Images Work

A comment I made to my friend Oppermann in a telephone call last night: "Yes, but you realize that we have in fact worked on something together." And this makes a moment of a shared weekend of experiences all the more important: we have worked on our images. We have worked on images, yes indeed with an aspect of nostalgia and incest, in the images of Arcadia. We have also worked on what was compelling in those images: the sulphrous element of compulsion that might be identified in the way adolescence smoldered. Of course such an element is now a warming fire, now a raging inferno, and one ought to be careful playing with such an element.

But we were not merely playing, this is not play that has no intent or meaning: the effort here is to attempt to bring some closure to the discussion of 20 years, and to open up the next 20 years of discourse. As we know "20 years" is often our expression for a condemnation, a sentencing: but all sentences have their finitude and their singularity, even if there is no singularity that can withstand the tug and pull of eternity, that same eternity that turn's anyone's voice as cold as ice, because it is the chemical rending in the furnace.

But somehow the playing with images here has blackened me in a pleasing manner, patina'd, deepened, charred. For what is there that is worth writing about if it is not the real immediate quality of this friend and I: I don't know if there is any other reason to go out at all into the world except to survive and make friends. The rest is all bullshit: manure and cannon fodder that we have to build on to make a better world.

I feel in a sense older with my friend, and in a meaningful way closer to him. I know we could say that we were "so much older then," that we are "younger than that now," to quote the words of our prophet, Bob Dylan. But I would say that we are both older and younger: we may be growing younger towards our images: younger, increasingly open. We may be older if older means that the threshold of consciousness has grown worn with age and the passage and tread of so many feet, that our lives are not some stark bare newness, but places where many have dwellt and many will continue to dwell: large women and screaming babes, steppenwolves, yes, and many others, wanderers, vagrants, immigrants, medicine men, accountants, saints, promoters, academics even.... the list goes on with the expansiveness of the dwelling in time not in mere physical space. The dwelling abides.

I may even more carefully say that we are growing "younger towards death," as the poet David Whyte might say, knowing such words are precarious without real circumspection, knowing that they are words of courage, telling us to be not afraid of fear or age. So for all we can say about the, yes, indeed, hopeless technological condition of the web log, the images thank us for this intensive dialogical work. I believe they thank us, I believe they really do, by virtue of a certain sense of gladness in my soul.

I kept thinking on my morning walk about the idea of opening a kitchen. I wanted to open a "soul kitchen" underneath which I would write the words "If you don't like the heat, get out of the kitchen!" I was thinking of a man I regard as being a really stupid fellow, who had said that he was once a psychotherapist, but then he switched careers because all that is required is definitely easy to burn out on; he told Deborah to be prepared if I needed to switch careers. I took umbridge at his smugness. I kept thinking, "Get out of the kitchen if you don't like the heat!"

In this reverie of a dream kitchen we (Deborah and I) would sell both soul food and vegitarian, and we would have a front counter where we would sell small golden birds and hearts. I dream to myself that Oppermann would visit this kitchen: and he would sit in a rustic wooden chair on the Northern California coast and look out at the sunlight on the not too distant oaks or pine trees, and we would pass yet another day in conversation.