To Theodor W. Adorno (first letter)

Dear Professor,

There's too much to write about. I'll try and keep things simple this first time out.



Can you refuse the way things are without perpetuating clichés?
Am I suspect for asking?



Being difficult, refusing to cater, going your own way -- these things can produce their own brand of cringe-inducing kitsch, a mush of arduousness that smothers self-reflexivity, a vain onslaught of juvenile distress and presumed righteousness that displaces all insight, an ongoing wave of unintentionally bad art that only helps to maintain the status quo.



It's also possible that people like Sisyphus are happy with their circumstances -- that their struggles are representative of being truly alive.



Your boulder has been thought itself, thinking things through, thinking openly despite the temptations of reactionary praxis and pseudo-activity. This has been your struggle. It's an affirmation of life -- a continuance of liberty despite the division of labour. I believe it.

jeremy

To Buttons (first letter)

I've hoarded you and kept you close.



I've tried to understand it. You're comforting and suggestive.



You proffer self-sufficiency.



You defy the perceived advantages and uncritical mystifications of concentrated wealth, proliferating complexity and technological mediation. It all happens in silence. It is still. It's something in and of itself.



You're not much and you're everything -- an always dynamic array of perfect circles, a mind-boggling strata of variations, a trove of stories.



Each of you acts. Every instance is a performance -- a metonymic intimation of possibility.



Working definitions of Art reside in your promise.



Histories of ideas accumulate in your gathering.



Each crowd consists of loss and becoming.



You are bestowed with a confused status. Your utility is subsumed by projected contemplations.



Each of you is rendered a representational raw material.



I collect you as if I were a hunter.

jeremy

To Whom It May Concern (third letter)

These moments ask



me



to acknowledge



inadequacies



of language



and



the chasm



continuing



to rest



between



each



and every one



of us.

jeremy

To Kafka Scholars (first letter)

Dear Comrades,

Have you chosen this life of study and exposition for yourselves? Have you been selected? Are you vying for affirmation? How does one speak for a man who claimed he had nothing in common with himself?



Do his stories seem to provide you with some critical distance -- a third party-like view of your own debasement? Have they given you a sense of momentary repose (a fleeting dissolution of panic and despair)? Do you ever catch yourselves laughing hysterically?



I've pictured each of you finding a new commitment of mind under some stairs (or perhaps in some forgotten cellar room alone with his books). I sometimes pretend you can escape the Modern World at will.



It doesn't matter. Horrific arbitrariness continues. Mindless constellations of power still entangle our most intimate archives and ambitions.



Did expressing this awareness free him? Has it been enough for you?

jeremy

To Your Absence (third Letter)

You remain here and no place



(a matter of conviction).



Each sign continues tracing



a movement of shadows



(always made by other things).

To Noir Apartments (first letter)

Each of you makes up an abbreviated, insular ecosophy. You integrate an enclosed material environment with the desires of a mental space trying to re-constitute itself.



The social world is kept out in the cold.



As a child I would try to will one of you into being. I wanted my own place with my own rules -- a fortress of repose that could always provide the time and space necessary for meaningful reflection.



I would watch your kind on screen and vicariously inhabit states of elusively pleasurable, melancholic stasis.



I thought I knew what it was like to be blind drunk on whiskey long before I ever tasted the stuff.



I was always worried about being on the street. Each time a key turned on screen -- every moment someone hung their hat and closed the door -- I would sigh with relief and be filled with wishful thinking. That would be my goal, to have that at least. You and I are not so different. Each of you might hypothetically contain me but only to the extent that I am able to desire it. We are one in the same -- as unreal as each other.



You persist in me as though I were a kind of lacking host.

jeremy

To These Pictures of You (fourth letter)

I want to believe your stare meets mine.



Pretend we are in a state of confrontational arrest

(an impossible truce).



You are still and I move involuntarily.



I'm unfixed while you are dead.



Your look is always over before mine begins.

To Melodrama (first letter)

You're realizing a kind of total control.
Mentioning this makes me feel like I'm a part of the act.



You're denoting all types -- all things. You're doing this as I wonder if you're mindless -- less than a monster -- an emptiness that structures by default.



You render singularities unambiguously ambiguous. All is generic. All is heralded. Acknowledgement is everything within your formulaic productions -- acknowledgement as being.



You use what appeals to the emotions you've defined.



All ruptures are contained by conditioned responses. It's just like a movie.
Recalling this makes me feel like I'm a part of the act.



The near-dead are in denial. They make a fuss over nothing. They make a scene. They distract themselves. They cling to you desperately, begging for respite. They seem to need a lot of attention.



Don't worry yourself about the strain (I'm sure you're not). You're doing a great job. Most of the audience is already dead.
Pointing this out makes me feel like I'm a part of the act.

jeremy

To Johannes Kepler (first letter)

Dear Mr. Kepler,

Those with the means have ensured your name remains imposed somewhere upon the Universe.



You're probably remembered now as I imagine you remembered Copernicus or Aristotle (an authoritative precedent setter in the advancement of human knowledge, a canonized entity, someone who has survived their own death through their works).



