On Writing

What it’s worth.

Overheard: Yes, but what can writing even do in a world? Or with one, for that matter? 

Other than explain, it might make a likeness. Or dream a new one. Or transform.

Most of us have glimpsed the silvery back of something flickering beyond time and space, entering and exiting with continual unpredictability, why not the pen? 

If the beginning was the word, where is the continuance, except here, in this ongoing fraught attempt to dream it forward, repair the torn fabric of the cosmos through which we slipped from something elemental into something else? 

What else does one do, but stitch new wings for some eventual return, word by word, and keep a record in the meantime––of how we fall?

Service Work

Artistic practice as an act of devotion.

Here is a riddle, one said. 

And who do you think you are? asked another.

Only a servant. He was making films. The answer is unimportant.

Why ask, then?

There is a code in here somewhere. It is the mystery.

Which mystery?

The usual ones: possibilities of transcendence, rebirth, levels of existence. The role of ritual practice.

Such as?

Such as this one. Right now, I am filming a liturgical text. Contemplating the sacred frame by frame, but I am just beginning. He had been at it three decades.

Are you praying, then?

I call it excavation. I am a social worker with a background in archaeology.

But why?

The idea is to resuscitate the present. This is my devotion.

***

Inspired by an interview I read this morning, in BOMB magazine, with the filmmaker Ashish Avikunthak.