by Chris Kraus
But I kept walking, thinking how I like winter best, along a deer trail, over ice, across a beaver fort ’til I was lost. The ground’s all frozen but there’s hardly any snow so it was impossible to follow tracks. I came up against an old chainlink fence, then left it walking what felt like south, over a stream then into a clearing, thinking High Street would be very close. But it wasn’t—there were just more woods everywhere, scraggly trees grown up over land that’s been logged and raped a dozen times in the past 150 years, deer tracks disappearing into bramble, and I realized I was walking erratically in jagged circles.
Up hill and down, I saw a partridge strut out from under a tree trunk. It took my breath away ’til I remembered I was lost. I went back and found the fence. It was mid-afternoon, a cloudy day though not too cold. Finding the fence’d taken nearly half an hour and now it was 3:30. I didn’t know where the fence would go but maybe I should follow it? But maybe not. I tried one more time to walk back the way I came but nothing looked familiar. Woods-woods-woods and frozen ground. I saw no way out, no animal markings, which in any case I don’t know how to read. So carefully I traced my way back again to the chainlink fence. I felt as though my eyes had moved outside my body. By now I’d left so many boot marks on the scattered snow I didn’t know which tracks to follow home.
I looked out in the woods and felt alone and panicky. Anything could happen. In another 90 minutes it’d be pitch dark. If I didn’t find the road by then what would happen? I thought of stories about people lost in winter woods and realized that I hadn’t paid enough attention. At fifteen degrees on a stormless winter night, was death by hypothermia a done deal? Was it better to rest under some bramble or keep walking?
Just then I heard the distant sound of a chainsaw coming from what might’ve been the north side of the woods: should I follow it? The woods were thick, the sound was muted and sporadic. Should I try to find the stream and follow it, hoping it would lead back to the creekbed behind my house? But last year’s logging’d left so many ruts it was impossible to tell which ice was streambed, which was frozen drainage. Then what about the fence? I didn’t know how far or where it led, but neighbors said the fence marks off the property of the North Country Beagle Club which owns several hundred acres of this unwanted land.
Three springs ago my friend George Mosher and the State EnCon man stood out the back of my place trading stories about fools who’d gotten turned around walking through the woods back here and gotten lost. (None of these stories as I recalled took place in winter.) George, who’s lived here his entire 80 years, says: To find your way out of the woods look at the top tips of hemlock trees because they point North. But I couldn’t tell a hemlock from a balsam tree and I didn’t know which direction the street is in, and anyway the woods were full of treetops pointing everywhere: north? east? south?
It occurred to me that there was only enough daylight left to act on one decision. If I chose wrong and was still here after dark, would Sylvère call the cops after finding me not home when he phoned from New York? Fat chance, because Sylvère says he is committed to supporting my independence, my new life. So if nobody would miss me until midnight or even tomorrow morning, what then? I had a wool scarf, my long black coat and vinyl gloves, though no matches or warm socks. Could I run in place from nightfall until 8 tomorrow morning to stay warm?
I chose the fence: walked to the left, because I knew the Beagle Club stretched down the right ending up several miles down Lanfear Road in Stony Creek. I ripped a forked branch from a tree to mark the spot. The fence didn’t follow a straight line. In order not to lose it I jumped over fallen trees, crawled through piled up branches, thorny frozen weeds.
I started running through the woods, profoundly grateful for having started taking an aerobics class. The sound of the chainsaw got fainter, further. I ran for 10 or 20 minutes, not thinking so much about death or deals with God as how many hours there’d be of night, and how it’s possible to survive it. Finally through the trees I saw a clear snow-covered slope, then farther on, a trailer.