Isn't this usually realized in part by arbitrary circumstances, dumb luck, strange twists of fate, the collapse of civilizations, a multitude of long unacknowledged recollections and chances -- a kind of complex randomness and destruction that accidentally manages to save the odd idea from utter obscurity?



I saw a painting of you (a digital image of a painting of you). I was reminded of an urban professional eating sushi (I live in 21rst century Vancouver).



I keep returning to your refutation of classical reasoning -- its fallibility in trying to discern the truth of things. I think of your powers of observation -- your ability to step outside of yourself. You knew you weren't the centre of the universe.



You started a shell game with the underpinnings of everything -- what we think we know, how we know it, and why. It all continues to be suspect.



Each of our selves remains an obscuring partition.

jeremy

To Sofonisbe Anguissola (first letter)

Dear Sofonisbe,

Your works seem like mirrors. They reflect something outside of language. I'm not sure, but I think this has something to do with the possibilities of honest feeling, unhindered sensitivity, or, well, something else altogether really -- something distantly related -- something I'll never adequately name.



Emotional states present themselves out of time. I keep seeing gumption and humor from the depths of a Man's World (always a very impoverished and unwelcoming context to begin with). You've managed to step out and find your own light. I get to see a different place. Your teachers could not begin to articulate such a thing, even when trying to capture your presence.



You knew this and could show them their failure. You could present their limited perceptions as an object of calm study. Your father, however, appears loving and concerned beyond the controls of convention and code. He is rendered without pretension despite the societal requirements of his station.



The same could be said of the Queen of Spain.



Your sisters appear preciously accessible. The intimate distinctness of each individual is effortlessly conveyed. The immediacy of it all is almost estranging.



You weren't allowed to study from a nude model, but I think this imposed limitation was beneficial in the end (easy for me to say, of course). It helped you get closer to a new kind of realism.



You had to find subject matter in the everyday, in the smiles and stares of those around you, in what was passed over at the margins of known description and the works of Masters. Your pictures remain alive today because of it.

jeremy

To The Ceiling (second letter)

You looked different today. I saw melting plasma steps, a landscape of erosion and shifting sedimentation, the face of a washed up and morphine addicted Nazi-era UFA film star -- an actress character from a Fassbinder film I watched nearly twenty years ago while half asleep.



You also reminded me of the movie's subtitles -- how they kept other concerns at bay and held my tired attention.

I left my monkey brain behind momentarily. We drifted together like a collaborative absence of consciousness.



You can often seem like a path leading back to the labyrinths of thought in my head (I've written to you about this before) but today you restored a lot of my squandered and stolen confidence (just as an old friend or familiar terrain might).



It was like I'd been climbing a dangerous cliff. You appeared unexpectedly, opening up before me like a plateau of divine perspective. We'd soon be shifting gracefully across the expanse of the horizon.



Before I was able to recognize how or why, before I could have any sense of an end, this new experience of you was gone. I struggled to remember correctly and completely. I tried to explain it to myself. I stopped staring upwards through your presence and began to write this letter.

jeremy

To People I Used To Know (first letter)

Dear Folks,

The city I live in is small. It's not even a city really. The people here are too familiar, as if I've known them personally. It's like we've been intimately involved with something, somewhere together, but can't remember what it was or who we really are. Circumstances, names and experiences seem instantly erased.



The bookstore clerk, a woman I keep seeing in thriftshops, that sunburnt alcoholic at the bus stop, countless others I keep mistaking for past co-workers, students, friends of friends -- they circulate constantly. A sense of imminent greeting repeats in the absence of real connections.

It's different for us though. We really did know each other once.



Maybe we'll cross paths again, on the streets we used to walk down while in touch. We could be moving through the same spaces right now, intentionally ignoring each other. Perhaps we jarringly remind one another of an insurmountable divide -- an unbridgeable gap between our memories (the stories we tell ourselves) and an objective reality concerning the entirety of our lived experiences.



Historical recollections are revealed to be internal constructions. One's imaginary and comforting rationales are exposed. Illusory assumptions and judgments are shaken.

It's no wonder we have a hard time saying hello to each other.



When I bump into one of you now, I feel as though I'm falling very slowly through numerous lifetimes. Constellations of relation hover just beyond us, full of incredible complexity and mystery -- absolutely unknowable -- and yet we have been a part of them.



It's perhaps too much to acknowledge and express, let alone understand. One summer might contain centuries. A day can take on years. A brief moment becomes infinite. We pretend to let each other go.

jeremy

To Your Absence (third letter)

Where have you gone?



Are you here now and no place



(a matter of my convictions)?



All signs continue tracing



a movement of shadows



made by other things.

To The Edge of The World (fifth letter)

You're at the crest of our formation, this thing we've called our planet, our lives as we know them. We're speeding through space. We're spinning beyond all sensory detection. That's what I must've been dreaming as I woke up this morning.



The sun is out and you're nowhere to be found. It's a matter of belief. You can seem more abstract than the international date line or a world financial crisis.



You're far too real and far too gone for anyone to fully grasp or simulate. Some try and fail. They go on vacation and pretend. You remain a tawdry ideal, a rumor perhaps...



I think you were everywhere once. Our first ancestors must have been there with you. Every aspect of every moment was an answer to being. You moved through the unknown together in a rush of feeling that could only end in lonely deaths -- a passing of silence -- the advent of language and delusions, the idea of progress and its eclipse, the reign of economically determined pragmatisms. We are dead-beat descendants.



