, petty; that the new hearing aid system doesn’t quite work and I have to troubleshoot people’s iphones before the service, for old people who can’t hear, and also refuse to wear their own hearing aids (“why can’t I hear??” Some ask, while refusing to put the goddamn units in their ears, and the pastor says, “maybe sit up front,” and they say, “oh I could never do that,” and then the pastor seems to share the exacerbated frustration on his face that I am thinking in the moment–did I tell you the pastor does not quite like the gay intern–and the pastor tells me of how some of these old people have $5000 hearing aids that they don’t wear?); and I thought of my photo project, where every ounce of free time this week, or any repose, any small breath I can take, is redirected towards CONCEPT: instead of poetry, or a novel, or anything, or the few things I have decided “are things I’m interested in,” I am reading about photography, (when I should not be reading about photography–i’m trying to find what I care about) or developing a CONCEPT (“what am I doing!”) when really I don’t care about shooting pictures of gay men anymore: it’s all just literal porn and that’s as brainrot as you can get, and I don’t like brainrot photos, despite my professor saying “stop thinking and just shoot,” but then you have to decide “shoot what?” and that requires a thought: the only requirement for photography that I have–which is the easiest medium to learn these days, and requires the least amount of thinking from anyone, and the thing that “supposedly” “makes me” a “compelling” “artist,” which is why I got this scholarship for this project in the first place, is that I turn my brain on sometimes, and I sat here playing dobro, and ordered two books on thriftbooks, and read Lake Mary’s instagram story (it’s his birthday: happy birthday, I sent to him), and realized he might be bi or gay or just homosocial, and all of a sudden, playing dobro, I remembered my single personal definition of what it means to be gay: Marissa Anderson and Danny Paul Grody, in an article I’ve linked before, play hypnotic and relaxing music: gay is the repose, sitting in an intimate tea shop, that escapes me as I deal with gay friends and gay intern and gay project, when, in reality, all I want is a vision of a pastoral landscape, not quite idyllic: emptied. I began to cry.
– (Blake, Nov 19)
So today, I read Jean-Luc Nancy, who drops a sentence resolving the project of “post-Bataille era,” which I don’t know if I’ve told you guys about. It was part of my 2024 New Years Resolution list. And so, he writes, in The Ground of the Image (expanding on a thought he began in his essay The Unsacrificable), “once sacrifice is impossible,” (sacrifice as the ordering principle of the Western world, according to him, and to Bataille and to Girard; in my mind, sacrifice a distorting sort of logic of sublimation, a hermeneutic of suspicion), “cruelty” (this extreme violence that links with bloodshed; for art, though: violence without violence?) “becomes violent stupidity.” If Bataille era traded violence for ecstacy–instead of a sacrificial, Jesus-like transcendence: a sacred immanence–then Nancy, moving forward, reveals “art” as a non-sacrificial “violence” through “the exact knowledge of this: that there is nothing to reveal, not even an abyss, and that the groundless is not the chasm of conflagration, but immanence infinitely suspended over itself.” What does that mean? I don’t know. That the groundless (images, representations, language, as signification that tries to break its self-referentiality, into a sort-of ground/groundlessness) requires no sacrifice: that there is no transcendent world beyond; no gods no masters; but that there is only immanence: that which is here, now, signifying nothing.
Which is a total jumble, a whole chapter of a book, using violence as a cruel metaphor. And while my brain wandered off to Jean-Luc Nancy land, I thought of “violence” as a severe focus, cutting itself off from what comes in 3 hours (me, mindlessly working in front of a computer creating slides for a church, probably playing ambient music while the gay intern is like “my ADHD brain could never listen to this: I’d be playing rock music and bops and pumping jams in here,” while, like last week, I sit in the early-set dusk of the church building, telling the intern, “I did not turn on the lights because I’ve been focusing on the play of light against the stone walls: the golden walls with shades of blue and green, from the stained glass windows, slowly colowing the walls in diffuse shades, and I enjoy the subtlety,”): if violence is to focus; a cut-off or violation of a world, or series of signs; if violence is to turn attention away from that which is “important:” if violence is to accept the opiate of the people (as one of my professors said, “the opiate of the people is not so bad,”) and to turn attention away from the conditions of a life, from the suffering of other people across the world (as if attention were a form of action); if violence is to accept the bad, then a good life is conditioned on a sort of unaware violence, glowing like cruel sparks. Turn your attention to everything. “I have become all things to all people,” Paul of the Bible said, but Paul, like all of us, lied. And then he died.
