? Red pigment and varnish on paper
? Video, black-and-white, sound
? Dyed cotton, grommets, rope, and thread, in two parts
I find the plainness and economizing record of materials handled calming. Realistic yet not austere, because what corresponds—the words oil on canvas—has everything and nothing to do with what I’m looking at. The disconnect wakes me up. The words plywood, plaster, and twine are deadpan and even grim. Bronze is bodily and somehow lewd. Characterizing a video installation as having “sound” seems like, for whatever reason, a breakthrough. That a glass display case or teakwood base is principle to the piece feels hospitable. “Fabric collage” is pseudonymous.
Too bad this sort of reduction cannot be achieved with books. Tables of contents don’t even come close. Indexes, maybe.
Because writing is a grunt, and when it’s good, writing is body language. It’s a woman narrowing her eyes to express incredulity. It’s an elbow propped on the edge of a table when you’re wrapping up an argument, or to signify you’re just getting started. An elbow propped on the edge of a table is an adverb.
I’ve heard rumors that writing can feel glamorous. But only glamorous, I’d guess, in the way a stretch limo might feel glamorous. No matter the pomp, one still has to crouch inside. Like skulking through a low-lit leather tunnel. An uncooperative space. Writing is awkward work and it’s become clearer to me why friends of mine have relinquished their desks and write instead from the comfort of their beds. Not in bed. From bed. Like sea otters floating on their backs, double-chinned and banging their front paws on a keyboard.
It’s imperative that writing consists of not living up to your own taste. Of leaving the world behind so you can hold fast to what’s strange inside; what’s unlit. A soreness. A neglected joy. The way forward is perhaps not maintaining a standard for accuracy but appraising what naturally heaps.
Writing is losing focus and winning it back, only to lose it once more. Hanging on despite the nausea of producing nothing good by noon, despite the Sisyphean task of arriving at a conclusion that pleases. The spiteful blink of my cursor: how it mocks. The rude temptation of a crisp day: how it bullies. Writing will never be as satisfying as observing someone whom I knew was terrible get caught in an embarrassing lie; as satisfying as the pop! I anticipate when twisting open a Martinelli’s apple juice or when I pour hot coffee over ice come summer or lace up skates in the winter—the firm tug of hooking the top part of the boot. Writing is a closed pistachio shell.
And yet, despite claims, no writer hopes for ideas to take complete shape. Approximation is the mark. Many times, writing that clinches lacks incandescence—the embers have cooled. A need for completeness can, off and on, squander cadence. Isn’t it fun to read a sentence that races ahead of itself? That has the effect of stopping short—of dirt and cutaway rocks tumbling down the edge of a cliff, alerting you to the drop. As the critic, author, and poet Clive James wrote of Proust’s à la recherche du temps perdu: “It reminds me of a sandcastle that the tide reached before its obsessed constructor could finish it; but he knew that would happen, or else why build it on a beach?”
What I enjoy is this. Responding to an artist’s work as if it were a missive. A film can be a fling I’ll cool with sentences I address to the director but that I’ll tuck into this essay instead. I’ve written to Akerman, Leos Carax, Antonioni, to Douglas Sirk’s Technicolor; his sylvan winters and obscene display of periwinkle. Love letters, generally. Essays that do not concern these directors’ works but are addressed to them—in spirit, tone, wash—because these directors have, over time, caused me to bend into shape visions that were long hibernating. How Agnès Varda, for example, introduced me to women with implication. How Varda portrays the defamed—often women—as irrepressible and in control of a mind built for maneuvering beyond convention. These women who perhaps even balk at the word survival and favor instead a far more fluctuant current: continuance.
I’ve written as well to Bresson, Bergman, Rohmer’s girls, Rivette, John Huston because I’ll never get over Susan Tyrrell’s Oma in Fat City. Her boozy pout is a wreck no one recuperates from. She is unconcealed. Her dress’s back zipper unzipping. Her wail: both mother and child in labor.
There’s no use in trying to bounce back from first seeing Giulietta Masina in La Strada. Her globe face is somehow panoramic: a pendant, the highest wattage, “an artichoke.” The sort of face one writes to because Masina was the queen of the encounter. Watching her means paying attention.
I’ve written to Mazursky and Cassavetes and their women sick with an itch, dissatisfied to the point of dancing alone in their homes to music that isn’t so much music but dull pain with a tune. Women with demands that are mysterious even to themselves. Women who are runaways in their own kitchens. Women who are in no rush to respond to a world that’s only conceived them as its consequence. Who experience deep movement by playing air piano. Who are wind-oriented. Who are Gena Rowlands. Who are Jill Clayburgh—bearably, unbearably, lugging a big canvas down the street, alone. These women who brilliantly source endings for takeoff.
I’ve written to Claire Denis, Maren Ade, to James Gray’s New York, to Mia Hansen-L?ve’s yearning boyish-girlish unease. To her films as photo albums. To her regard for a person’s things. I’ve written to Abbas Kiarostami’s ballads. His least possible, spare approach to poetry and splayed views that above all are an indication of the times as they weigh on country and personhood, and how the two are prodigiously connected. I’ll send notes, again and again, to Wong Kar-wai. To Wim Wenders and his roads, and those questions that can only occur in cars. To Maya Deren! To Jane Campion! Andrea Arnold! Desplechin! I write to him a lot. To Satyajit Ray, whose character Durga, the mischievous daughter and Apu’s sister in Pather Panchali, is my namesake. Ray once said in an interview that he directs his films “in harmony with the rhythm of human breathing.” I’ve tried writing with that belief in mind, discovering instead how deep inhales and the release of a strong exhale are furthest from writing’s doubled-up glove. Moving pictures are a better match for that kind of subliminal flight.