dear stephanie: “I say it is time the empty lots and suburban yards are able to express the halting pauses of human existence.” it tickles me to think that the guy on his cellphone thought he’d missed the rapture, rather than potentially thinking that opening the door into an empty church filled with silence and the absence of people is the rapture! perhaps art-making is the halting pause we need in order to exist. in rapture we become de-selfed, move elsewhere. it is a gap into which we fall? i’m not sure i believe in the rapture, though i have experienced rapture and hope to again. the spiral jetty is rapturous, but not more so than the oil company jetty jutting out into the water just a few hundred yards away. the museum can be rapturous (or at the very least enjoyable); the street more so. and even more so when the museum is doing its job, to shift (molecularly) our awareness out to the edges of things, so that once we’re back on the street heading wherever it is we might go, the textures and parameters are completely different. “The indiscriminate exactness of description seems so apt a metaphor for existence.” | 221
we describe and describe and describe, never arriving at substance yet always substantially palpable. to rub an experience or vision between our fingers, to balance it on the tip of the tongue. we tell ourselves about ourselves, respond to the world by saying “world.” patience is limited. what are the poetics of impatience? if we were to practice revolutionary description—or simply revolution—what might that look like? what then would we balance on the tips of our tongues? xoxo jen
jen, oh revolutionary description seems a stellar goal. our fingers would be sticky and larger than expected as the remains of these experiences and the descriptions of them—the switching descriptions—would linger and grow atop each other. the ** quotes from barber’s For A Lawn Poem (Publishing Genius, 2008).