An immanence suspended infinitely over itself, says Nancy, and I wonder who suspends it. What we take for transcendence, a world above and outside of us, is a force, intimate to our imagination, that, somehow, externalizes itself.
“Life is suffering,” or “dissatisfaction,” says the first noble truth. Life is conditioned on violence. And the rest: the slow dissolution of a worldview, and the compassion that might follow, according to some Buddhists, comes after.
— (Blake, Nov 21)
Waking up to check my phone before driving two hours to take “gay pictures” of a cellist I know, my phone read, from a boy I met a couple of years ago (but that Mikey met recently and said I’d have to compete with the pups for him), “omg im on a dodgeball team with axxle and jordy,” after. Mikey and Greg “broke up” with axxle a few months ago, and yet this drama still lingers, because I said, “lol i know them,” wondering if I should ask this boy to take a look at Axxle’s abandoned fishtank with living fish in it, or tell him about when I housesat axxle and his dogs shat and pissed ten times in the house in one night, because “they did not like the rain,” according to axxle, who never thanked me for housesitting, or just warn him that axxle and jordy meant trouble, but it’s not my business to warn, and truly, someone with the judgment skills of a sponge would know to avoid everything to do with axxle. So I got up, got into my car, and spent the morning with a cellist in studio city, when Brett, the old Dom, texted me asking if I’d be interested in keyholding for one of his friends. I hate chastity. I said I did not have time. And drove down home. It’s been a week. I sat at a coffee shop charging my camera for a shoot later that night, needing food, drinking coffee. That’s the trade off in a hurry. And Brett texted me out of the blue, asking about “pup crux,” (who i call manslaughter pup) and wanting to find a keyholder for one of his friends, and I thought, “there’s no fucking way,” and told him, “I don’t want to spread rumors but I’d stay away from that pup. My friends say he’s really coercive and volatile. Supposedly, he pressures pups to take drugs and one of them OD-ed and died,” and he said, “noted,” and then, continuing, “I’ve been to therapy and processed a lot of my internalized homophobia,” he said, and continued, “the person I need the keyholder for isn’t a friend: it’s me. I think you’d be a good keyholder,” and I said, “I do not have the time right now,” as I got in my car and began to drive to a shoot for a sustainability group, and he said, “I would not need much from a keyholder,” and I said, “what would you look for?” and he said, “just someone to passively check in with me,” and I said, “honestly, I think I’d expect you to grow as a person if I did this for you,” and thought, “the key is not the eternal key,” (the tao is not the eternal tao), and realized I had made a decided “no,” and so I texted Greg about this kinky situation, who said, “that sounds hot!” and I pulled up to the sustainability group, turned my phone off, and just took photos in silence, until, as I left early and walked to my car, a dog, unleashed in this industrial district, barked, and barked and barked and barked, running around the grass of the buildings next door, and I ran to my car, sat in silence, and put my head against the steering wheel.
All it takes to deal with any of this is a constant, reaffirmed, and determined “no.” The other week, I talked to Diana, who’s Curtis’ mom: Curtis the closeted gay man engaged to a woman, getting married next year. And Diana talked about how Curtis, who is engaged to a woman enmeshed with her family, constantly needs to negotiate boundaries. He’s constantly telling his fiancé “no.” “No, we can’t move in with your family every other week; no your family cannot come over unprompted; no we cannot let your brother live with us while he goes to school; no we cannot kick your gay best friend out of the wedding because he’s gay,” and so on and so on, and I asked Diana, “how can Curtis sustain a relationship where it sounds like his only job is to set boundaries? Like fundamentally, if his fiancé values her family in a way that Curtis has to constantly reject, are their values just incompatible?” And she said, “hmmm,” not excited, and said, “well he makes do,” and after Diana left for the night, I looked at my dad, and mimed, with both hands in a heaving motion, waving a giant flag. He mimed, in both hands, more frantically, waving those little fourth-of-july small ones that they put on lawns. And I said, “RED. FLAGS.” and he nodded, and my mom laughed. If I’m honest, I think I expect a bit more or less than just making do.
–
My hot take, recognizing that as soon as I parked near a creek today, my body immediately softened and winked out into a mid-afternoon nap. I woke in sweat. I opened the creaky car door, walking to the creek. And I walked back in silence, to the car, turning the engine, driving, slowly, back, across a charred blackened terrain, over a mound of rockslide, and onto the highway: forward.
