(grass covers me)

Dear K.,

We are old enough to be of the generation when writing letters was still a thing. I loved receiving them, like everyone else, but I also loved writing them. As a teenager, it felt romantic, surreptitious, maybe even a little sophisticated. 

But now- many decades later–now I struggle. I don’t think it's just because I have gotten used to the efficiency of texts or that any attempt at writing by hand devolves quickly into illegibility. It’s something deeper than pragmatism. It is almost as if writing a letter is too personal. Maybe because when you are writing one, regardless of who you are writing to– what exists on the other side is a giant abyss. The recipient is abstract– dropping it into the post box feels like storing it in a repository. In the immediacy of email or text, the reflection of the recipient is present in the act of writing–you can imagine the consequence of your words. With letters–  it's almost as if you are writing to yourself. And maybe I avoid it because I need some space from my own brain or maybe I avoid it because in talking to myself, a dam might burst.  I’ll say too much, confess too much. Or maybe I am worried about naming things I don’t want to think about or giving shape to things I don’t really want to recognize. 

It has been two years since you wrote. And it has been two years that I have been thinking about writing you back. I have been carrying it around- I don’t think about it every day, but I think about it a lot of days. You wrote to me in September, and it is September now– sandwiched right between B.’s birthdate and his deathdate. A lot has happened since this started. 

Even though this specific correspondence is about death, outside of this, I can’t seem to not write about it. It’s not just limited to personal letters. Even when it is not appropriate to the assignment, I have found myself writing about massacres, accidents, crimes, suicide, illness in the form of letter, essay, exhibition texts, articles, and now as an artwork itself. It never starts that way, but inevitably it is where it ends up.¹ I never share these pieces on instagram– I don’t want my mother to read them and think I am depressed. I don’t think I am, but maybe? When you look at where we are, how could you not be?

I’ll tell you what though, K., I can’t deal with all of the roadkill up here. 

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¹ The first three James Baldwin books I read were Giovanni’s Room, Another Country, and Just Above My Head in that order, which also happens to be the order in which he wrote them (with many others in between). In Giovanni’s Room, a death occurs at the end of the novel; In Another Country it is in the middle, and Just Above My Head begins with a death, It is almost as if Baldwin could no longer hold his tongue.

How many dead animals do I pass in a day? 5? 3? Depends on the season for sure and honestly I think there are more on Mondays. People care less on the weekend. Sometimes when I am out driving around, and I see some small animal lying in the road before it’s been further maimed by tires after tires after tires– I will stop the car; grab the shovel I bought when I moved up here for snow emergencies and move its corpse off to the side of the road onto a soft patch of grass. I already don’t fit in up here so I try to move them as quickly as possible before anyone sees me and so they can fulfill their destinies as fodder for any number of turkey vultures, coyotes, foxes, ravens, beetles, maggots in peace. 

For the ones I can’t scoop– too ground into the road or just tufts of fur- I kiss my hand and touch the ceiling of the car as I pass. It’s the same gesture that I use when running a yellow light- though that’s a selfish superstition meant for my own protection. This means something different– an apology? Maybe it is just an acknowledgment that in witnessing these animals’ deaths, I have witnessed their lives.

When I was in college, I made the mistake of taking Italian, Spanish, and Russian all in the same semester and by the end, each individual language had folded in on the others– creating a giant single lexicon. If I was trying to speak Spanish- I might accidentally say a few words in Russian– entirely unaware that I had changed languages. One reality just slips into another. It’s a weird analogy- but at some point any death has become all of the deaths. 

Is this transference or some kind of fucked up anthropomorphism? I was always a sensitive kid. I just had a lot of feelings. When we would go to the store I would apologize to all of the objects that were being left behind- not chosen, without homes, stuck on a shelf. It was mostly just the stuffed animals or figurines- the things that looked like things with feelings, but sometimes it was also things like fabric or bananas, whose life span is already so short. There’s no time to waste. Maybe it’s just OCD. 

After Malcolm Jamal Warner died, I dreamt I was both him and floating beside him as he realized that he/we were not going to make it out of the situation. Once I felt his panic, I separated from him - watching his body and staying with him, so he would not be scared. It makes me both tear up for him and gasp for breath as him even just thinking about it now 3 months later.²

I was thousands of miles away when B. died, and we had been out of touch for many years, but still I see that moon. 

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² I almost deleted this story but as I was writing, I was on a flight from Savannah to New York and the person sitting in the aisle seat in the row in front and to the left of me was reading a post about MJW’s death on instagram. I try to heed the signs I see.

K.-- this is why I don’t write letters. I’ve already said too, too much. None of this is to make it seem like I’m such a great person and it sounds more tortured than it feels– this life as a ghoul, where I slip in and out of your death, or you slip in and out of the deaths of those closest to me. Death is just the opposite of life and for all of the morbidity in this letter so far, this actually seems like the point. 

That said, I hate that B.’s birth and death dates now have this other death around it. I use initials for you and B. to offer you anonymity in a public writing. I won’t say his name either- but not to protect him– but to try to keep his name out of people’s mouths. The reaction to his death is simply theater, a ruse to further justify this slow slide into authoritarianism. I mean I don’t care if they actually cared about him- that’s not the upsetting part. 