But you're not mortal or material. You're more human than human -- an amazing space/time between something and nothing. You're always eluding the production of desire.



You were there in a first instance of singularity and void. This planet can't claim you (as much as I'd like to think you are an intrinsic part of it). It's no wonder the universe is expanding. Everything seeks you out, demands a fringe, a line to be continually redrawn, a new border crossing.



I think you're waiting us out. I've written to you about this before but don't know where to send the letters. I still think you'll show yourself again as everything we've named collapses into nothingness.

jeremy

To These Pictures of You (third letter)

I want to believe your stare meets mine.



Pretend we are in a state of confrontational arrest

(an impossible truce).



You are still and I move involuntarily.



I'm unfixed while you are dead.



Your look is always over before mine begins.

To Margaret Atwood (first letter)

Dear Margaret,

Did you ever walk around the Annex anonymously, timid and worrying, slipping into coffee houses with mousy hair and a macrame shoulder bag?



Did you wonder about your intelligence, its dimensions and character? I imagine your beginnings, developing new frames of reference, quietly planning with the shrewdness of an assassin, the supernatural clarity of oracles, young and unblemished, waiting for opportunity, collecting strange adjectives, crude cartoons and hit lists.



Surely the old order was waiting to be cut down. Their pomposity demanded it. They dared you with their cigar smoke and excessive drinking, their leers and intellectual indifference. They were begging to be challenged, to be called on their audacious patriarchal crimes and misdemeanors, their provincial maple leaf pretensions, their unquestioned taste.



That was a thousand pant-suits ago. Countless luncheons, award ceremonies and fundraising receptions have come and gone (along with the praise blurbs, fair weather friends and politically necessitated associations).



Now you're calling the shots. You're one with the problem.



It's as if you've mimicked your protagonist in Surfacing for all of these years -- as if you've traced the book's plot to maintain an allegorically parallel life. The Canadian Wilderness is transfigured. You've journeyed to the heart of the Canadian Arts Industry.



You've come for the posturing, controlling Father, dissolving yourself within his absent presence.



You're able to convey an awareness of all this through your work. Victims and debt, myth and fable, speculation and apocalypse, revolutionary desires -- they all recur.



You remain interesting after endless affirmations from those within the game. You're able to fascinate despite your comfortable lifestyle. You're a sharp and pampered Sisyphus, pushing it out repeatedly on the inside track.

jeremy

To This Picture of You (Sixteenth Letter)

I want to believe your stare meets mine.

Pretend we are in a state of confrontational arrest

(an impossible truce).



You are still and I move involuntarily.

I'm unfixed while you are dead.

Your look is always over before mine begins.

To The Point Of No Return (first letter)

You're hurtling past...


















You're a state of movement so pervasive, so totalizing, that you can can seem like stillness. You're a suspension that might only seem achievable through some kind of divine insight and epic discipline, something impossibly ordered, contained, thought-through... But to mis-recognize you like this would be nearly horrific, pathetic, unforgivable. It could also be laughable if it weren't so deadening.

























There's never been any going back to anything. Every destination is already disinterred. They're bathing in demolition lights (always reconstituting).





















Everything I try to save, protect or prevent is rendered nostalgic -- an invention.




















Fate and choice are reduced to pulp. Nature and culture run around like chickens with their heads cut off . You pluck, skin and chop. You season, stir and stew.

Life appears as a cannibal feast -- a gorging that forms all there is, was or will be.

























You don't have to be reached because you're always already here -- no rock bottom or irreparable damage, no state of grace to lose, no lines to cross.
















You're the real authority behind the Alphas and Omegas, the kits and kaboodles.
















You were there in the moment I first thought I existed. You were there already.



















There's no shame to be had in all of this (no stoicism either). No point of origin is waiting for me. You're the verdict, the sentence, the crime and the punishment. You're the rehabilitation too.

























All plateaus speed endlessly beneath and behind us. All geographies are passing. You seem to be the only option for hanging a hat, planting roots or retiring.


















You're hurtling past. You're always already.

jeremy

To Eckhart Tolle's Parents (first letter)

Who are you people and what did you do to your son?





















The same ambiguities (omissions?) remain consistent despite (because of?) the media glare. The same underdeveloped storyline is repeated. Were you Nazis? Janitors? Bankers? Soldiers? Communists? Drunkards? Invalid Resisters? What did you expect from him during the rebuilding?





















Were you Werewolves in the rubble? Did humiliating years of utter defeat slip by until the baby? Were you of that silent generation unable to morn or apologize? Did you return to your everyday lives as if nothing had happened in Germany since the 19th century?



















Perhaps Eckhart was a disappointing specimen, a sickly caricature of an ideal, a reminder of weakness and inadequacy. He laughs as if scarred, as if his gestures are reflexive, as if they are not his own, as if they were triggered by degradations he has consciously forgotten. Maybe people identify with him because he is somehow able to dramatize outwardly a kind of common grotesque bondage, a generically modern type of damage to the self that digs in deeper and earlier into one's life than any construction of ego. Are you still alive? Are you proud of what he has accomplished?




















