The Jackette

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• on July 8, 2010 Permalink | Reply

  Half-wit, worry about cleanliness, don’t worry about pleasure 

  As an artist, as a writer, F. Scott Fitzgerald reveals truth.

  According to Heidegger in his essay The Origin of the Work of At, art is a form of unconcealment, and beauty ‘is one way in which truth essentially occurs as unconcealment’. In being exposed to truth through art, lives are infused with meaning, as he writes, ‘the temple, in its standing there, first gives things their look and to the men their outlook on themselves’. Fitzgerald surely then would have had some impact on the outlook on the lives, and the meaning infused in those lives, of the readers of his work. His novels and short stories might not tell us directly how to live, but by reading his work, our lives are altered in some sense. This is what art does, or at least what I hope it does.

  But what if Fitzgerald cut through all the crap, the metaphor and imagery, and simply put in bullet form a list of directions on how to live, surely that would save some time, help us Get Things Done®. Why should we fluff about with art when we can simply refine our language, be concise and straightforward. Adapt the ‘inverted pyramid’ style of journalism to literature, where we start with all the information that is needed, the who, what, where, when and how, and leave the less valuable dribble to the end, so that it can be quickly cleared up by the editor’s delete key. The question then is what is the valuable dribble and what is the useless dribble? What in life should we value and what should we discard? I believe that judging value is what art gives us the capacity to do, but possibly a straightforward list, written by an esteemed artist, such as Fitzgerald, would suffice.

  In a letter to his 11-year-old daughter, Fitzgerald provides us with this straightforward list:

  

  F. Scott Fitzgerald photographed by Carl Van Vechten

  What to worry about:

  Worry about courage
  Worry about cleanliness
  Worry about efficiency
  Worry about horsemanship

  What not to worry about:

  Don’t worry about popular opinion
  Don’t worry about dolls
  Don’t worry about the past
  Don’t worry about the future
  Don’t worry about growing up
  Don’t worry about anybody getting ahead of you
  Don’t worry about triumph
  Don’t worry about failure unless it comes through your own fault
  Don’t worry about mosquitoes
  Don’t worry about flies
  Don’t worry about insects in general
  Don’t worry about parents
  Don’t worry about boys
  Don’t worry about disappointments
  Don’t worry about pleasures
  Don’t worry about satisfactions

  Fitzgerald writes in the letter that all he believes in in life is “the rewards for virtue (according to your talents) and the punishments for not fulfilling your duties”. These are extraordinarily conservative values for a ‘dreamer’, the role society generally ascribes to most artists, and seems to be more harmonious with the ideology of a Thatcher or Howard. Admittedly Fitzgerald is attempting to discipline his daughter in this letter, but I am sure that the way one raises their child is synchronous with the values one holds about life. The letter therefore provides a somewhat unique insight into the values that Fitzgerald holds, and in turn, highlights the conflicting values in his body of work.

  I never believe much in happiness. I never believe in misery either. Those are things you see on the stage or the screen or the printed page, they never really happen to you in life.

  In the letter to his 11-year-old daughter, Fitzgerald advises her not to worry about pleasure, and not to worry about disappointment. Happiness and misery might not exist in a ’real life’ where such things are overlooked. A life lived without worry for pleasure or disappointment will surely succumb to some sort of stasis, a state of being without struggle, an easy plateau. Yet Fitzgerald recognises that such a state does not make good fiction. His characters are obsessed by the threat of disappointment, the yearning for pleasure, and the torturous tangle of the two. As Gatsby recognises:

  He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.

  

  Daisy and Gatsby in the 1974 film adaptation of The Great Gatsby directed by Jack Clayton

  Those unutterable visions. That perishable breath. Gatsby worried about pleasure his whole life, he hoped his successes, his wealth, could restore the moments of pleasure he experienced in his youth while with Daisy. Yet Fitzgerald tells his daughter not to worry about growing up. Perhaps he does this to spare her the disappointment of growing old. He was attributed to saying that “life hasn’t much to offer except youth, and I suppose for older people, the love of youth in others”. The love of what once was. The love of what could have been. Gatsby was fuelled by this love, and he recognised that once he kissed Daisy, attempted to return to what once was, the fuel would burn up. Her breath was perishable. Her body breakable. His dream, his idolatry of her, was not.