I came out on Elmer Woods Road, a one house lane that cuts off Mud Street and walked a couple of miles down Mud Street to Smith Road. There weren’t any cars. I thought about a story told by 9 year old Josh Baker, who lives here in a trailer, about his mother walking alone down Mud Street one winter night when a demon-ghost leapt into her throat. This story, always colorful, now seemed not at all improbable.
xxo,
Chris
PS—Dick, Now it’s Wednesday night and all week I’ve been thinking about calling you: knowing that if I’m going to do it I will have to do it soon. By now you’ll have my note express mailed Tuesday and you’re leaving, what?—tomorrow, Friday?—for ten days overseas. I can’t remember what I wrote but Ann Rower promised it wasn’t too drippy when I read it on the phone. I think I said I was embarrassed about the ninety single-spaced pages of letters. Then something like, “The idea of seeing you alone is a vision of pure happiness and pleasure.” God now I’m really cringing. Anyhow I know I lied about “having” to be in LA at Art Center alone on February 23. Sylvère and I are going there tomorrow to do studio visits Friday. And I want to make it casual but the telephone’s so brutal. What if I reach you when your head’s a million miles away? Could I handle that as well as being lost in the woods at dark? No. Well, maybe. I’m torn between maintaining you as an entity to write to and talking with you as a person. Perhaps I’ll let it go.
Love,
Chris
New York City
Thursday, February 2, 1995
DD,
I’m sitting here at the West End Bar on Broadway having a coffee & a cigarette before going over to meet Sylvère. Have already been travelling most of the day: left home around 10:15, drove down to Albany through snow squalls, and then the endless train.
After talking to you last night I didn’t fall asleep ’til 3 a.m. Heart & sex chakras pounding, mixing themselves up ’til sex feelings are overwhelmed by heart. Or perhaps it’s more like sex feelings pumping out of heart. Anyway it was a kind of excited bliss, & I haven’t felt this way for 10 years, since I fell in love with Sylvère. At that time it went so badly—those feelings were barely expressed and never accepted. I had to resort to other stratagems, like being the most intelligent and useful girl.
My personal goal here—apart from anything else that may happen—is to express myself as clearly and honestly as I can. So in a sense love is just like writing: living in such a heightened state that accuracy and awareness are vital. And of course this can extend to everything. The risk is that these feelings’ll be ridiculed or rejected, & I think I’m understanding risk for the first time: being fully prepared to lose and accept the consequences if you gamble.
I think our telephone call went well last night, despite the ambiguous archness of your question: “And you only want to talk, right?” I can’t remember what I answered, the answer just flowed out, but I think we understood that we were talking about the same thing.
Chris
Fillmore, California
(The Condor Preserve—
late afternoon, 94 degrees)
Friday, February 3, 1995
DD,
Art, like God or The People, is fine for as long as you can believe in it.
Things To Do With The Person You’re Having An Affair With:
1. Take photobooth pictures of yourselves
(Note: finish this list later.)
What I was thinking about in the car:
That I don’t want be the person who always knows anymore, who has the vision for two people and makes the plans. I never understood before people who would do this (i.e., turn their whole lives around)—I thought it was idle, self indulgent, another way of just avoiding doing things in the world. But will, belief, breaks down…& now I do.
Here’s the formulation: I got together with Sylvère because I saw how I could help him get his life together. I’m drawn to you ’cause I see how you can help me
take my life apart…
Pasadena, California
Saturday, February 4, 1995
“Maktub” in Arabic means “it is written.”
Write a narrative in which the speaker starts to understand that events, as they happen in her/his life, can be seen not as surprises but as an uncovering—the systematic revelation of fate.
DD,
I am sitting in the Art Center library and starting, systematically, to read your essay on The Media and Magic Time in the Zurich Kunstmuseum catalog that I’d come across here last trip. I think that I am your ideal reader—or that, the ideal reader is one who is in love with the writer & combs the text for clues about that person & how they think—
(Through love I am teaching myself how to think)—Looking at the text as the way in. Given that disposition no text is too difficult or obscure and everything becomes an object of study. (Study’s good, because it microcosms everything—if you understand everything within the walls of what you study you can identify other walls too, other areas of study. Everything’s separate and discrete and there is no macrocosm, really. When there are no walls there is no study, only chaos. And so you break it down.)