Did he look at you with disgust, with incomprehension? Did he know too little or too much? Why the schooling abroad, the overwhelming despair, that supposed intimacy with suffering? Why did he drop out? Did he drop out? How does one live in an English urban park without income for all those years? What did he think of the Bader-Meinhof gang?



















Did he talk about Jesus much at the kitchen table? Did he sometimes drift off as if arrested by a vision, an intuitive insight, the answer to everything?

























Did he talk about time much, the beginning and the end, the idea of the eternal? Did you give him grounds to judge you? Would he look for a platform? Would he one day forsake you altogether, as if you were phantoms of the past or the future, as if you were part of this human problem he has been wiggling out of for decades.

























This is the struggle, the drama that he bestows. It is a theatre of the present with a wisdom of the ages repetoire. It's an ideal fit for the web and TV -- for this post-ideological, deregulated, ongoing world of now.


















He lives here in Vancouver these days. I've probably seen him walking along the sea wall enjoying the moment. He has learned a great deal from this blandly provincial, new-money mecca. He must gain strength from its new-age faux-finish.


















This city we live in appropriates all possibilities of authentic experience, class warfare, dissolutions of nature/culture dichotomies, conceptions of the sublime. It helps to contextualize all that beige in his wardrobe and his inability to be spontaneous.

























Did he ever write to you? Does he know where you've been and what you have done? Do you exist for him now?

jeremy

To These Pictures of You (second letter)

I want to believe your stare meets mine.




















Pretend we are in a state of confrontational arrest

(an impossible truce).


















You are still and I move involuntarily.

























I'm unfixed while you are dead.



















Your look is always over before mine begins.

To Gulf Island Campgrounds (first letter)

A healthy-looking lesbian couple adjust lycra bicycle shorts while conversing in soft-sounding German. Two eagles circle overhead as white wanna-be Rastas play hacky sack. I'm thinking about the first hill along the way to you and the backpack straps that will dig into my shoulders. I'm thinking about how remarkably relaxed I was the last time I got off the ferry. Can you regain that kind of calm after an extended absence? The goal seems doomed from the start. Expectation negates it.



















My last gourmet coffee for a while is emptying. Too many cars disperse from the boat -- but it's over in an instant. The coastline around the dock is redeveloping. The general store girl looks older. Everything here seems to be momentary, changing, on the verge of disappearing. This is perhaps one of the most startling of Bourgeois Civilization's reoccurring nightmares, in part because it is irrefutable. It is, in a most uncomfortable sense, true. The significance and remembrance of even seemingly mundane experiences can become suspect. It's enough to make you neurotic. It's enough to make you reconsider what it really means to be a sentimental fool.

You are always reminding me of a claim by W. G. Sebald (I first read one of his books on a trip like this one -- just before his death by car accident in 2001): "Melancholia, the contemplation of unhappiness as it is occurring, has nothing in common with the desire to die, and at the level of art in particular its function is anything but reactive or reactionary…. The description of unhappiness carries with it the possibility of overcoming that unhappiness." To join you is to witness an unstoppable passing, and also to hope somehow that this loss or destruction can be surmounted, at least for a little while, by doing so. There can be a sense of time slowing down in being with you or in moving towards you, but this is not reassuring or suggestive of some alternate reality. In actuality, quite the opposite is the case, with one's attention being drawn with ever more violent and profound force toward an already nagging sense of the end of things.























It can seem as if you reside precariously on the collapsing outer barrier of a global matrix (or perhaps just beyond it) but you are also an accommodation within such a system, a kind of release valve or simulation of radical reform. Maybe you are one of the last places on earth where there might be discernible traces of a now deceased, pre-grid-like existence, or still more likely, the possibility of imagining such a thing. To endure this state, to see it through, must surely promise a kind of peace (virtual or otherwise), a sort of coming-to-terms with the collapse of time and space within modernity, and the finite and rapidly depleting tolerance of this planet to host our cancerous evolutions.

















You're a final repository/resting place for the ongoing and unspoken, colonially-conditioned desires of the underclasses -- a want of both autonomy (escape from the division of labor) and ecological integration -- an always/already compromised idle retreat for contemporary indentured servants and the imagined peasantry of past Golden Ages. You host people trying to crawl out of their heads, out of language, out of culture, out of the socially necessitated.




















More Hollywood holiday homes have blossomed around you since last spring, replete with tennis-courts, surveillance cameras and helicopter pads. They appear occasionally in the distance behind elaborate gates and manicured shrubbery, breaking up an already ad-hoc arrangement of abandoned farms, wooded lots, ill-kept grazing fields, modest prefab trailer homes, lattice-encrusted gardens and D.I.Y. front porches.

















I can hear a thousand insects in the few feet around me -- a near-silent riot.


















I've reached you once again and sit on a grassy slope by the waterfront. The ocean is busy with speeding vessels and wakes. A fire is lit, the sun is setting, and all around us the world moves in while closing down slowly.

jeremy

To The Neighborhood Of Infinity (first letter)

Talk of cities continues. Perspectives proliferate exponentially. Contexts and agendas are constantly reinvented. It’s a compounding chatter that can seem almost soothing. It's the sound of elaborate ruins being built all around us.




