My hot take was that my friends are going through the gay adolescence; most people say that people (like my friends) who come out in their late twenties are fucked up for their thirties. And that’s that.
–
(Blake) Nov 22,
I stand in shoes I bought once. They’re ultralight. My feet begin to ache. It’s an ache that happened after long hikes, hauling packs too heavy for my shoes (ultralight shoes: ultralong lens; not a good combo) but now it happens when I stand still. Some say the shoes broke, and I’m waiting for them to shred to bits before I believe what they say. Some say they were never the right fit in the first place.
I went to Barnes and Noble today. My attention is shot. I went to look at a book by Mary Oliver, after giving away some Mary Oliver books a couple years ago. Here: a plan to return to those materials that set the pace of my life. My attention is shot. I opened the page book, and immediately, the first poem about fascinating over a sunrise caused a reaction in me like an allergy: “too sincere,” i thought, “naïve, old, romantic,” I thought and, now, curious about where I stand, in relation to where I used to be, I bought the book. But her work is too romantic for me now, and I stand in the bathroom, in shoes that ache. There is no return.
I told my photo mentor that I refuse to take any more gay photos. Landscapes only, I said, which is what I used to do. “I’m not sure what more gay portraits will do.” He opened up. “Shoot what fascinates you.” I closed down. “Isn’t that what I’m implicitly always doing? Otherwise I would not shoot the photo? Or…I’m shooting what’s interesting to me, which is not quite a fascination, but a curiosity?” And he did not know what to do. “I want the project to open up.”
So this is a picture, below, that I took the other night for the sustainability group, while I thought of landscapes only. “Let the medium be incomplete,” my mentor said, “so that it speaks.”
Nov 26:
I drove up to Ventura, then Ojai, yesterday, to spend an empty day (initially planned for friday and postponed to monday) processing some of my gay friendships and gay life and direction in life.
I sat in a coffee shop that I always visit. I went to the bookstore. And then I drove up the mountains to where there is no service, expecting to feel better, but I felt heavier, like I was grieving a loss, and the grief came and went throughout the drive, when I sped down a windy highway, slowing for curves, into muddy roads, suddenly stopped for construction five different times, so that the scenes suddenly rolled to a halt, until, hitting the peak and heading down, I turned around back to Ojai. And then I guess I drove back to Ventura, watched the sunset, thinking of how I did not have enough time here. I drove to watch Chaz play music as Lake Mary, which is the only thing that’s made me feel happy in the past week, but has not resolved a little crisis for me. Today, I’ve resolved towards long-form mediums, finishing books, and finding vulnerable community.
I read about a critique of eso/exoteric Buddhist communities. Greg and Mikey both texted me, as they’ve been texting me, and I have not found a way, except with Greg, to tell them how badly I do not want their communities to be peripheral to my life (I have no interest in feeling like I need to belong to another community, especially a kinky one, I told Greg), and they keep saying “it did not have to be like this,” which is the most religious way of thinking I can think of, as if they’re invested in converting people to their puppy practices, but all of my energy to get angry is gone. Out the window. Because I think of Greg’s critique of me talking about kink: one time telling him that often people use it to to replace childhood religious structures, and that the kink to religious pipeline did not appear out of nowhere, and that there are certain analogues between religious and kinky experiences. Greg said: Blake you are not part of this community so you’re bringing an “etic” (or is it “emic?” one of them is insider; the other is outsider, words made up by scholars) view to this: you are like an anthropologist colonizing our community, because kinky people would not use these terms to describe themselves, and I just said back: I am literally reading essays written by kinky people about their own experiences who are happy to use religious language to describe it; kink is a spirituality for them that often directly replaces their religious upbringing, and Greg, nervous (no thoughts just pup), continues to insist that I am an outsider if I try to even think about his community, if I try to think about it at all (because it is a practice of not thinking: how mystical, except not because greg calls it “embodied,” woof!), and so, today, after Chaz sent me a beautiful and vulnerable podcast about queer art, I came across a passage about eso and exoteric Buddhism, calling them “unhelpful and divisive.” This insider/outsider distinction, at least at a discursive level, is not so great at all, but this is not what I came here to talk about.
I sat in church, thinking of a thanksgiving post that would rival my halloween one. The Halloween post earned the comment “harsh:” Martin Luther (the founder of Lutheranism) stood there with a Jack-O-Lantern head. It’s because Reformation Day, which celebrates Luther, coincides with Halloween. Some thought it might be sacrilegious!