I think that in that essay you (perhaps a lot of other people too, but since I’m in love with you I’ll pretend that you’re unique) were on the brink of a very important discovery: how to bring some politics to bear on the visionary ecstacy of Levi-Strauss, the ecstatic nihilism of Baudrillard, without becoming an old stodge. Politics means accepting that things happen for a reason. There’s a causality behind the flow and if we study hard enough it’s possible to understand it. Can politics be articulated in a way that’s structural, electric, instead of being dug up again, the boring bit at the bottom of the barrel? I think the clue to this is simultaneity, a sense of wonder at it: that the political can be a PARALLEL SOURCE OF INFORMATION, & more is more: adding an awareness of politics, how things happen, to the mix can just enhance our sense of how the present is exploding into Now Time. I’m thinking of the quote you cite from Levi-Strauss—“a universe of information where the laws of savage thought reign once more.” As if the instantaneous transmission of information can return us to the time-based, finite and deliberate magic of the medieval world. “The Middle Ages were built on seven centuries of ecstacy extending from the hierarchy of angels down into the muck” (Hugo Ball). So when you introduce political information to your texts, it shouldn’t be a matter of “And yet—” “But still—”, as if politics could be the final countervailing word. (I’m thinking of the essay on postmodern retro camp in your book The Ministry Of Fear.) Politics should be introduced: “And and.” Breathless, keeping it afloat—how much information about one subject can you juggle in two hands?
You write about art so well.
I disagree with you, obviously, about the frame. You argue that the frame provides coherence only through repression and exclusion. But the trick is to discover Everything within the frame. “Think Harder” as Richard Foreman used to blast out over the PA in his early plays. Or just Look Closer.
New York City
Tuesday, February 7, 1995
The sweetest tongue has the sharpest tooth.
DD,
I woke up with a start last night after maybe 20 minutes of cramped airplane sleep with a very vivid dream.
I was out for the night with Laura Paddock, my best (only really) friend among the Art Center Students. We were at someone’s place (a student’s?); a bunch of people having dinner, & Laura & I’d planned to leave early so I could hook up with you. I was supposed to call you to confirm, & I did that from the party, & when I reached you you cryptically called the whole thing off. And I hung up the phone, & in front of this roomful of art students in their 20s let out a huge & uncontrollable sob. No one looked at me but Laura, who instantly knew, & I collapsed into her arms.
Laura and I met Saturday morning in Pasadena for coffee, sat in a courtyard off Colorado pretending we were in Mexico or Ibiza, continuing a dialogue we’d started months ago circling around mysticism, love, obsession. Our conversations are not so much about the theories of love & desire, as its manifestations in our favorite books & poems. Study as a Fan Club meeting—the only kind.
There’s an implicit understanding between us that we accept it (love, extremity, desire) & can share some personal information/vision best by swapping favorite epigrams and poems. It was Laura who told me about this proverb about tooth & tongue—“That means, I guess,” she said, looking straight at me with wide and ice-blue eyes, “that the one you love the best has the most power to hurt you.” And we both nodded, smiling slightly, like we knew. But since this’s school, not girltalk, we both work hard to keep our conversations on a referential but ever so suggestive plane. Meeting Laura’s always like inhaling ether; like ladies in the Heian Court, we’re always conscious of ‘the form.’