  Don’t worry about the past. Don’t worry about the future. Worry about courage. How does Fitzgerald expect his daughter to be courageous? She cannot be courageous in facing the future, as she should not worry about the future. She cannot be courageous in dealing with her past, as she should not worry about her past. She cannot be courageous when confronted with creepy crawlies, because she should not worry about insects. I feel that the courage that Fitzgerald talking about is talking about is the steely resolve required to face a life that does not hold happiness or misery. The courage to embrace a life devoid of drama, the courage to cleanly and efficiently get through life until that last breath. That perishable breath.

  Nick Carraway must then be the hero of The Great Gatsby. He is the character who holds no real desires for his future, no regrets for his past. He does not worry too much about girls. He just carries on with his life. Cleanly and efficiently.

  Fitzgerald himself worried about pleasure and misery. He worried about girls. His tenuous engagement with Zelda depended entirely on his financial viability, on having his first novel published, on triumph. And so he did worry about triumph, he did not regards the book deal as just reward for his virtue (according to his talents). As soon as the book was to be published he whisked himself and Daisy to New York, to revel in the high life, to flaunt his celebrity, to wallow in the pleasure of his celebrity. Do not worry about popular opinion.

  Is the Great Gatsby then some sort of morality tale? Does it illustrate how far you will fall if you worry about the wrong things. Fall face first in the pool. Gatsby perishes. Carraway continues. If you strip the art from the novel you are left with a simple tale: man worries about the past, man worries about the future, man believes in happiness, man is murdered; man does not worry about the past, man does not worry about the future, man doesn’t believe much in happiness, man lives. It is a straightforward equation that complies with the guidelines that Fitzgerald gives to his daughter. It is simple. It is instructional. Why then did Fitzgerald bother with all this art bullshit, why didn’t he simply write up a pamphlet and hand it out on the street to passerbys? Why didn’t Fitzgerald lead by example and live his life according to these guidelines? Why then was Gatsby great, and Nick Carraway not?

  It is because the plain truth is only half the truth, the more complicated and coloured truth, the creative truth, is where truth really happens. As Heidegger writes in the Origin of the Artwork:

  Art is the origin of the artwork and the artist. Origin is the provenance of the essence in which the Being of a being essentially unfolds. What is art? We seek its essence in the actual work. The actuality of the work has been defined by that which is at work in the work, by the happening of truth.

  Truth happens in art. If a novel is a work of fiction, and a letter is a work of non-fiction, then the truth of this non-fiction is nowhere near as revealing as the truth of Fitzgerald’s fiction, his art. Heidegger proposes that although truth may not necessarily be true, art is truth.

  Truth is un-truth, insofar as there belongs to it the reservoir of the not-yet-revealed, the un-uncovered.

  

  A Pair of Shoes by Vincent Van Gogh

  Heidegger uses the example of a painting by Van Gogh of some peasants shoes. The shoe is a shoe. That is true. Although the painting of a peasants shoe is not as true as the actual shoe, the artist chooses to show the shoe to you, to reveal the shoe, to present its truth. Heidegger calls this happening of truth unconcealment. Heidegger posits that everything is always concealed.

  Yet as a world opens itself the earth comes to tower. It stands forth as that which bears all, as that which sheltered in its own law and wrapped in itself.

  Art attempts to clear this concealment, and it is in this attempt, what Heidegger calls ‘strife’, that truth is revealed. Yet truth is not what we call true. Those shoes there on your feet are true. Those shoes there in the painting are not true. But those shoes that Van Gogh paints reveal to us the truth, they make us see the fields the peasant has walked, the life the peasant has lived. We cannot know this truth, because this truth does not exist in the world, in the dirty real world. Yet we can feel this truth, experience this truth for a brief moment. It can pass through us. As Heidgger writes:

  Truth does not exist in itself beforehand, somewhere among the stars, only subsequently to descend elsewhere among beings.

  So we cannot seek out the truth, we can only create the truth. But the truth doesn’t hang around, we can only catch a glimpse of truth before it disappears again. Everything that is, is always concealed. Truth is struggle. Art is strife. It wrestles to keep it open, but it closes up again.

  In the creation of a work, the strife, as rift, must be set back into the earth, and the earth itself must be set forth and put to use self-secluding.

  So why bother with art? Why bother with the Great Gatsby when Fitzgerald has written up a simple straight-forward list of values. It is because there is no truth to those simple straight-forward values. There never is. Not to worry about pleasure is not to worry about disappointment. Not to worry about the past is not to worry about the future. Not to worry is not to choose. To think about the past, and the choices you made, hoping for pleasure but fearing disappointment. To think about the future, and to wonder if you ever will be satisfied. Worry about satisfaction and you will never be satisfied. We can worry about cleanliness, clear everything out from our lives, including the choices we make. Keep it simple and straight-forward. Keep it efficient.

