It was, last night, right in the midst of the man’s talk that I realized, pondering over my own life up until this point and the looming moment ahead of me, what exactly is meant by the concept of the trace.
The conversation went something like this:
“And so, what do you do?”
“I’m an artist.”
“…Right, this is __, everyone here is an ‘artist;’ the question is what do you do, how do you feed yourself?”
“Well I…”
“…”
Here are two things I don’t believe in, as I just told Ben:
1. That the phrase “the right thing” in the sense of “doing the right thing” means anything, or isn’t completely empty. I do believe this: that there is no such thing as “the right thing” that one can do.
2. That anything ever happens to anyone according to the strict adherence to the rules of some system. More specifically, the concept of “merit” in the sense of “meritocracy” is either also empty, or its true nature is deceptive. You will never get anything or anywhere by “playing by the rules” and “doing things the right way.” I don’t simply mean that you’ll just end up “ok,” “satisfactory” or in some good but not extraordinary position; I don’t mean that you have to “go the extra mile” in order to be “really, really” (as opposed to “plain-old”) successful. I mean that if you don’t play the shadow-game that each set of rules attempts to conceal but always carries with it, you’ll get exactly nowhere at all, not even to plain-old mediocre ok. There is a subtext, hidden clauses, spectral rules and regs–often visible on the surface only as traces, and made the clearest only through given processes by which we are initiated into the “secret knowledge” of a given system by the conscious and purposive intent of others–to everything we do, every system we insert ourselves into, every game we play. This goes for everything from collecting unemployment to getting into a PhD program to love to being the president of the world. There are no exceptions to the fact that the seemingly exterior non-rules that attend all formal or informal systems are anywhere from equally important to more important than the official line. This is what is meant by “playing the game,” and “the game,” unlike “the right thing” is absolutely real.
I spent the last couple of days in New York again, doing the visitation rounds. Happily, most of it was spent in the always excellent company of Josh, and a good deal of it with the ever-as-excellent company of Mark. I hope it never is said of me that I do not love my friends, and I hope never to give reasons for that to be said. Kate has been back from Japan for some time now and I trained out to Jersey City last night in the absolutely frigid cold and with the beginnings of the illness that completely demolished me today, to see her and catch up. I haven’t spent time in old JC since Josh and Hagar pulled stakes and landed safely in downtown Brooklyn, so it was nice to see one or two old and fleeting haunts in that town. Since the powerhouse art spaces were demolished a few years ago and Uncle Joe’s closed for good, Jersey City has kind of lost the spark that made it the exciting and promising and fun place it was 5 years ago. But, it still has its stalwarts, and just the right locals braved the cold and, when Kate and I left the Merchant and the Majestic to meet Stephan at the Golden Cicada, who was sitting at the bar but Joe D and his brother. This is not only significant because Joe and his crew are just about some of the best people (and most fucking kick-ass musicians) out there, but because precisely the same thing happened the last time I actually went to a bar in JC, two years ago with A and her insufferable brother. This time it was friends all around, but last time (at the Merchant) Joe and company allowed me to get away from the stream of inanities pouring forth from the table. I also relate to Joe because, as we discussed at length, we are kindred spirits in being, at heart and perhaps fundamentally, pissed-off, angry dudes from Jersey. When you are, for whatever reason, someone who both has a temper and is prone to loosing it no matter how hard you try, you do not, ever, meet people who understand what that’s like, let alone why it happens. That is, with the exception of other people with the same personalities. Joe and I spent a minute reviewing for each other some of our more infamous flip-outs (it’s New Years, and top-10 lists are in the air, no?). It’s nice, after all, to talk to other people who understand you, rather than just cast knee-jerk moral aspersions. Frankly, I’ve always believed that most people don’t tell others how they feel out of fear, and the encounter with people who are not afraid to let given thoughts and feelings manifest fully is, understandably, intimidating; but I digress. Brooding over the past aside, it was really good to catch up with Kate, to hear how the entire spectrum of current and former Japan friends are faring (I was going to bring a can of olives with instructions for delivery, but I thought the better of it), the various (and increasingly successful) musical projects both here and in Japan, and all of that. It was just as good to catch up with Joe about current and former musical projects, friend news that I haven’t been up on in a few years, and to just generally shoot the shit over more beers than I normally allow myself.
