'The Letter' - an Exchange
Edward Picot and Alan Sondheim
Alan -
I'm not sure it's
possible to draw a line between "art" and "real life" in the place
you have attempted to draw it. Your piece is beautifully
written,
but in a way that's it's Achilles heel: you've chosen a very literary
and arty way of questioning the value of all things literary and
arty. You've even made up a little story about the letter and
its
recipient:
"I could only imagine that she
had moved on, that she wanted as much distance as possible from the
writer, that the letter was a reminder of an uncomfortable past,
one which
could never be absorbed, could never fit in with her current
lifestyle.
The letter was close to illiterate, she was in college, and the
text was
somewhat advanced, with a cdrom illustrating ecological processes,
and
quite clearly often played."
So although you say that you rejected your usual impulse to "make a
work" of the letter you've really ended up "making a work" of it
after all.
And is the letter itself really such a contradiction of all things
artistic?
After all, a letter is a piece of writing, however
roughly it may be written; and this particular writer, in calling
his rival a "nigga" and threatening to kill him, is using metaphors
and imagining fictional scenarios even if he isn't doing so
consciously or with conscious artistic ends.
He's trying to
re-
imagine the world in terms which make it acceptable to himself -
however brutal those terms may be - and he's also trying to produce
an effect on his audience.
Which is what we do, isn't it? In
fact
it's what everybody does.
All human beings tell themselves
little
stories and make up little metaphors and hypotheses to explain the
world, and they use these stories metaphors and hypotheses as a
means of both manipulating the world and defending themselves
against it.
Certain types of art - perhaps including our own -
may
be peripheral to the lives of the vast majority of "ordinary"
people, and may completely fail to understand or express anything
much about those "ordinary" lives because we're all so middle-class
and arty and computer-geeky and up our own arses - but the workings
of the imagination itself are not peripheral, I don't think: they're
central.
The attempt to get hold of the "debris" of the world
and
subsume it, which you represent as an expression of the supreme
selfishness of the artist, is in fact the same attempt which every
human being makes, and cannot avoid making, to organise the raw
stuff of experience into some kind of comprehensible shape.
So
the "weakness and pretense" which you identify does not belong
especially to art, but to the human mind itself, don't you think?
Edward
*
Edward -
I strongly disagree with you here but it would take a long time.
The
letter was hardly metaphorical; you just have to come over here some
time
and listen to the neighborhood scanner.
It was direct and
threatening
and
one reason it was returned was in order that the recipient perhaps
get
a
restraining order.
When you write things like
"
He's trying to re-
imagine the world in terms which make it acceptable to himself -
however brutal those terms may be - and he's also trying to produce
an effect on his audience."
No. He was making a very real threat.
I'm becoming more and more anti-theory and more and more materialist
as
I
get older.
This person - you would have obviously had to read
the
letter -
was hardly "imagining" - he was going to act very concretely.
I remember
I
was teaching at a school somewhere (I don't want to go into details)
where
a student was going 'off' - I warned and warned the faculty who
thought
along the lines you describe - it was metaphor, imagination.
Later the
student killed himself after he was committed.
I tend to take things like this letter on their own terms.
As far
as
I'm concerned, they're primary.
As far as my arty writing, that's the way I write. If it's
arty, so be
it; it's just about the last word I'd apply to it.
Alan
*
Alan -
I unreservedly withdraw the word "arty" if you regard it as a
comment about your own art.
I was trying to talk about the
"weakness
and pretense in all writing" to which you alluded yourself, and I
certainly didn't mean to imply that your own writing was arty,
middle-class, up its own bum or whatever.
Neither did I mean to imply any disbelief that the letter writer was
dangerous or potentially violent or likely to carry out his
threats.
I completely agree that violent emotions or violent
intentions or violent expressions of the kind you describe can often
be the precursors to actual violence, and that therefore they often
need to be dealt with on a practical level; but I also agree that
they can be horribly shocking and disconcerting and hard to
assimilate mentally and philosophically, and the effect of this can
be to make us wonder if our value-systems, the things we normally
take for granted and cherish, are really built strongly enough to
withstand such a challenge.
But is this challenge to
assimilation
really a specific challenge to art? Or do people go through the same
shock and loss of self-confidence, when confronted by such
unassimilable "debris", whether they are artists or not?
Personally, I think the latter.
.
Edward
*
Edward -
I agree completely with you here.
Letters like that represent
an
uncanny I
think, unassimilable. They don't go away; they're dis/ease in
a sense,
of
our own body politic and of our own making.
They're also a
danger and
another challenge, to our notions of justice: what produces this
within
our culture, which is so completely ruptured that, at least for me,
I'd
have no idea what to say to the writer...
.
Alan