  This is what I call lazy fatalism. The clearing out of options. The unworry. Going with the flow. Not questioning the rules. The guidelines. The simple straight-forward values. An obedient life is an easy life. Yet there is no truth to this life. We may pass through it, but we never really live it. The life of the lazy fatalist might be clean and efficient, but it is a half-life that does not seek to unconceal truth.

  Art brings us pleasure. Art brings us disappointment. Art is rarely clean, but in those messy moments where we can’t quite work out what it is, why it is, or sometimes even where it is, we can catch a glimpse of truth. Fitzgerald shows us this through Gatsby. Gatsby’s mind has been romping like the mind of god for most of his adult life because he has made his life into art. He has torn his world up with his desire for Daisy, his dream of happiness. He knows that once he kisses her, brings the dream back to earth, to her lips, to her very real flesh, the dream, the art of his life, will close itself up again. It will conceal itself. He knows he will be disappointed. He kisses her anyway.

  This choice he makes. This worry he has. This is truth. Without the future and the past, without desire and regret, without it there is no tension, no strife, no art. Why worry about art? Why worry about anything at all. Why not simply cease.

  As Fitzgerald said to his daughter.

  I think of you, and always pleasantly, but I am going to take the White Cat out and beat his bottom hard, six times for every time you are impertinent. Do you react to that? Half-wit.

  Choose to be obedient. Half-wit. Have a half-life. I will however choose to worry about pleasure, and continue not to worry about cleanliness.

  
  Tags: art (3), disappointment, F. Scott Fitzgerald, happiness, heidegger (6), love, pleasure, The Great Gatsby, vincent van gogh   

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    Shauna_colnan on July 8, 2010 Permalink | Reply

    This is really interesting. Reconciling the artist, his work (in this case), his temperament, words from his everyday life…..it's a labyrinth with no centre. But if there is a centre, yes, I'd like to think that it's art. Fitzgerald's letter is intriguing and perplexing, causing dissonance for those of us who find his prose so lyrical and … See Moreso fine. How could the artist who wrote The Great Gatsby write that letter to his 11 yr old daughter? It's strange. For me, ultimately the letter is flat and disappointing. It can't be reconciled with Fitzgerald's beautiful novel. In my experience artists don't tend to explain their work with words that well. And why should they? As Sylvia Plath said, 'I write only because there is a voice within me that will not be still'. Did Gatsby spring from Fitzgerald's inner life, his heart, his creative instincts that only revealed themselves when he wrote? Interesting to think also that the 11 yr old girl's mother was Zelda. I'd love to know more and now feel inspired to read some biographies of the Fitzgeralds and to read Heidegger. Thanks for this. A final thought: if Fitzgerald's daughter were to look back on the novel and the letter from her father, I wonder what she would make of it all?

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• on April 6, 2010 Permalink | Reply

  The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis 

  

  Life consists of waiting to fuck, fucking, and then remembering when you fucked. When you die, you think about how the fucks went. When you grow old and stare vacantly into the mirror, your ‘bald patch receding into infinity’, you say to yourself, ‘Fuck, I rememember when I used to fuck, what happened to all those fucks.’

  This is the impression of life I get from The Pregnant Widow, Martin Amis’ latest novel. The book was originally planned to be an autobiographical account of Amis’ sex life, but Amis canned that concept as he found the prospect ’sort of disgusting, really… icky’. Instead Amis bent the truth a bit, and told us the story of Keith Nearing, a 20-year-old trying to come to grips with the sexual revolution, where girls are trying to act like boys, while boys are trying to get into the ‘cool pants’ of the girls.

  Unusually for a 20-year-old … Keith was aware that he was going to die. More than that, he knew that when the process began, the only thing that would matter was how it had gone with women. As he lies dying, the man will search his past for love and life.

  The Pregnant Widow is Martin Amis’ search through his past for ‘love and life’ and what it all meant. It can read at times like the gruff memories of an ageing man, with the ‘when I was young’ stories.

  When I was young, old people looked like old people, slowly growing into their masks of bark and walnut. People aged differently now. They looked like young people who had been around for too long. Time moved past them but they dreamed they stayed the same.

