In Love is Care

 

Dinosaur bones, abundant here beneath us, were first discovered in my home province of Alberta, Canada in 1884 by a geologist named Joseph Burr Tyrrell, partial namesake of the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller. What Tyrrell actually discovered on that happy accident of a dig was the skull of a large carnivorous dinosaur shortly to be named Albertosaurus. When I was a boy I would draw dinosaurs endlessly, in addition to hockey players and rock musicians. Though I am not a geologist like Joseph Burr Tyrrell, in the summer of 1998 I did work as a geological technician, which back then meant I spent lots of time at a funny little machine looking at geological logs, printing them out, splicing pages together at a kind of draughtsman’s board. My favourite parts about most paying jobs are the parts that involve gadgets and tech. 

CÉRÉMONIE D’AMOUR (Walerian Borowczyk, 1988)

Jacques Derrida can take the one word ‘aura’ and break it down to the exact right core elements: The oral, the aura, gold (or), hour (heure). In speaking about and then writing about his dear friend Hélène Cixous, like him a European Jew who spent her childhood and early adolescence in North Africa—or perhaps we should say French colonial North Africa—Derrida finds himself placing Cixous, over and over, on the side of life, mystical array, and endless poetic resurrections. We know that head-down sleek and speedy Jacques Derrida is himself death’s bagman, just as he himself knows it, never out of audible range of the clocks that count down tick tick tick until it’s your precise turn to lay down and take it, however bad it is. From Derrida’s point of view, the philosopher has to worry about this stuff and find some sense in it or who else is gonna? “These are lives of power, at great depths,” writes Hélène Cixous already ahead of the curve, "unsubjected to the clock.” Here is Derrida in H.C. for Life: That is to Say…, his book on his supremely distinguished friend Hélène: "What happens then, as far as belief and the impossible are concerned, when the song of the enchanting chant [chant de l’enchant] can no longer be dissociated from the whole body of words and from what still presents itself as the literality of literature? When literature becomes an enchanting chant?" Hélène Cixous: "We are bodies in minds fast as the radio."

My uncle George was in town for cancer treatments recently and crashed at my place for two nights and we had ourselves a hoot and a holler, let me tell you. Alas, that being said, it was from George that I heard about the recent death of feisty and funny leftist American folk singer Todd Snider. The details were a little hazy at the time, but I guess some folks were more than merely insinuating that Snider had been kicked out of the hospital for being mouthy and broke. I personally didn’t find that very likely. This is the official series of events: some sort of violent altercation involving Snider and others occurred outside his Salt Lake City hotel and he sustained head injuries; Snider sought medical help but was later arrested by police outside the hospital on disorderly conduct and other charges, with bodycam footage showing him pleading for help and complaining he couldn't breathe; days after returning to his home in Tennessee, Snider was hospitalized with walking pneumonia, which would prove to be the official cause of death. While we were out doing the rounds, etc cetera, one of the record shop proprietors fond of my uncle lent him his own personal copy of Snider’s book I Never Met a Story I Didn't Like. I’d be curious to take a gander at that one myself.

Boy Meets Girl (Leos Carax, 1984)

The bottom line of meditation and embodied mindfulness is that you slow yourself down biorhythmically and take deep breaths at the proper tempo, getting the circulatory and respiratory mechanisms in proper alignment with the earth system simply by letting the body open up its impossible roiling depths to feel the universe first and foremost, a haptics of the encounter in which the properties of the invisible feel sensorially at a scale that supersedes anything currently imaginable. It is also true that you can meditate by simply running your eyes over the ceiling for three hours while humming and sobbing to yourself. You can meditate on the sounds of urban automobile traffic. Sometimes when I was a teenager I would cut my arms with razors and tacks and that was a meditation too. It vacated my mind of all thought other than the colour black with fine specks of silver in it, which if you think about it is less a thought than it is a more artifact-like product of epiphenomenal intellection. If my left big toe gets sore in a very particular way then I absolutely must obtain an espresso-based beverage of some kind post haste. In a deep meditative state I am actually able to perform medical surgeries on myself using my own nervous system and carefully directed focus. I can feel everything that is happening to my body during surgery, but it is mostly kind of pleasant, a tingling tenderness vastly superior to the hollowed-out solitude that is my normal daily lot. When I feel my body doing magic for me I tell God that I am grateful and I do that because I am grateful, positioned maybe even at the extremities of lived gratitude, as it were. Like the birth of tragedy her insufficiently-coronated self. In the effervescence of transient light it is we who the frolicking Gods seek to excite. All Gods are equitable but we insist they all pay taxes, no matter how cunning and merciless their lawyers and/or heavies. 