We can’t measure or date these constructions. They’re not soft or hard, permeable or solid. They’re visible and invisible, silent and deafening, always absent to our touch and absolute comprehension.

























There’s been no plan to begin with. The beginning has been forever. There was no architect, no council, no corpus or schemata. All lexicons are fantasies.

























Freedom here and there (in all such locales) becomes a word with a lot of problems. It roams the language slums of our togetherness.

























You keep promising a way out without saying anything. I sense it as if it were the sun coming out. It’s like a sudden recognition of the obvious or an acceptance of the poetic.

jeremy

To Julia (second letter)

Dear Julia,

I found a new edition of George Woodcock's book Orwell's Message: 1984 and the Present. He lived here in Vancouver for years (until his death in 1995). I never met him. I never met Orwell either (he died before I was born -- not long after his arguments with Woodcock about pacifism and the war against the fascists). I think they disguised themselves as writers. I think they were grass-roots-humanists at heart. I still don't pretend to understand you though. I've never met you either, which only exacerbates my confusion over your existence.
























You continue to inhabit multiple figures simultaneously: a fictional character, an actual person (the actor Suzanna Hamilton), and a kind of suspected ghost persona meant to stand in for someone (or a composite of people) Orwell might of had private relations with. You look and sound like Hamilton to me (as she was in that film version of 1984 from 1984). You're Hamilton and you're not. I saw you as her before I saw her as you. I still don't get it.
















The mystery of all this is arresting. It's seductive and frightening. It's as disturbing as any other rupture of rational deduction and assumed/established Laws of the Universe. It's as unsettling as having your thoughts read. I've written to you about this before, but I've since realized that you also hover out of time.














You are an ongoing point of departure -- an absent presence. I look at an image of Hamilton then (1984) and an image of her now (2009), and find that aging has not obscured a kind of constancy (but I can't say of what exactly). It's been twenty five years since I first saw an image of her/you and this feeling, this sense of something ongoing, remains the same. I am always being transported back to that first moment of intuitive recognition. The future keeps collapsing into the past, and I'm left at a loss for words.

























Is this "timelessness" achieved through Literature, through Art? Woodcock argues that 1984 hybridizes disparate literary genres. He dismisses claims that the novel is, for the most part, a reworking of particular dystopia/utopia traditions (some kind of construction/deconstruction of an ideal society). His discussion of the Gothic in relation to the characters and plot is new to me, at least on a conscious level. Horror and romance now seem to engulf the text. Any reduction of the work to a simplistic, propaganda-oriented diatribe about the formation of a postwar global order has been irrevocably complicated. Are you Orwell's female Gothic protagonist? Are you trapped within an entirely domesticated, almost infantile space -- a cage completely inscribed by The Father (or in this case, Big Brother)? Is all of this somehow connected to that seemingly eternal something I can't quite describe?
















Your dangerous, risk-laden behaviors act as transgressions, but they also seem to be part of an elaborate predatory fantasy (perhaps Orwell's own) about an erotic, youthful subversive as object of desire. Winston Smith/George Orwell remembers what life was like before The Party. He has been beaten down. His confidence has been infiltrated, compromised, but you have never known anything else. You proceed skillfully and without hesitation in your pursuit of pleasure. He feels he must possess you to find himself again.

























It's also possible that you extend completely beyond these kinds of scenarios -- that you exist outside of any phallocentric ordering of things. Your desires might escape all points of reference or understanding. Perhaps you embody the "ineffable jouissance of the Other".

























You are definitely beyond me. I've often found myself feeling hopeful, even comforted, because of this. It's got nothing to do with "radical" re-inventions of subjectivity or any agency in difference. This something I'm trying to understand about you doesn't proliferate markets, alternative lifestyles or cultural capital. What seems constant about you is related, I think, to what allowed Woodcock-The-Anarchist and Orwell-The-Socialist to be friends in the first place. It also has something to do with their impersonations of writers.
























They were able to recognize an eventual submission of all formulation, culture, ideology, language, reason, etc, to the transition of power from a means to an end -- but they also witnessed first-hand the persistence of revolutionary need. The inherent intelligence and empathic vitality of people, these qualities which keep promising to bind us together as a human family, are perhaps retained in the memory of this persistence.



















Much like yourself, this memory is not necessarily of the past at all, but of an ongoing emotional (perhaps even bodily) anticipation of possibility and connection. It's like remembering that you're thinking a thought. It is forever resisting a history of forgetting. It is also unforgettable, and yet so hard to articulate, so difficult to abstract. We just live it.

jeremy

To The Ultimate Demise Of All Gigantic Heads (first letter)

They keep coming despite you.



Sometimes they resurface destroyed. They can seem like beached whales at low tide, meteors in the desert, vehicles after an avalanche.



They roll out from the darkest corners of nature's reclamations. It's as if they've been waiting forever to whisper at us in silence -- with the quietness of death. It's as if they were kicked out of a cleaner, safer place.



Each gigantic head is a colossal failure, the wish-face of a culture's pride and fear, a displacement of desires to constitute existence, to materialize a sense of being in the world.



You ensure these repeated efforts are made meaningless. They're like a wind carving cliffs in sand. Each re-creation moves dumb matter through the years. Every likeness is rendered alien to successive generations.