There are a lot of ten-year marks coming up, and I am always one to import significances into things. It’s New Years tomorrow, and I can’t help but think about where I was New Years eve 1999. But more importantly, I went to the MoMA on the 29th, and remarked to Mark and Joanna that just around the corner from where the bathrooms are, the Duchamp wheel and stool used to stand. 10 years ago: December 30, 1999, at the MoMA. I remember it because it was an amazing day I spent with Donna. Perhaps to certain people she was something of a controversial figure, but god we were all so young and fucked up back then, who can blame or really talk about any of us — especially that crew — in those days. More importantly though, our own strange and circuitous and fundamental history, the oddball points at which our lives crossed in the strangest of places: DK was always someone important, in one way or another, to my life. I remember her only fondly, and with sadness, and with friendship. I remember that day, I remember talking about Duchamp, and telling each other those stories, and New York in winter and being cold and your sister and J and all of it. And I remember how much more shit you used to give me about different girlfriends and how much, absolutely fearless, shit you used to give those people themselves. Perhaps it’s the least someone can do for someone else, right? To remember? I remember it all only with fondness, and I regret that we didn’t get a chance to catch up (god it’d been years) at Jonathan Richman — I saw you across the room, it was dark, I think you were with that guy. I saw you walking a dog once too, on Spring Garden. But, it’d been so long, and maybe I thought too long, or maybe I thought who knows what. The point is, I was at the MoMA, in the spaces we stood, 9 years and 364 days after we stood there together, and if there is nothing else I can ever do now, I will always remember that and so many other days. Donna: August 1995, the Fall of 1999, New York in Winter, December 30th, 1999.
I can only write about important things badly. In such circs, grace escapes us.
This is unedited, because I need to get back to work:
Davidson was talking about what the concept of a philosophical life could possibly mean in a contemporary context the other day, and it caused much walking-home-on-a-brisk-Hyde-Park-Tuesday-evening discussion. I got to thinking, and this is, as Foucault would say, only to put it schematically: much of what had been proposed regarding this concept focused on what the philosopher himself does, to himself. It places the action, and the burden of the important action, on the philosopher himself. But I was thinking of people I know, as usual, as models for what this could be, and thinking of Foucault himself, and want to put this conceptualization forward: what about a vision of a philosophical life that places the philosopher as a kind of facilitator, one who uses his/her unique gifts and training to made possible the expressive acts of others, the speaking, living, making, doing of those around him or her? Like Foucault, who did what he could to allow the people he was concerned with to speak for themselves, or like Brandon and Rich at PIFAS (certainly among the best philosophers I’ve ever known–Ramsey too, and others), who, rather heroically, gave both psychical and physical shape to a space of human flourishing. Now, look, anyone can run a warehouse, anyone can put up studios, but is there not something uniquely philosophical about the forms of facilitation that certain individuals and groups engage in in order to make such spaces not just possible, but to allow them to live and flourish? I think, probably, yes.