But one of my friends decided, hiding behind his close-friends instagram story, to post about how Thanksgiving was implicitly a Christian holiday, and if you cannot tell, I feel like I’m surrounded by such massive brainrot that I had to reply. He said, Christians sacrifice Jesus then eat communion. Americans sacrifice turkey (???) (we just eat it??) and consume it for Thanksgiving. Oh god I hope he was high, but he was not. Absolute sober thought. And I told him, “closer to sacrificial cult” and he said, “isn’t that Christianity sometimes?” and I said, “read about Santeria, or read René Girard’s Violence and the Sacred,” because for some Santeria practitioners, sacrificing a chicken or something is like an actual thing, but today, as I was thinking of the follow-up to my halloween post, I thought, Oh My God Turkey Jesus. So I typed it into Photoshop AI: “TURKEY” over a picture of a painting of Jesus being crucified, and it said “THIS GOES AGAINST OUR CONTENT POLICY,” and I thought, “this is why I know photoshop,” so I put Turkey onto Jesus and showed my dad and he said, “too much,” and I showed my mom, who said, “I DO NOT WANT TO SEE IT DO NOT SHOW IT TO ME THAT’S SO SACRILEGIOUS THAT’S AWFUL DO NOT SHOW IT TO ME DO NOT POST THAT THAT’S SO DISRESPECTFUL,” and I said, “mom it’s an image of a turkey on an image of a painting of jesus,” and she said, “THAT’S AWFUL I DO NOT LIKE THAT AT ALL,” and I sent it to the guy with the turkey theology, and he said, “it’s borderline sacrilegious but they need to understand,” and I thought of how shitty the theology is but shitty theology makes good imagery.
But the real story I want to tell, right now, is how the intern walked in, and told me all about how he wants a service that is contemplative, and how he believes that volunteers shouldn’t work on christmas day (to which I thought: mister intern pastor you realize you have a whole crowd of malleable religious people who want to serve and value christmas, and would bring their families to church, like do you not realize the power you have over these impressionable minds; if you want a day off please take the day off but do not assume that’s what other people want?) and he continued on, about how I need to change the youtube channel, and I, hearing rumors that the lead pastor does not like his intern very much, thought I would text the lead pastor about the Buddhism book that I got, just so that he could know that someone in the church sometimes has a thought.
I told Ann, the worship leader, about the Lake Mary concert. Chaz began his performance with a little speech about the importance of communities, especially while the world seems like it’s falling apart. All we have is each other, and we have to take care of each other. He played a song of grief, about a friend who passed from one of his anarchist communities. And I told Ann how similar it was, at least structurally, to invocations in church, and she said, “what’s anarchism?” and I said, “oh it’s sort of like social work, but people rely on little communities that they create; so when Lake Mary does music, he sometimes gives funds to trans communities, or (thinking carefully, avoiding saying “planned parenthood”) to womens’ communities or (thinking of something less controversial) hurricane victims.” And Ann said, “oh that sounds really wonderful,” and I said, “that’s like what we try to do here,” and she said, “I have sciatica, so it feels like someone is constantly smashing a hammer on my leg, or like someone is stabbing my leg,” and I said, “that’s no good,” and she said, “pastor Luther said stretches help,” and I said “oh so no amputation?” And Ann said “not yet,” and the pain did not go away, so we began stretching together, and she mentioned, “there are people who live with chronic pain and make do. Or not.” And I said, “it reminds me of burn victims. Annie Dillard writes about that, and how they’re in constant pain,” and Ann said, “well at least they find a way to keep living,” and I said, “well some of them have been advocates for assisted suicide, because the pain is too much,” and Ann mentioned a television show she had seen, where the doctor sees how much pain they’re in and decides to just kill their patients, and I said, “that’s so arrogant!” And she said “no the show makes you believe it! You would object at first but the show really does a good job and I’m not representing it well,” and I said, “oh that’s probably the point of the show, to anticipate my reaction,” and Ann said, “I better get back to work,” and I said “alright I hope your leg feels better,” and she said, “you know, I had this before, but I’ve got this strange coping mechanism where I just forget everything, so I don’t know how I solved it,” and I said, “huh, well I’ll remind you to write it down this time,” and she said, “that’s a good idea,” and as I walked to the bathroom, I thought of how a doctor seeing the pain in people’s faces is still ethically not even close to a basis for a decision to kill them, like imagine, as I thought of my religious studies ethics classes, a patient who could not be intentionally unplugged for karmic or metaphysical reasons: oops: straight to hell, as I stood there, figuring out why I so depressed after talking to the intern earlier, finding myself feeling vulnerable, and realized that I have to find ways to sustain the creative energy I had after hanging out with Chaz: it’s hard to be happy surrounded by things you don’t want to practice, or do not quite “believe,” in, like fixing the church’s YouTube channel. I told my friend, “I get paid $61.50 on a Sunday,” and he said, “PLEASE let me Venmo you so you can take a Sunday off,” and I wish, right now, I had less to complain about.
