(8/20/86)
Why must this be centered around some
great pain? It all ends with an
explosion, a tearing...Nurnberg...
the walled city...the bombed out buildings...
memories read, exploded and reconstructed...
composition ends in decomposition...airy
fragments...
"It is almost as if two people were writing it."
"Only two?"
"It doesn't make sense, doesn't cohere,
doesn't go anywhere."
The very qualities we like may not be
acceptable to us. This is frightening and feels
like a diminution of power. Under these
conditions, power seems to reside in renouncing
temptation. This is not the first time (poetic
exagerration- in turn, this depends on
the purpose of possibilities and subtexts) we have
had to pause at the juncture when something
interesting was about to happen...we were
about to go on...in a camp where many
voices can be heard...this isn't Nurnberg,
Germany, this is the Presideo, San Francisco...
some of the people may actually remember
you from school...What about Skipper
Amory- does anybody remember him...
he was fun and then he was mean...after
he tripped me in the schoolyard and I didn't
want to be his friend after that...
but now you've gone adrift into the
details of your own life...they'll feel
that conflict anyway...it was in the
apprehension of that Western room
and it was in that man's face before he put
his arm through the bars of the cage...
the details start to get fuzzy...it's
not the sleepiness, it's the smell of this
man's fear, it's in the smell of his room and
the eyes of his mother...in the fearsome
unlikihood of the act...in its breaking of
the boundaries between the real and the unreal...
these cardboard men with their paper cards...
it all goes limp, particularly after the
man falls wounded and the act has been done and
the man is lying limp on the ground, or
maybe screaming. I can't completely see it
yet...this man was terrified and the pain
came crashing through on every level, his
strange wanting it somehow, the feel of the power
the way the man shooting the gun must have
felt - his power...all of this in the darkest
dark , it must be, a dim
day at the zoo, cloudy and a lantern held
above the table for light...and, will these
shadows be all it takes to put meaning there?...
Much more...
8/21
The nameless horror