A repressed decapitation is exposed with the advent of these inventions (perhaps it is you, most of all, who must see it this way). It's like the return of a murder that hasn't been remembered, that hasn't been passed down, that has never been recognized.



Each gigantic head fails in its attempts to kiss the folds of time, to press a unique likeness, an authentic self, a living consciousness, into the malleable walls of historical recollection.



Each metonymic noggin is begging to be vandalized. Each has claimed power as an end.



You kick-in the artifice that props up the possibilities of ego. You could care less. You know gigantic heads are empty. You know they are shells of nothingness.



Your inevitability reveals their formless truth.

jeremy

To Saint Helena (first letter)

Dear Saint Helena,

Fragments of your son's likeness have formed an incomplete collection. They're a reminder of the end of things -- a warning of violations to come.



Just imagine it -- you're the Patron Saint of Archaeology.
Procuring the True Cross must've put you in the running.



Your claims endorse a desire to possess. They champion a need to own the material stuff of origins -- to render meaning as property.



You're a Founding Mother of the Modern World.



The expansion of your order has survived the Fall of Rome, sprawling across the pagan earth, carving it up, repackaging it, staking claims and relocating foreign artifacts, destroying languages, cultures, contexts, all forms of historical record.



It doesn't seem to matter that your boy killed his eldest son. His dream of victory under the sign of the cross remains. You've passed it on as if it were a public inheritance -- an obtainable object -- a thing to be had by any means necessary.



Centuries have passed and the crusades keep coming.

jeremy

To Your Absence (second letter)

You're still here and no place



(still a matter of conviction).



Each sign is still tracing



a movement of shadows



(always made by other things).

To Your Absence (first letter)

You're here and no place (a matter of conviction).



Each sign is tracing a movement of shadows



(made by other things).

To The Commune (first letter)

You're still asleep. You wake up in a dream.



There's a greasy kid (straight from a riot) telling you not to give up or in. The kid says there's been a few glitches over the years, but soon the most misanthropic amongst us will be clamoring for a chance to join your lot and leave behind all of those humiliating, unspoken, schizophrenic habits our society depends on to perpetuate itself. No more ingratiating. No more shopping. No more work. No more suppression or thwarted feeling. No more lies. No more concern for things as they've been.



We'll get rid of your most problematic factors. No more Kool-Aid. No more cargo cults. No more ego-maniacal sexual predators. No more in-house consciousness inquisitions, bomb factories or strictly rationed rice & bean diets. No more militant isolationists, mystics or prophets. No more dogma, except to say: "All Power To The Commune!"



Community will not be a goal (nothing will need to be held in common over difference). Organizing will be a means, not an end. Don't doubt the extinction of bureaucracy! We'll send it packing before it has a chance to take root. There won't be another Dictatorship of the Proletariat. No one is taking over. We're gonna take leave.



New souls will learn how to build solar panels and splints, make candles, clothing and software. They'll become their own everything and leave titles out of it. They'll retire the police and celebrity culture. They will discover Reality, the Moment, their own mortality. They'll exit the cave.



The kid is now saying that you might as well go back to sleep (asleep in your dream), that nothing is immune to oblivion, that you don't need to force it. You are as inevitable as the demise of the Universe, as assured as growing up and old.

jeremy

To This Lack Of Position (first letter)

No one talks about you much when you're not around. Breaching you as a subject causes a lot of problems. Accusations of essentialist thinking, fascism, ignorance, naivete, and worst of all, being behind the times, get thrown around like inadequate wrestlers. Career opportunities are jeopardized. Artist talks suddenly get interesting -- like an ancient tragic comedy as it emotionally awakens you in its narrative arc.



Maybe, in truth, you've never existed at all. An unacknowledged or laboriously obfuscated absence of position is a position. It is a choice with effect, inevitably contributing to an enabling of the way things are.



Morality is rendered theoretical (and equivalent to its absence) another malleable form in the production of new markets, new lifestyles, new desires, new conformities and fears.



I keep spotting you in lobbies, galleries, store fronts, lecture halls. I've watched you inhabit a pristine shipping container re-presented as inter-active, collaborative possibility. I've watched you possess the hearts of earnest texts and steal away with them. You condition the meaning(s) of forever relational contents. You embrace a neutered re-presentation of the collapse of time and space, communal experience and action, each and every History of Ideas. You posit globalization as a dynamic rhetorical question. You circle the wagons of concentrated wealth.



Your paradoxical existence has become the only weapon of choice amongst ruthless opportunists -- and those scared to death of disappearing. You are the grease in the wheels of Death -- of this dead civilization.



I see you everywhere.

jeremy

To Leon Trotsky (first letter)

Dear Mr. Trotsky,

I've been thinking of you reading in your armored train. You're being whisked back and forth between battle lines. You're turning the pages of the latest French novel. You're taking notes about an Art of the Proletariat.



The Revolution has arrived but the expressive powers of the Old World still render all else naive, dogmatic, generic. Ideologues across the forming Republic look out from their windows into the darkness, their pens in hand, frustrated, concerned. This is the Modern World. Can a New Art catch up?



