Anonymous comment on "Coming Soon. & On rats. From Daddy Wolf. From James Purdy.":
Yes, well it's redemption, isn't it, you expect chaos, you get order instead. Unment expectations. Miracles.
My response, written today at the laundromat(where I am without a computer):
The unaffected shrug I read in your words about redemption is seductive.
Like the relief of taking your first cigarette from someone older who assures you that it is just a cigarette. So relieved not to have to rake yourself over the coals, you can ignore the implication in their words that there are bigger things to worry about and just sit and smoke.
I would have done horrible things for Quatorze when she used to visit. Because of her shrug.
It is her shrug I read in your words.
Falling back on the chaise longue with a loud sigh at at the mention of miracles is careless and bizarre. Miracles reside well beyond the boundaries of intention and accident.
Your unmeant miracles suggest the diminishment or compression of meaning used to hasten sentimentality by admen trying to sell me something. I read in your sigh something more affected and distanced than tragedy or romance; that is, the self-conscious adoration of the romantic and tragic. I would venture that if it were miracles you were speaking of your cynicism would be impossible.
4 comments:
maybe I was talking about your relationship to accident-- the causualness of the mircles in your compositions. Maybe it's your cynicism you should be investigating, not mine.
My response was composed without the comments in front of me. I was responding to a phrase not even used in your comment: unmeant miracles. Looking at the comment now, I am not sure if the mis-spelling is of "unmet" or "unmeant". And now you've given me "causualness", be it totally naive or intentional your shoehorning of words together and apart has me delighted.
This is fitting, my work right now is on the funniest paintings I've ever made.
Anyway....I still take issue with how lightly you are treating miracles, or how heavily you're taking my work. While I have been saying there is an excess in my work, that is a distance past the tips of my own fingers that I can't account for, I'm sure you can understand my reticence to call that overflowing bucket a miracle.
fucking catholics, always needing the blood to fall from the hands to call it a "miracle".
I've heard you use that (non-secular. and shruggish) language around the nexus of accident and purpose in your paintings. Many times. I think there is a really beautiful tension in that quote (it's from pynchon by the way) between irreverance and deadly seriousness (that maybe gets lost out of context) that I see mirrored in the way you straddle things like your religiousity and foppishness, or the way your painting straddles stringent formalism and pop, for example.
fucking catholics, always needing the blood to fall from the hands to call it a "miracle".
Re-reading these comments, this line strikes me as sublime and funny. At first I read "fucking" not as cursing catholics, rather as a verb.
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