September 24 2024 (message from a walk)
Tenterhooks, broken glass, eggshells
We walk the blue sun too hot
The question I ask about openness turns back to me close face to face
In the moment of folding the letter we learned exact thirds and parallel
A certain knowledge claims space between the ribs and outwards; won’t be contained
The film about ticker tape will be my last film. The film about this or that will be my last film. Each film is the last film never to be made again. Then there is another.
If the sky blue hot opens there is still more sky
The slap of regret
The eyes we wish we had
Had back.
Golden molten pours through the top of my head and up into my cheekbones
Two year cycles, everything an orbit
My carpet, floating around without me, says it’s coming back to my stop in a year or so.
The date at the top right, the comma or the colon depending on to whom
The pride of loop and unlined straight line. The Z above and below the invisible line.
Telephone unraveling my face
Better it was there were no terms for these things before
October 22 2024 (message from an institution)
I have not been able to write, or willing to write, or at least write here. I have been too sad about the state of the world, the destruction of Gaza, of Lebanon, of Sudan, of hurricane-wrecked Appalachia. I have been too frightened of what is to come after the election. I have been too frustrated and angry about everything, including my work, the work I want to make, the work that won’t make itself. The work that is too many works, indecisive, its power latent, sputtering, sparking like those tin toys I had as a kid where you press in the button and generate the whirl and sparks come out every direction. The sparks only reach so far and they don’t ignite anything.
Today on the train to Philadelphia I got on the quiet car, as I did for years, back when I taught in this city. A woman has a big suitcase and she is trying to figure out where to put it. I offer to help, but she doesn’t want help. I say I like your shirt which is a black t-shirt with a huge pink and green stylized image of Kamala Harris on it. She says thank you and then overflows a monologue.
She tells me that while waiting for the train at Penn Station she was standing in the main hall and it was crowded and two security guards approached and asked her to go sit in the waiting room across the station, though her train was coming soon. Of all the people in the busy station, they came up to her. She said I don’t want to make this about race but that the other people around her were all white. And she was the only one they told to go somewhere else and sit down out of sight.
The security guards didn’t say it was because of her Kamala Harris t-shirt and neither does she but we acknowledge this to each other with nods. She talks for a long time about what is happening, about how a crazy person can get people to believe in him and poison the minds of an entire country. How that is what happened in Germany. How this happens in places around the world. She tells me she was just in South Africa and in Zimbabwe. How in Zimbabwe people told her that there is huge unemployment and that corporations are coming into the country and buying the land and bringing in people to come and work there. Parallel worlds on corporate lands.
The conductor comes on the intercom to remind everyone this is the quiet car. She says we should be quiet. She thanks me for listening, saying she just had to let it out what had just happened at the station. I introduce myself. She introduces herself. Her name is Claudette. We separate and sit down in different parts of the quiet car.
I am now at a fancy private college where I was invited to show BUNKER and be a guest in a professor’s class. It is 80 degrees hot today. The leaves are turning nonetheless and it looks like a perfect campus. The students seem young and well-kept, like the campus lawn. I can’t stop thinking about Gaza. In decades past I could not stop thinking about Iraq, Afghanistan, Rwanda, Myanmar. This is not to relativize. I am incensed, flooding with questions. My whole life I wondered how to know when to leave and to where. How does one know it is time to go. When does one stop trying to believe in the everyday. I am meant to find joy in the everyday. Decades of dissonance.
In order to make this writing about what I am working on I try to imagine myself not as a stratospheric balloon but as the steel cube attached to the balloon, the cube that carries the scientific experiments. This object resembling a Sol Lewitt sculpture is called the gondola. I imagine myself as the gondola after it has fallen from a height of 27 kilometers with its parachute. The gondola is waiting patiently in the swamps of northern Finland or the deserts of White Sands or the mountains of the Sierras or the tundras of Nunavut. I’ve landed at an angle, my cardboard crashpads crushed on one side, plastic balloon and parachute crumpled around me like a caul; like Harry Caul’s translucent raincoat in Coppola’s film The Conversation. A thin disguise, an attempt at protection, a sail.
If I am the crashed gondola landed at an angle in swamp or desert, the birds stopped singing but started again after some time. I may be slightly sinking. Or frost is forming on my edges. I am beaming, my wires mostly still intact. Some of my contents shorted out, others never really worked, not even when I was up high. The scientists are waiting and the helicopter’s on its way so I keep sending out my location signal.
Up there, like they told me, it was quiet. Up was dark. Bright lived below. I turned and spun and danced and grew. I wasn’t worried about falling because a steel cube can’t worry. I was there and now I am here.
The stratosphere sends a letter back to people waiting on earth. The letter makes no sense. What would it say? Would it tell us not to worry? Would it say it wants nothing to do with us? Would it sing or sigh or tell jokes or make a whooshing sound? Why is a sound necessary? I think it has a different name.
October 27, 2024 (message from the stratosphere)
You said you could not read my letter. But you keep on writing to me.
You arrived with a message expecting a reply in a language you could take and own. You think all your tests will work on me. You made a chart that said my temperature goes up when it should go down. You send boxes with telescopes that point at the sun and cameras that point at the earth.
You deflect and collect; wonder how I protect you from burning up. You subdivide me, calling one slice the ozone layer. You calculate how many particles travel along my currents from a coal-fired plant in Virginia to the skies above Delhi. You shoot sound waves through me and watch helplessly as your balloons drift along my streams.
A quasi-biennial oscillation is what you call it when I turn my back on what I did before and go the other way. And then when I’m ready and not before, I turn again and you call it the same thing and draw a different picture.
I gather moisture from the Pacific and dump it as snow in the Sierras. I am uncontrollable, you say unpredictable. I take your huge helium-filled plastic bags wherever I want. The only thing you can do is pop them when you see them heading somewhere you’ve decided is the wrong direction.
My letter asks for freedom. For you to stop sending me letters. It’s not important what I am here for and what I am doing. I send you this letter to ask that you leave me alone. I create this image from my own source, it does not resemble anything you could have imagined or invented. I drop it at your feet. You pick it up and open it. This is my letter back to you.
Thanks for reading.
BUNKER is streaming on Mubi, Amazon, Metrograph, and Projectr.tv.
Thank you for this.