  The story itself can neatly be separated by a fuck. There is before the fuck, and after the fuck. The ‘before-the-fuck’ occurs in the confines of a castle in Italy in 1970, while the ‘after-the-fuck’ meanders slowly (and awkwardly) through a couple of decades in London and into the present day, or at least 2009.

  The ‘before-the-fuck’ period reads like an old English novel (Amis references Austen, Bronte, Lawrence, Dickens and others throughout the novel). According to Keith Nearing, who is an aspiring critic, the English novel consists of the ‘anticipation’ of waiting for the woman to fall. In Amis’ retake of the English the novel, we are waiting for the man to fall, and then during the ‘after-the-fuck’ period we see the consequences of that fall, and exactly how far he fell.

  Amis posits that the sexual revolution has left us detached from ourselves and the other. During the featured fuck of the novel, Keith Nearing describes the sensation of experience as unreal, where the colours were ‘wrong – all Day-Glo and wax museum,’ with hopeless acoustics and hopeless continuity.

  One moment the thunder felt no louder than a plastic dustbin being dragged across the courtyard; the next, it was all over you like a detonation. And the human figures – him, her? She was much better at it than he was, naturally (she played the lead); but he kept having his doubts about the quality of the acting.

  Keith watched the whole fuck take place in the mirror, and it ’seemed to make sense only when you watched it in the mirror. Something had been separated out. He did know that.’

  Yes, it was good in the mirror, realer in the mirror. You could see what was happening very clearly. Uncluttered, unsullied by the other dimensions, which were those of depth and time.

  The revolution of the fuck sought to smooth things over. Things being depth and time. The glossy images of pornographic magazine. Still. Depth and time are relegated to the place of bookends, the before-the-fuck and the after-the-fuck.

  The future Keith, the ‘after-the-fuck’ Keith, reflects on this new condition. where ’something’ had been separated out.

  Surface will start tending to supersede essence. As the self becomes postmodern, how things look will become at least as important as how things are. Essences are hearts, surfaces are sensations.

  Was post-modernism born then out of the fuck, out of the sexual revolution? Post-modernism is the condition of the pregnant widow, the real bastard child of the revolution has yet to be born.

  What do you do in a revolution? This. You grieve for what goes, you grant what stays, and greet what comes.

  So we shoud greet this surface, this detachment, this separation. Amis writes that in the 17th century poets lost the ability to both think and feel, he says that during the sexual revolution we lost the ability to both feel and fuck. This is what is left. The unfeeling fuck. Greet it, but grieve for what is gone, grieve for the poets who could both feel and fuck, because Amis cannot.

  Last Words to Miriam

  D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930)

  Yours is the shame and sorrow
  But the disgrace is mine;
  Your love was dark and thorough,
  Mine was the love of the sun for a flower
  He creates with his shine.

  I was diligent to explore you,
  Blossom you stalk by stalk,
  Till my fire of creation bore you
  Shrivelling down in the final dour
  Anguish–then I suffered a balk.

  I knew your pain, and it broke
  My fine, craftsman’s nerve;
  Your body quailed at my stroke,
  And my courage failed to give you the last
  Fine torture you did deserve.

  You are shapely, you are adorned,
  But opaque and dull in the flesh,
  Who, had I but pierced with the thorned
  Fire-threshing anguish, were fused and cast
  In a lovely illumined mesh.

  Like a painted window: the best
  Suffering burnt through your flesh,
  Undrossed it and left it blest
  With a quivering sweet wisdom of grace: but now
  Who shall take you afresh?

  Now who will burn you free
  From your body’s terrors and dross,
  Since the fire has failed in me?
  What man will stoop in your flesh to plough
  The shrieking cross?

  A mute, nearly beautiful thing
  Is your face, that fills me with shame
  As I see it hardening,
  Warping the perfect image of God,
  And darkening my eternal fame.

  
  Tags: love, martin amis (2), revolution, sex (2), the pregnant widow (2)   

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• on October 14, 2008 Permalink | Reply

  A call to arms and the absent other 

  It begins with a call to arms. I dress in my grandfather’s military uniform and address the camera I am being transmitted. I call for a revolution, but language fails me. I speak gibberish. I am calling for the other. I am calling to be touched.

  In 1940, my grandfather, Sidney James Conlon was called to arms. An engineer for the New Zealand army, he had enlisted himself before the war began because serving the state was one of the few sources of employment. But in 1940 he was called to fight for his ‘mother country’, Great Britain, in the very distant and foreign continent of Africa.

  He had never left the shores of New Zealand.