Once, on a night a long time ago, maybe like two years now and some change, somebody said something to me, something which for various reasons I deflected, despite deep down not wanting to. I did it out of a kind of over-inflated sense of duty, of loyalty, of such things that my anachronistic self tends to value, much to the confusion of others, and to the chagrin, often enough, of my own better judgment. Since that night a long time ago and since that moment, I have regretted the choice I made not to respond to the statement that was made to me in a different way; I’ve born the sucker’s torch, I’ve replayed the tape how many times. Look, despite what’s good for me or you or anyone we know, I have complicated relationships to both regret and guilt, and have often known that those relationships should and maybe even could be minimized. Well, whatever, so it goes. Sometimes, you hold em too long, and sometimes you just make a bad call. I made a bad call, and I’ve “felt it” in the form of a dull and nagging sensation somewhere in the back of my something ever since. Tonight, however, along with a whole flood of other things, that regret, the singular awareness of simply having made the wrong choice strikes me like a dart, a stake in the gullet, a precise point which parallels the acute awareness, the precision of the knowledge of the wrongness, the cowardice, the mis-placed-ness of the choice that was made. It is an uncanny thing to be able to zero in with such visceral clarity to a moment like that. A moment where you can see the probability matrices present themselves, the alternating paths that life could have taken lay themselves out clearly, like two green lines departing from either side of your face (perhaps one comes from one eye and the other from the other) and to know that you picked wrong. It’s like those dominos they toppled the other night in Berlin: the events at the end of the line are connected with those at the beginning.
I wonder if it’s ever a good idea to talk about shit like this on the internet. Who knows. Just do yourself a favor and think about the long term, think about the teleological suspension of the ethical, think about Abraham. Now there was a guy who knew what he had to do.
This question is directed at a single and specific individual that I do not currently have the guts to ask it to directly, and as such and because it’s a kind of good general question anyway, I’m putting it here: Do you think that there are such things in our lives and levers or keys that if, once discovered or completely unknown, when pulled or turned will unlock either one or an entire series of problems, effectively allowing various things to “fall into place.” Now, first of all, this doesn’t mean that I’m talking about any kind of “quick fix at all;” hell, doing all the necessary work in order to be able to identify such a key is not exactly easy, let alone actually turning it. Secondly, it’s not like such a turning would simply erase all problems, it may even generate new ones or allow you to notice some that had been hidden; but what it would do would allow certain extant issues to fall away, these specific ones to be no more.
Who knows if such things exist anyway. They’d obviously be different in different cases, lives, places, days, nights, weeks, years, cars, jobs, buildings, cities, countries, travels, studies, books, loves, and so on. I think they might, but that might also be wishful thinking.
If we knew each other, if we were acquainted or acquaintances or friends, today would be the kind of day in which I would feel compelled to email songs to you. Or, if I was lucky, to play them for you in person. I am, however, lucky on neither count, because we have never met, we have never known each other and we will continue, by definition, by natural law, by force of nature, to never have been acquainted.
It’s raining and a bit cold, and so in this hypothetical world, today it would be, probably, “Have You Forgotten?” and then, as a supplement, “Atlantic City.” The former I would choose for the general mood and the full sweep of images and questions evoked both by the lyrics and the music itself, including his phrasing. The latter I would add, again as a kind of supplement, for all of those same reasons of course, but in this case as the background to a very specific and pointed thing I would hope would stand out to you very clearly against the backdrop of the combined mood created by the two songs together. Specifically, the lines “Everything dies baby that’s a fact, but maybe everything that dies someday comes back.” And, if it worked, if I was right and if the move, the gesture, the reaching out succeeded, these words would stand out for you sharp and clear like a sliver of sky or a sharp and bright gray rock against the atmospheric presence created by the combination of the first song and every other component of the second.
That is what I would be thinking and the actions that I feel would naturally accompany such thought, in the clearest terms I could put it, if I were in any position to think and do such things.
I don’t have any real thoughts, conclusions or even an intellectual trajectory for this question yet, but it’s something that struck me a while ago and which I want to seriously ask myself at some point:
Is there some benefit, something positive and affirming, something at all good, or even good for us, about arrogance? More simply: does being arrogant have or play (or potentially have or play) some constructive role? Is it or can it be something more than just pathology?
Today is the 64th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, if you’re counting. There is an excellent article on Common Dreams by the great Daniel Ellsberg, very much worth reading and reflecting on. As is the general rule with anything subtle on the internet, don’t bother reading the comments. Also, there are some photos on my Flickr from my trip there 2 years ago and change.