Just as I was about to reply to this disucussion, a letter arrived
from my mother with the following, appropriate to the matter at ahnd:
"My favorite idea for sorting out my apt. has always been to put a
dumpster under the back + throw out EVERY THING IN IT. Have it carried
away and then a ballon with basket holds fast by the deck railing and I
step into it and float away Sophey (her cat)."
I work with mainly materilas all sizes found on the street and until
almost five years ago had boo, record, object, foto etc collections going
back from more or less a liftime. Then for various reasons in the last
years have lost just abt everything I had a few thimes--each time I moved
and began agin for a few years or less--the same thing--lose evrything,
start again. When I moved this winter, I was in the hopstial and the friend
who moved me left behind all my accumulated materilas and most of my work of
the last two years. As an essay of mine has it "Necessity is the
Motherfucker of Invention"--and am working away, finding as always plenty to
work with directly intthe streets, making rubBEings and paintings using clay
impressions and collages etc.
The ways in which I have lost things but on the other hand has taught me to
continually keep finding things with which to work. The essay is about a
situation in which I was in where after all this time of working in and with
the streets and street found materials I was confined ninety days--so had to
learn to find materials in a rather barren environment. (It is also a lot
about Mail Art, originally was in Japanese journal KAIRAN, now at my
blogspot davidbaptistechirot blogspot.com alongg with a great deal of
rubBeings, some paintings fotos and other writing--; also do a google
search--) This was great for training the eye and hand and imagination to
find things in what at first might appear a desert--and then carry that
training back out into the outside world. One of the things that one misses
about having as it were the archives of one's life is that in a sense one's
material history is done away with. All that is there is really just onself
at this moment--and whatver small bit of work one has in hand. The rest is
inside oneself--no doubt to come out in some form--I think back to huge
record, book , object etc collections have had over the years--and all I can
say is glad I had so much pleasure from them while had them. I have no
value judgement whatsoever on which is "better"--to have more or to have
less--all I can say is I have been very fortunate in that I have been able
to learn from circumstance that one continues to work no matter what. I
think if working is what you do, whether there is clutter or emptiness, you
will work--now, how is that for profundity!!
Here is the last line from Faulkner's THE WILD PALMS: "Between grief and
nothing, I will take grief."
and here a poem by the Bosnian poet Semesdin Mehmedinovic, trnalsted by
Ammiel Alcalay, whom i heard read it last night at Woodland Pattern Book
Center here in Milwaukee--
(Body on the Bridge)
From an abondoned garge
by the Museum of the Revolution
we looked at windows on Grbavica
when--from the river--voiices could be heard
What's that?
"Nothing" benjamin says
"they're changing a body on the bridge"
Twelve years have gone by
and--for the first time--
I' thinking about that NOTHING
(in itlaics in the text)--david-bc
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