For several days, my brain blocked. It would not think about the drama. I’d get nauseous if I did. And I wish I were still there, but I feel pulled to easily back to where I was.
Because last night, (on November 27th), I went to a barcade with my cousin and my brothers and one of my brother’s girlfriends. We walked through the bar, which hosted a drag show, and slowly populated with gay men, looking at the flashing lights of arcade machines and a row of pinball machines. It did not sound like it though: Slow Ride from Guitar Hero blasted above every bleeping sound design from the video game machines, so that, competing with the club music, a wave of audio blared, neutralizing the particularities of the place. And we waited for a drag show, while I made everyone play Street Fighter 2, the best bang-for-your-buck game that I could find, with me: and then, while some gays watched, I invited them to play with me, and then, slowly, the bar populated with gay men and my brain, through a routine like habit, began to socialize with gay a few gay men and I became part of the bar scene, until, eventually, despite Alex and Lauren wanting to maybe leave, the drag show started, and we watched as a sort-of stiff drag performer faked a blowjob on a man giving her two dollars, and I turned around after the show to see Michael, who immediately started making out with me, and we walked around and my family disappeared somewhere, until I saw them on the patio. So we made out in the corner, and my cousin found me and told me that he was leaving with my brother, because all of a sudden this was a gay bar, and I thought, “okay,” and I put my number in Michael’s phone for some not-quite-drunk reason, and suddenly, thinking of the lyric “I remember at Michael’s house” (Sufjan Stevens), we drove to his place, and I got into his room, and remembered from last time that we watched a strange propaganda action film (Michael is “into movies,” like Marvel movies) and sat on his bed while I tried to charge my phone and he ran to the kitchen to pick up his wingstop to eat right before bed, while my cousin texted me, “stay safe,” and I said, “maybe too safe!” and, as Michael came into the room with fried wing stop chicken, I said, “I haven’t really seen you on Scruff,” and he said, “I’m looking for something more long term and the apps aren’t good for that,” and I thought, “oh no,” because Michael, from what I remember, hates contemporary art, which is 50% of what I talk about, and he walked into the room with wingstop right before we made out, and I thought, “I’ve made a mistake,” and so we had our fun and then he suggested that I stay the night, so I got under his covers to fall asleep asap, but not until he embraced me, and I thought, “oh GOD we better not be sleeping like this,” because he took the covers off and he runs hot and I run cold and held me tighter and tighter and I thought, “we are sleeping like this: are we even human people or is this just some romantic dream he has?” and I woke up in the morning and immediately–as he continued (somehow throughout the night) to maintain his grip (as if holding me for a long time would signify the strength of his resolve to construct a relationship)--immediately I thought, “I do not think I could invite him to the Sun Tunnels and enjoy it,” or I thought, “I do not think, from what I’ve learned at all in the past week, which has been a sort of condensed processing of the past year, that I want this at all.”