What if I were to tell you of a return in my own time to what seems like nothing more than a battle of coercion -- a struggle for control over taste -- a game in which content has become irrelevant in and of itself?



Articulating how we feel and experience this life, and its evolution, cannot be rationally assessed utilizing some form of scientific method. It certainly can't be done in an afternoon through rigorous dialectical debate at some International. I know you've known this, but what of the ensuing lag -- the need for an organic coming to terms with an economic determination of reality?



It seems as though the human animal cannot catch up. It seems as if the technological reconfiguration of existence keeps changing with such rapidity that it has left us stalled -- frozen -- within slowly mutating biological and spiritual limits.



The situation now threatens to muzzle us entirely from the inside. Many said this was already the case during the close of the last century, but putting this all into words for you now feels as though I'm still fighting for my life, as if my thoughts are still my own, as if the idea of this is not a simulation of an idea.

jeremy

To Science Fiction (first letter)

By the time I'd discovered TV, everything seemed to be changing. You were suddenly a fast-money phenomena. I didn't have the language for it, but I distinctly remember feeling an almost physical sense of hollowness in the core of my body.



Your latest novelties would appear completely devoid of substance. When you weren't remolding the past to suit the present, you were busy pretending it was a vision of tomorrow. It's as if I missed out on a time when people tried to imagine the future.



Your stories make up a museum of endgame formulations and transfigured Westerns. They're like re-runs of the apocalypse from an infinite variety of parallel universes.



Time and space have collapsed under the weight of the marketplace.
There's been no future for decades now.



I still believe, however, that you're capable of introducing the present to us as if it were the past. You've got to try, if only for an instant, if only to argue for a possibility of things as they might be, to suggest an awareness of everything in process at once -- to construct a hypothetical totality of the moment -- an understanding to move on from.

jeremy

To These Pictures Of You (first letter)

I want to believe your stare meets mine.



Pretend we are in a state of confrontational arrest

(an impossible truce).



You are still and I move involuntarily.



I'm unfixed while you are dead.



Your look is always over before mine begins.

To Masochists Of The Theatre (second letter)

I'd like to provide you with an ongoing distraction -- the crossing of a landscape -- an always singular imagination. If I'm able to take you there, please don't litter. Don't feed the animals. Don't ask me to explain what is going on.



Enter your part. Become your character. Don't worry about typecasting or career success. Map the stage as if it were the project of a lifetime. Never stop to ask if this could all be different - somehow beyond any current frame of reference.



This world will be everything you need to know. It will inscribe your morphology. It will decide what you see with your own eyes.



You will stand before strangers on a regular basis and ask them to like you and appreciate what you've done. You will be judged, or perhaps ignored, repeatedly.



And so... I'd like to provide you with an ongoing distraction -- the crossing of a landscape -- an always singular imagination. If I'm able to take you there, please don't litter. Don't feed the animals. Don't ask me to explain what is going on.



Enter your part. Become your character. Don't worry about typecasting or career success. Map the stage as if it were the project of a lifetime. Never stop to ask if this could all be different - somehow beyond any current frame of reference.



This world will be everything you need to know. It will inscribe your morphology. It will decide what you see with your own eyes.



You will stand before strangers on a regular basis and ask them to like you and appreciate what you've done. You will be judged, or perhaps ignored, repeatedly.



And so... I'd like to provide you with an ongoing distraction -- the crossing of a landscape -- an always singular imagination. If I'm able to take you there, please don't litter. Don't feed the animals. Don't ask me to explain what is going on...

jeremy

To Fighting On The Roof (first letter)

You can make higher ground seem so contested.



What's with the vertical axis? It would be hard to figure out if you fixed yourself above and below everything else in this life (like a layer of sediment, a rung in a ladder, a brick in a wall and countless other clichés).



Consciousness gets stuck shuffling humiliations and indifference back and forth (up and down?) between matter and content. Some people scramble to get on top and take a shot. It's what you've always needed to exist.



They head to the roof in the hopes of revelation, perhaps some clarity, control, some purpose even. They think they'll surmount all obstacles. They want to get closer to the sun. They're hoping to distance themselves from the smell of this messy earth.



So you let them play God (an always inadequate imagining of what that might be). Your being is transfigured into a Battle of Pretenders.



You keep promising higher purpose, something situated between Heaven and Earth, but your arena has been built on a growing pile of garbage.



It's still one of the shabbiest places for fools to fall from.

jeremy

To The Ghost of Ethan Edwards (first letter)

Dear Mr. Edwards,

What, really, has been lost? What was ever taken from you?



You keep running on empty. It's a need to blame that is absolute. You are another phallic monster trying to reconfigure the Universe. You speak for Whiteness (an invention animated by your horrible will).



Perfection, manliness, gravitas - what are these words and their meanings? You claim they've been disrespectfully buried in a shit pile called History. You assert your righteousness by damning it all to hell.



You're not a lunatic fringe. You're a madness waiting everywhere. You conjure up purities violated by alien forces. You want an excuse to shoot.



You're a specter of race. You're dead and stinking up the place.



You've expanded the Frontier to a point of dissolution. It wraps the planet in multiple layers, like flight paths and TV channels, blogs and car bombs. The whole world is now found and lost. Your involvement is no longer necessary.