When I first met Laura Paddock I was impressed by the fat notebooks she was keeping, full of favorite quotes and drawings & her own lines. Remembered how I used to do that years ago. And now—
Thurman, New York
February 9, 1995
—All yesterday on the train and today I’ve been reading your last book, The Ministry Of Fear, which I checked out from the Art Center library. It’s so amazing that the book came out in 1988 because even though the title comes from Orwell it took four more years for fear to drive everybody back into the fold. 1988 was the year when Seven Days, a magazine about real estate and restaurants swept New York and ending up living in the park no longer seemed impossible. Famous-Artist dinner party talk included stories about former colleagues seen scavenging in dumpsters. Money rewrote mythology and the lives of people I’d admired now seemed like cautionary tales. Paul Thek died of AIDS in 1986 and David Wojnarowicz was dying and there was all this academic shit out there about The Body as if it were a thing apart. And in the midst of this you wrote the most amazing thing about the need to bring things DOWN:
“The biological,” you wrote (quoting Emanuel Levinas) “with the notion of inevitability it implies, becomes more than an object of spiritual life. It becomes its heart. The mysterious urgings of the blood…lose the character of problems to be solved by a sovereignly free Self. Because the self is made of just these elements. Our essences no longer lie in freedom but in a kind of chaining. To be truly oneself means accepting this ineluctable original chain that is unique to our bodies, and above all in accepting this chaining.”
And then in Aliens & Anorexia you wrote about your own physical experience, being slightly anorexic—how anorexia arises not from narcissism, a fixation with your body, but a sense of its aloneness:
“If I’m not touched it becomes impossible to eat. Intersubjectivity occurs at the moment of orgasm: when things break down. If I’m not touched my skin feels the flip side of a magnet. It’s only after sex sometimes that I can eat a little.”
And that by recognizing the aloneness of your body it’s possible to reach outside, become an Alien, escape the predetermined world:
“Anorexia is an active stance. The creation of an involuted body. How to abstract oneself from food fluxes and the mechanical sign of the meal? Synchronicity shudders faster than the speed of light around the world. Distant memories of food: strawberry shortcake, mashed potatoes…”
This’s one of the most incredible things I’ve read in years.
It’s now 2 o’clock in the afternoon and as I copied these lines out from your book by hand I felt a shudder of connection with myself when I was 24, 25. It was as if I was right back there in the room on East 11th Street, all those pages of notes that I was writing then, tiny ballpoint letters on wrinkly onion paper about George Eliot, diagrams of molecular movement and attraction, Ulrike Meinhof and Merleau-Ponty. I believed I was inventing a new genre and it was secret because there was nobody to tell it to. Lonely Girl Phenomenology. Living totally alone for the first time, and everything I’d been before (a journalist, New Zealander, a Marxist) was breaking down. And
all that writing eventually cohered or was manipulated (the mind’s revenge over dumb emotion!) into Disparate Action/Desperate Action, my first real play.
The arteries of the hand & arm that write lead straight into the heart, I was thinking last week in California, not seeing then that through writing it’s also possible to re-visit a ghost of your past self, as if at least the shell of who you were fifteen years ago can somehow be re-called.
When I got here yesterday the house was banked in snowdrifts three feet high. The pipes are frozen so I’m shitting in the yard and making coffee out of boiled snow. As I was writing this Tom Clayfield and his wife Renee pulled up with a load of firewood. Quick cut to winter coat and gloves, icy breath, hurling logs onto the ground. And suddenly it’s Survival Time in the Great Northwoods—the inescapable part of living here, not good or bad, just takes you someplace else… But even though this winter’s real it doesn’t seem as real as this… At least not for a little while.
What I was about to start writing before this poor Tom Clayfield (32 years old, a torn-up face and his few remaining teeth completely rotted) came by was The 1st Person. The difference between now and fifteen years ago is I don’t think I was able, ever, to write any of those notebooks then in the 1st Person. I had to find these ciphers for myself because whenever I tried writing in the 1st Person it sounded like some other person, or else the tritest most neurotic parts of myself that I wanted so badly to get beyond. Now I can’t stop writing in the 1st Person, it feels like it’s the last chance I’ll ever have to figure some of this stuff out.
Sylvère keeps socializing what I’m going through with you. Labeling it through other people’s eyes—Adultery in Academe, John Updike meets Marivaux…Faculty Wife Throws Herself At Husband’s Colleague. This presumes that there’s something inherently grotesque, unspeakable, about femaleness, desire. But what I’m going through with you is real and happening for the first time.