Because from what I remember, Michael is basically a walking smiley face (derogatory), who goes to a conservative, evangelical church on sundays; I feel, if I feel anything but detachment, apart from the two-drinks-in-somewhat-horny-need-to-escape-from-my-family feeling from last night: I feel like I have to argue my worldview with him; he believes so naïvely in the Bible, which is something I’ve spent a lot of time studying; he believes so naïvely that contemporary art is not beautiful (but, later, he says that art is supposed to convey a message, not be beautiful, which, apparently, “still lives don’t say anything,”); he believes in the consistency of his perspectives, that he should try to be consistent; he believes in God; he believes that some art is more valuable than others; he continued, as somehow, he brought up art and I told him that I land in the experimental camp of art, to not only define, and try to define, but also to splice definitions of art (if it was not visual art it was performance art), in what seemed to me an obsession with consistency and categories and boxing things in; and he talked about how art is “something created with intention and purpose,” through “story,” which is a word, I clarified, “for narrative,” and I said, “when we look at a piece of art, standing alone in a museum without access to the author or artist, we cannot see the intention nor the purpose, and they do not tell us anything about the piece of art, so I do not see those as strong categories for definition,” and he insisted that purpose and intention (which I think are very biblical categories) were the hallmarks of art, and I asked him what sort of art challenges “story” or “narrative,” and he said “it’s all story; it’s setup and payoff” and I said, “I wonder what happens when story is disjointed, when it’s incomplete, and what’s underneath; when a story is so fragmented it stops being story” and he said, “that’s still all story” and finally, I said, “you’re very traditional. You’re a traditionalist,” and he said, “I don’t think I’m so traditional, I just do not like contemporary art,” and I said, “well I think I land pretty starkly in the experimental sphere of things, so from my perspective, you’re pretty traditional,” and I think of how I know that he listens to sermons on sundays, and that, suddenly, I remembered that when I was shooting his photos for photo project, he regurgitated transphobic bigotry, which I do not quite like, and I remembered wanting to send him an article on trans aging, which I thought addressed many of the concerns that anti-trans activists have against trans activists, but never sent it to him, and this all seems so petty and small now.
Because the overriding feeling, like a noise that cancelled out all the small details, was too big, too much of a romanticized dream. “In a past life I would have been a fascist,” Hal Fisher said, after categorizing and defining different styles of “gay culture” for an art project. What slowly surfaced in my mind, pieced from traces from the book that I had been reading, which is about Thai Buddhism, was the uselessness of the category of “Buddhism” when studying Thai Buddhism, because it often misses the “small” (but actually very big) things that Thai people do; it misses the actions people take by searching for the things people believe; it really has such little attention to detail and the practicalities of people’s everyday lives that it sort-of dehumanizes them, placing them into a hierarchy of good/bad valuable/not-valuable Buddhism, that I thought of Michael hugging me to sleep and mentioning that he wants a long term relationship and that I had only met him once or twice before, and that these were big things to say to someone you barely knew.
So I got in my car to drive home, and saw that Michael’s texts last night did not go through to me, and sighed relief. I put in the wrong number by accident, although Michael does not believe in accidents. I drove home, thinking how crazy it was that instead of wanting to find someone to start a traditional sort of white-picket fence life with, I wanted someone that I thought would appreciate a drive to the Sun Tunnels in Utah, or the Lightning Rods in New Mexico (did God intend the lightning?), or a walk through Orange County Museum of Art, or would sit there and begin to discuss the Anarchy and Religion book that I’m beginning to read, which, according to some people who tell me that a relationship is mostly sex, is a lot to expect from another human being. Some say I do not want a relationship, but that I want a friend.
I texted my cousin, who replied to last night’s text with, “?!?!?” I texted him, “a conservative Christian guy. Watches Marvel movies and says he’s into ‘cinema,’ hates contemporary art. Conceptually: too safe,” and he said “sounds lame,” and I said, “very,” thinking of how this gay-night at a bar community is not policed by eso/exoteric definitions, by who’s in and who’s out, straight or gay, by any conceptual or pragmatic category.
The Buddhist book, in one small line, refers to narrative as the basis of how people construct a life. People live, in other terms, through story. A story turned to theme to ethic to a life, which is, practically, a good alternative to looking for ethics in rulebooks and laws. But the storied life is a religious sort of life, one bounded by a commitment, one opposed, acknowledges the book, to other sorts of values that Buddhism holds, against the slow dissolution of a worldview, against non-attachment, against that which signifies nothing. And in the book, stories become so comprehensive that they become unspoken and invisible.
Chaz sent me a live recording of Lake Mary from Friday. “Just a quick mix” he said. It begins with birdsong, and sparse lap steel guitar. It creates space. And when the noise from an airplane overhead enters in, it does not override. It comes and it goes. And honestly, out of nowhere, I think it’s time for me, whatever this means, away from what seems to be a consistent and insistent pressure, like a slow crushing feeling, where every ounce of repose is redirected towards concept: I think it’s time for me to go. I sat here this morning, thinking that these events were not worth writing at all; if I’ve learned anything from photography, it’s that the best work comes from a good life (from a life that fascinates you); the best “story” comes from a good life; the best life exceeds a good story. And my mentor says to keep shooting, and always keep with the project, and I’m reminded, earlier, “let the medium be incomplete, so that it speaks.” A vision, in the draft of a recording, of a pastoral landscape, emptied. No setup, no payoff, all relief.