A few years ago I heard the artist Simon Leung reference the Greek concept of askesis. He spoke of self-care as an endeavor of preparation…that what begins in ourselves is preparation for how we encounter the other – that the ethical is not so much what one does in a particular situation but rather how one prepares oneself to be. There is a concept in Mayan culture that is similar in its intention—In La’kech, which translates roughly to “I am the other you.” In English, I suppose the word most closely related is empathy, which I understand to mean “I understand your feelings” or maybe even “I can feel your feelings,” but which falls just short of the embodiment of you-ness that In La’kech implies. In America, our historic commitment to independence keeps the you at a distance.

I have held an abiding belief in non-violence for as long as I knew what those words meant– that there is a moment when one could choose, irrespective of how bad any situation might be, to build a pathway that was constructive rather than destructive. As I got older- that belief became more nuanced as I thought about revolution- what it meant, how it happened, who got to be a part of it. I’ve remained fairly convinced that those who grab power through violence can only maintain power through violence. 

Is this where we find ourselves now? 

That’s why this most recent death- the one which has intruded into B.’s life and death space, feels so strange to me. I can’t get to him, his family, his death. It’s not only that I don’t care, it’s that for the first time in a non-abstract way, I have no sadness, no relational empathy. I wouldn’t say I’m happy- mostly I’m just angry. I’m angry at the doom which will be brought upon us from this act of killing, or the way in which he has been elevated to some kind of saint or martyr, or the way they rolled his body out like we have lost a national hero.  I can’t access any empathy for him because I am overwhelmed by empathy for everyone- me, my loved ones, strangers, the future as a thing itself or our shared futures within that– that he has targeted.

I’ve thought about it a lot for the last week-trying to understand where that break for me happened. I think I can empathize with the person he might have become if he didn’t actually become who he was. I see that fork in the road. Maybe I can feel empathy for the kind of psychosis that is required to ignore, rewrite, and weaponize history; to destroy any tiny amount of space actually given to us after centuries of trying to get you to see our humanity. I draw the line with trying to understand an impulse to humiliate, degrade, and criminalize; to remake our world based on lies and in his image. Empathy is transitive- me and you have to engage in it. Not just you and you. Anyway, he diminished the idea of empathy and I have no reason to offer it to him. 

He was just very good at debate– a true believer in the 1st amendment- they say. He didn’t choose a gun, but violence takes many forms- the sneakier, more insidious violence occurs within changing a culture. And he struck first, and hard, and often and with great effect. Even more so now that he is dead.

I don’t see him in the roadkill. He is, in fact, the car. 

Anyway- he is not the point. Or maybe the reason I’m writing this letter in this way is because B.’s life stands in stark contrast to his; and because so maybe I am obsessed with death but as I explained earlier- even though I don’t particularly care to traffic in binaries- I am also obsessed with life. 

This person– his words were the language of deprivation, hoarding, dehumanization– destruction. Remember earlier when I was talking about non-violence? Destruction can be an act of violence, though it doesn’t necessarily have to be. Construction can also be violent– think manifest destiny,  think gentrification, think capitalism (always bigger, always better, always more). The good thing about binaries is that they keep things simple- the good thing about the non-binary is that with complexity, there are infinite permutations and infinite ways to create meaning. And when I think about the dichotomy of violence and non-violence– the opposition is not limited to just an action or an absence of harm. It can be more conceptual, more ideological, more aspirational–where violence is a closure- a shutting down, non-violence is an opening. 

A world building rather than a world ending. 

B. and I met at such an important time in our lives. Though we were very different, I think at heart, we were interested in the same things. When I wrote to you after he passed, I called it exuberance. His was a kind of reckless exuberance and mine was more studious. Both were rooted in possibility– potential rooted in a certain kind of wildness as a structure that could undo a lot of boundaries that are taught, but which aren’t actually necessary if one cares to imagine something different. He might have believed in utopia more than I do, but utopia, according to More’s clever plan– means both “good place” and “no place,” so there is something for each of us.

It is not that I don’t want to believe in it. One could argue that I have been on a kind of eschatological pursuit of it for my whole adult life. I guess in a funny way, I am more practical than wistful or faithful– I don’t just want to believe in it, I want to build it. And I’ll be honest- it's not just pragmatism that motivates that desire. I am certain that when utopia was first imagined and probably imagined for many centuries since– like depictions of Jesus, the keeper of another kind of heaven, people imagined the inhabitants of utopia as white. It was (is) the default. So many of us left out of that vision.

There’s that Wallace Stevens poem- Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself that some ex introduced me to. I am sure you have read it, K. I kind of think it is the best title of a poem ever or maybe it is a poem itself, which sits at the intersection of “no place” and “good place.” I ended up where I did with B., in 2002, because I was looking for that “no place,” somewhere we might practice building into a “good place.” It wasn’t about being there- it was about the making and most important, it was about the making together and making it for everyone. And maybe the sisyphean task of it is both the mode and the neverending end result. It can’t rest.

