I have had insomnia for three or four weeks. Not too terrible--I do usually end up with 4-6 hours of sleep--but I think I have only had two full nights of sleep in these hot and humid weeks.
My thinking and writing and being is so deeply inflected by my ghostliness via exhaustion and frayed nerves. It does make me more attuned to certain affects, effects, moods.
I decided to watch the movies of Kelly Reichardt in the long nights. I am in the middle of Meek's Cutoff (I won't yet comment on its seeming failure to think hard on settler colonialism but I will say that it's an amazing portrait of boredom-dread and perseverance and gender/power/lack), and years ago I watched Wendy and Lucy (in my memory: it's soft and sad and likeable). Here, though, for our purposes, I want to mention Showing Up. It's maybe a bit loose with its interrogations. Un-rigorous, I guess. But it's insanely watchable and lovely; it's shot so beautifully and very carefully works very hard to frame the labors of artmaking. The main character's clothes are super PNW chic, but they're wonderful. The actress Michelle Williams moves in interesting ways and I really love watching her face as she performs the artmaking itself (she's a sculptor in the film)--
I also just read Kathryn Davis' Aurelia, Aurélia, and she writes, of encountering a piece of art (of any type):
"And there you are, ghostly you and ghostly artist, in ghostly communion in that non-existent place between words, images, notes."
And I am also reading a book about Joan Jonas and she says, in describing her piece Organic Honey's Visual Telepathy:
"[Closed-circuit video systems] altered my way of performing, and I began to perform for the camera. I didn't want to be recognized as myself, so I wore masks, I dressed up, I played with disguise. I developed imaginary characters or states of mind . . . investigating my own image in the monitor of my video machine . . . obsessed with following the process of my own theatricality."
She starts doing drawings in her performance, as her character (Organic Honey, obvi!), and, rather than being alone doing the artmaking labor and being most def not a face to be seen, she's in a costume, making art, and she looks at the drawings via the monitor rather than at the drawings themselves.
Maybe something here for us about dressing, persona/e, being in character, artmaking-costumes.
Maybe something here to think about re: "developing" a state of mind through a persona.
Maybe something about our coming into contact with one another's ghosts in that non-existent place.
Maybe that place is something that happens in a close-circuit video system that loops the information in and out.
Kelly Reichardt says her movies are just about people passing through.
I think you both know that I have written about wanting to make the liminal into an eternity.
I think there's something there about encounters. And clothes.
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