  All he understood of this war and the world it consumed was seen through the flickers of the cinema screen. The world news briefing where everyone in the audience stood up and sung “God Save the Queen” before the screening started.

  The world was transmitted to my grandfather by the machinery of the cinema. He was called to arms via the screen.

  The cinema screen. A large white space. The focus of the funnel of the theatre. An empty space. It is in essence Heidegger’s void. It ceases to exist as some thing  until shadows and light begin to dance on the screen, projected from behind people’s backs. For a moment the void is filled, but only for a moment. The frame, the captured image, hovers in space for a split second before it fades. For my grandfather the war and world appeared briefly in front of him before slipping from his grasp and retracting into the ether. He followed it. He left his lover and followed the call to arms.

  Sixty years later his grandson sits in front of a television awkwardly grasping for the hand of a girl who wants to hear the words ‘I love you’.  Her face basks in the glow of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet.

  The flicker of the cinema screen or the glimmer of the television. Both fulfill Heidegger’s prophecy of abolishing ‘every possibility of remoteness’ without making anything near. This is the intimacy of the remote. This is the love I uncovered in the love letters. A love borne of absence, or of emptiness, a space without the other.

  Now,  absence can exist only as a consequence of the other: it is the other who leaves, it is I who remain. The other is in a condition of perpetual departure, of journeying; the other is by vocation, migrant, fugitive; I – I who love, by converse vocation, am sedentary, motionless. At hand, in expectation, nailed to the spot, in suspense.

  Roland Barthes writes that there are two desires, or two words for two desires,  drawn from two greek gods, the sons of Aphrodite. Pothos, a desire for the absent
  being, and  Himeros, the more burning desire for the present being. I would argue that the two desires cannot be distinguished  simply by proximity. The two desires are to be distinguished by the methods assumed in connecting to the other. I tell the other I love her. I use language to connect. I touch her. I use my body to connect. Pothos; I speak to you. Himeros; I touch you. I reach for her hand. She waits for a word.

  Both Pothos and Himeros are forms of sexual love, this is  the love I am discussing, not familial love or religious love (Singer). This love itself can exist only as Pothos. ‘I love you’. It is language.  Whispered into the others ear, written in a letter, or typed in a text message. It is a call to arms, a call to be touched. The other is always absent when I speak to her. I use language to call her nearer. That is the nature of love.

  Hume writes that all sexual love contains a yearning for continued oneness with the beloved. Plato says that love is a striving for perpetual possession. Neither are feasible. I will strive for you, I will desire you. But you are always the other. We do not join to become one. We connect as two, yet the yearning for oneness persists. We create the abstract to shape the void with language.

  “I love you.”

  I. It is I. And you, the other. In-between, is that void, shaped by language, the word love. Here, outside of ourselves and outside the other do we fulfill that myth of oneness. Here is the intimacy of the remote. I am absent from you. You are absent from I. Yet we are intimate. We both project ourselves onto that word love, like light and shadows projected onto the cinema screen. Here does love become some thing.

  
  Tags: barthes, cinema, heidegger (6), language (3), love, love letter (2), singer, television   

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• on August 11, 2008 Permalink | Reply

  To not write a line or speak a word 

  Rummaging through my mother’s antique dresser, looking for scotch, or some other stoic spirit that could bide me well through a teenage evening of debauchery I discovered hundreds and hundreds of old love letters bundled in twine in an old biscuit tin. Cautiously I untie the knot of one bundle. They weren’t signed from my mother but from my grandmother Thora;

  “All I want to do tonight is not write a line or speak a word but snuggle down in your arms, my head on your shoulder and my soul in communion with yours in the perfect unity of our love. And that is what I’m going to do now. Goodnight my darling, I love you so,

  Thora”

  Eyeing off a bottle of port I returned the letters to their cave. They served some interest. I was sixteen and currently engaged in a heated debate with a girl at school over the meaning of love. She had asked if I loved her. I asked her to explain what love meant. She couldn’t. I tried.

  It was my first crisis of meaning. I should have just told her I loved her rather than tussle over semantics. The meaning would have followed the proclamation. As Irving Singer writes:

  “What looks like a seizure from without – the innocent and hapless individual suddenly being struck by an arrow from cupid’s bow – may therefore be taken as a manifestation of meaning being created in accordance with whatever needs or desires the lover accepts as paramount at the moment.”

  The only issue with cupid’s arrow was that my paramount need and desire, was a need and desire for meaning. The arrow would not strike until I could manifest meaning.