Sometimes I worry that I have had one idea and it’s just been on repeat for 20 years and I’ve talked a lot about the woods: 

as a space where one could suspend some amount of reality by being separated from it; 

as a space where one could hone attention by looking and listening to slight variations in color, in sound when not surrounded by the constant bombardment of the manufactured noise of cars, subways, machinery, sirens; the overwhelming visual stimulation of tv, ads, wealth disparities, racism, cruelty, violence;

as a space to observe the interdependent systems present in nature, which lie in contrast to our systems of nihilism, isolation, and abuse. “People use ‘[t]hat’s for the birds’ in a derogatory sense, but I have learned valuable things from birds.”³

as a space where one might imagine outside of the images of what we already see, know, and are held to.

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³ Myles Horton with Judith Kohl and Herbert Kohl, The Long Haul: An Autobiography, (New York and London, Teachers’ College Press, Columbia University, 1998), 198.

Actually, these aren’t even my ideas. People have been retreating to the woods for safety, for refuge, to build something new forever. I have studied so many models of radical reconstruction that started in the woods- the Maroons in Accompong, Castro in the Sierra Maestra Mountains, the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST) in Brazil, the Liberation Theologians and Christian Base Communities in Latin America.⁴ There are separatist movements, religious movements, intentional communities, communes, cults. What all of these share, for better or for worse, and for many different reasons, is the impulse to be in collaboration to build and sustain a different life than the ones they inherited. And while these movements, out of different necessities, looked toward a constructed stability or perpetuity- a closed space (not all violent, but certainly some), I wanted a more promiscuous praxis. Why shouldn’t we all practice wanting more than the fucked up models, hierarchies, power dynamics, isolations, oppressions, complicities, fears and limitations that are part of how we live and how we pursue life. 

The you and me of it all. If some of the yous deny the humanity of some of the mes- who ultimately pays that price? Who is invested in changing the terms of those relationships? Even if you deny me, my other me has to be you in order to change things for both of us.  Hands to work, hearts to [g]od.⁵

Those things, above– the fucked up models, hierarchies, power dynamics, isolations, oppressions, complicities, fears and limitations-  are things we are trying to shed, not the things we are trying to build. That pesky making in the image of, rather than imagining something new. B., in his exuberance, was particularly good at modeling the speculative. He was particularly good at a kind of untethering, the kind of openness one needs in order to inspire the necessary bravery required to exist undefined. It might have looked like a kind of lawlessness from the outside, but there was an intention, a stewardship undergirding the whole experiment. bell hooks calls service a form of political resistance.⁶ When it was good, we took thousands of people through the experiment of a temporary or a fragile utopia. Maybe in trying to build it in the center of so much dystopia- short-term is the most we could ask for. Get out before it breaks, yes, but also get out so you can share it far and wide.  And so my life, at least, became a two way street– where I am pushing forward and outward, but also pulling back to start again. 

As I wrote to you nine years ago, I hate that that exuberance came with joy and also consequences. I would go on to try to construct a planned recklessness in different environments. B., as we know, would not.  We shared our beginnings with art, the most obvious form of creative production, but eventually for me, I needed that universe to get larger. So here I am. And B. exists also like some kind of ghost tether between you and I. 

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⁴ Castro, of course, is known as an authoritarian in many circles, but in the moment on the eve of revolution, and in his earliest days was seeking to correct a hegemonic imbalance between the elites who held money, resources, and power and the masses who were simply the ladder to get there. 

⁵ The most well known of all Shaker sayings.

⁶ bell hooks, Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope, (Routledge, New York and London, 2003), 91.

That Wallace Stevens poem ends:  “[s]till far away, it was like a new knowledge of reality.” Eschatological in time horizon, groundhog day in practice. I was supposed to be writing about stewardship and service; education and the Shakers. Somehow even though I haven’t named any of it directly– it is what this is about. Hands to work, hearts to [g]od. None of this comes easy. I think a lot about regeneration these days- still creative production, with a teleological loop. B., the animals- while absent in body, remain particles devoted to the future growth of land, ideas- the smallest building blocks of a million constructions. Eschatological in time horizon, groundhog day in practice.

This letter, this project feels incomplete. Am I giving myself an out? Or is its non-resolution part of the modality? It’s like building a stack– not quite starting over completely but an adding to over and over as we get closer and closer. Good places and no places- neither places- this place. This letter is an ouroboros, the never ending cycle of death and life; the toggle between present pressures and future futures; the slippage between you and me. Not an anticipation of the end, but a return to the beginning.⁷

(grass covers me. I am a field of maize).⁸

always always,⁹ ¹⁰

s

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⁷ Thomas Merton, Seeking Paradise: The Spirit of the Shakers, (Orbis Books, Maryknowll, NY, 2003), 127.

⁸ Robert Peters, “The Gift to Be Simple: A Garland for Ann Lee,” 1975 in The Shakers and the World’s People, Flo Morse. New York, Dodd, Mead & Company, 1980, 69-71.

⁹ I caught you sleeping here, almost broke my heart.

¹⁰ Future Islands, “Little Dreamers,” Wave Like Home, Thrill Jockey Records, 2008.