In his book At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life, author Fenton Johnson, who grew up both gay and Catholic in Northern Kentucky, bemoans the heteronormative state of things, arguing that “the stories we tell ourselves embody fantasies of idealized couples and families, even if in unconventional configurations, instead of the rich and rewarding solitary journeys more and more of us are living out.” Figures of distinction from recently history who Johnson praises for their bold and unwavering solitary industriousness include Henry David Thoreau, Paul Cézanne, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, Eudora Welty, Rabindranath Tagore, Zora Neale Hurston, Nina Simone, and Bill Cunningham. Here we have Johnson rhapsodizing himself dizzy on the great Impressionist painter Cézanne: “I can say he’s crazy—perceiving a soul in a sugar bowl?—or I can listen to what he’s telling me, in his letters and in his work, which is that the sacred exists in every particle and atom, the sacred is what is, and my job is to pay sufficient attention so that I too can perceive the psychology of the earth—its living, feeling, expressive self, made manifest in rivers and seas and mountains and tornadoes and earthquakes.” Whitman and Dickinson are both presented as appearing to have gradually embraced the solitary life over time, though for each this manifests in a rapturous giving, an impassioned loving enacted both through friendship and literary creation.

Flowers of St. Francis (Roberto Rossellini, 1950)

St. Francis of Assisi had his first spiritual visions as a young prisoner of war and would later go on to purportedly make personal friends with all animals and literally preach sermons to birds. Inspired by Matthew 10:9, which instructs disciples to carry no money or extra clothes, Francis renounced his family's wealth, notoriously stripping naked in the town square to renounce his inheritance before the bishop. Francis referred to his cohort of monks as the "joculatores Domini,” and it was their mission to use joy, song, and poetry to spread the word of a loving God. Fyodor Dostoevsky, on the other hand, started having epileptic episodes complete with strange and disturbing visions in 1846 and the famous fake execution that messed him up for life happened three years later, in 1849. Dostoevsky was taken into a courtyard to be killed, only to be given a last minute reprieve when all hope seemed lost, the whole thing having not evidently amounted to much more than a sick joke. When you start to read about Dostoevsky’s life it starts to become clear why he shook uncontrollably and spoke of visions beyond the means of language to tackle; infernal winds that rip they sky and tear away at animal flesh, winds with a sizzling red rim around them. Sometimes God would put a man on the floor hard if only so he’ll stay still for a moment.

Philip Guston, COUPLE IN BED, 1977

“Why do we imagine solid matter exists?,” poses Aldous Huxley in his 1936 masterpiece Eyeless in Gaza. The answer (the 'why' of it): “Because of the grossness of our sense organs. And why do we imagine that we have coherent experiences and personality? Because our minds work slowly and have very feeble powers of analysis. Our world and we who live in it are creations of stupidity and bad sight.” Look, a case could certainly be made. In his book Spinal Catastrophism, philosopher Thomas Moynihan argues that the work the human spine has done to keep us on two legs is stupid, awkward, and bizarre, such that inevitably we’re uniquely bad at everything even though our brains are phenomenal in theory and we have created all the cities on the surface of the earth, et cetera. We are also proud and pitiful. Where an individual will easily enough identify people making errors, behaving badly, or acting in a devious manner in ordinary life, should you so happen as to point out concrete errors these people have themselves made, unseemly things they’ve done in public, lies of commission or omission, well, you can expect this incidental theoretical person to sulk, pout, and play the victim like the victim were the damn fiddle. That is a large part of why it is tremendously hard to get people to openly and honestly discuss anything in which the emotions can or will figure. Talking about stuff you don’t want to talk about usually helps a little. It’s true. If we all intend to grow it will be necessary that we fess up from time to time. You, for example, you bashful little vamp. You gone and you went away a long time ago and yet I still remember how mean you were, more than just nervy and pugnacious in the usual way...ugly mean. I remember how we ate that great big piece of chocolate cake with two forks and it was almost like being on a date...but you’re too mean for me...you’re mean and you like it that way...

Los olvidados (Luis Buñuel, 1950)