  I sought the letters. I believed the meaning of love could be uncovered in their bittersweet correspondence. I only had to read that line again to know it was not. She did not want to write or speak a word, only to snuggle down in his arms.

  “All I want to do tonight is not write a line or speak a word but snuggle down in your arms, my head on your shoulder and my soul in communion with yours in the perfect unity of our love.”

  He was stationed in Egypt and the world was at war. She was home on a cliffs edge in New Zealand. They would not see each other for years. They would not snuggle in each others arms. She wrote that the communion of their souls was the perfect unity of love but would they not reach this communion without performing the ritual of the embrace. She did not want to write a word but she did. She wrote the word soul. She wrote the word love.

  If the word love was never written would she have loved?

  Love lies in that little squiggle that hangs from that sentence. The question mark. Love lies in every mark. I scoured the pages of the letters seeking to define every other word written if I could not define the word love. Soon I saw there were only a sparse collection of markings, of symbols, of words that I could concretely define. Symbols of things that I could see, things that I could taste, things that I could smell, things that I could hear and things that I could touch. Love was not one of these things, but love was some thing. As Heidegger writes:

  “When we fill the jug, the pouring that fills it flows into the empty jug. The emptiness, the void, is what does the vessel’s holding. The empty space, this nothing of the jug, is what the jug is as the holding vessel. … But if the holding is done by the jug’s void, then the potter who forms sides and bottom on his wheel does not, strictly speaking, make the jug. He only shapes the clay. No — he shapes the void. … The vessel’s thingness does not lie at all in the material of which it consists, but in the void that it holds.”

  Love is not shaped by clay. It is shaped by language. It is shaped by symbols. Love does not mean anything, but love is the opportunity for meaning. As Singer writes;

  “Love, like life itself, is a plastic process. It varies in conformity with temporal vicissitude. It rarely stays the same for very long.”

  Love in its plasticity cannot exist in a stable state but in these letters it is written and it exists in a physical form. It exists in this world as a few scratches of line. It is shaped by language.

  
  Tags: love, love letter (2), writing   

   

• on July 23, 2008 Permalink | Reply

  Shooting My Hands 

  I shot the source material for my work Attempt to fill an empty space (Performance Anxiety). The work will debut at First Draft gallery Wednesday, August 20, 2008 in the exhibition ‘Desperately trying to tell you something’ with Ben Terakes.

  I used two Keno lights to try and get a flat light without any shadows so I wouldn’t have to mess around too much in post production when I composited the images. My planned assistant for the evening Alex Reznick was out of action due to a broken finger. In a typical effort to procrastinate and delay the beginning of the shoot I accompanied Alex to the RPA hospital.

  I always feel it is necessary to explore the context and environment for each performance I do for the camera. The video captures a moment of time and of my self and what happens around that moment will indirectly feed the final work. I had just spent an hour waiting in emergency with Alex before I returned to the studio. I had to abandon Alex early (he was there for 8 hours) because I couldn’t cope with the hospital scene.

  In my work I break the body down to language. In emergency, bodies were breaking down in a very tangible and physical way. The woman sitting next to me was gasping and gulping, trying to suppress the sickness that was fighting its way up her throat. A child was vomiting into a small waste basket. A junkie was raving obscenities and pacing across the room. A man was hunched over clutching his stomach, muted screams as tears ran down his face. A solemn elderly couple sitting still and holding hands stared vacantly ahead. It is often only when the body breaks down that we become aware of it.

  My work for the last year has been on love letters, and how an abstract notion can be reduced to four letters. Four scratches of line on paper. *Love* I imagine the invisible exchange in the air, particles of dust dancing around each other caught by rays of light. This invisible dance is where concepts meet and meanings merge. I say I love you. You say you love me. Each of our imagined meanings of love meet, collide and create some other meaning, unknown to both of us. But love also lies in the physical.

  I remember moments when my body has broken down with another. Our sicknesses mix. Our fevers lead us to holiday together in hallucinations. Our bodies broken. We leave them on the bed together. We know they are there. We feel their physical presence. We know them more than ever. But we leave them behind. They don’t work anymore. Maybe it is here, in sickness, that we can transcend the barriers of skin and share this mutual imagining of meaning. Maybe we only moan and let our vile fluids stew together.

  This was what I was thinking as I stood in the bright lights. My hands shaking. The camera rolling.

  
  Tags: andrew newman, body (2), love, love letters (2), performance art, sickness (2), video