You won't be deciding the business of getting on with business. You've been relegated to a grab bag of dirty tricks. You've always been there anyway. It's just that Capital can't hide it any longer.



When you finally found your daughter, where did all the hatred go? You couldn't kill her despite yourself. The story keeps being told but the ending never cuts it. You'll have to face your meaninglessness, once and for all, if you ever want to rest in peace.

jeremy

To The Installers (first letter)

How many times have you propped up other people's half-baked schemes (renouncing all credit, sleep and thresholds of tolerance)? Have you ever found yourself wolfing down a lunch you couldn't afford to begin with, huddled in some storage space, a back alley, an awkward passage?



Do you think about getting up the next day before you fall asleep - and just how do all of these others get here, these people who demand your loyalty and labor?



Imagine their impotence. Their lips are moving but there is no sound. You could destroy them so easily. This stuff can creep into a racing mind. There's also those nagging fears of arrested development, the paralysis of one's dreams, one's optimism and expectations.



Perhaps you could exist somewhere else altogether - a lost realm of calm. All senses of entitlement are revealed to you so boldly and so often. You get used to having no illusions.



One day you wake up and discover there's no more lies to tell yourself.
It's as if the truth exists in a concrete way and can actually set you free.

jeremy

To This Picture of You (fifthteenth letter)

I want to believe your stare meets mine.

Pretend we are in a state of confrontational arrest

(an impossible truce).



You are still and I move involuntarily.

I'm unfixed while you are dead.

Your look is always over before mine begins.

To This Picture of You (fourteenth letter)

I want to believe your stare meets mine.

Pretend we are in a state of confrontational arrest

(an impossible truce).



You are still and I move involuntarily.

I'm unfixed while you are dead.

Your look is always over before mine begins.

To The Edge of the World (fourth letter)

If you were here before I existed, I'm pretty sure you'll be here when I'm gone - but I still don't know where here or there is.



Perhaps all we have to guide us is an arrangement of alphabets - an arrangement of alphabets written down.



I've written to the First People on Earth, which is pretty ridiculous... They probably didn't have any form of writing, and besides, I didn't actually send the letter anyway.



Before the written word then, perhaps, the World was without end.
You couldn't possibly exist.
Can you know this from where you are now? Did the First Peoples?

jeremy

To Carrie Brownstein (first letter)

Dear Ms. Brownstein,

Since the band broke up I've found it all the more engrossing.



Despite the strange staccatto musings and dark spaces, the DIY excitement and vocal freshness, the inherent libertarian politics - it's really this new foothold in nostalgic projection that's become the most arresting dynamic around the group.



Sometimes it seems as though most things enjoyed, cherished, fretted about and analyzed, must arrive in ruins, with parts missing, inaccessible, seemingly before or outside of our lived experience - as if each of us can never have any time of our own to begin with - as if we wander around shut out from any future or past.



I've wanted to write to you about your approach to guitar, your biography and your presence as a performer - but when push comes to shove I must admit that I can't do this with any integrity. I can't provide the social context.



I've always wanted to go to Portland (it's so close by) but I don't want to bump into you. This would probably never happen of course, but the thought is there. All this stuff so beyond me would suddenly be now.

jeremy

To This Picture of You (thirteenth letter)

I want to believe your stare meets mine.

Pretend we are in a state of confrontational arrest

(an impossible truce).



You are still and I move involuntarily.

I'm unfixed while you are dead.

Your look is always over before mine begins.

To The Morning (first letter)

It can be strange sharing you with the rest of the world.
Do you know what you're missing when you're not around?



There's no carnival tonight, but the dumpster divers continue to scurry just below my window.
Thousands of artists attend professional development seminars in poorly lit back alleys. The air carries endless talk of relational activities and funding, world travel and best intentions.



The TV screen is rippling like the moon on fast water. Someone nearby has been smoking too much. The thought sinks in slowly.



It takes a long time for the sun to set - the sides of some of the buildings downtown still look like they're on fire. I'm waiting for unpretentious couples with open bottles of wine, barter-system night markets, street gangs snapping their fingers in unison.



Now it's dark. It's very dark now - you'll be arriving before we know it.
A fuzzy lyric tries to shut my eyes: It's four in the morning and the bars are all closed.



You'll have to let yourself in.

jeremy

To Infomercial Actors (first letter)

It seems we all have to eat. I watch you lap it up. The degradation is spectacular.



There's something almost provocative (but not quite) in this compression of reality. The horror of it all remains contained. The truth, so to speak, is pressed up against one side of a transparent screen, muzzled and out of breath.



We could pretend we're not the same - that we find one another absurd.



What choice is there?
Can you exist without pretending?



Was there ever a good old days?



I watch you now and wonder who you really are. I wonder if you'll lose it - what that would look like and how I'd see it. Imagine an outtake like that.

jeremy

To The Ceiling (first letter)

I was trying to get away from you again. This often happens after periods of extended confinement, staring at your anonymous terrain, your a priori being, your constancy.



I went to a park and pitched a tent.



While the tent didn't seem to possess your likeness, the sky certainly did. I looked up at it as I would with you (without realizing it, without trying). Despite the travel, the hike, the elements, here I was again, staring through a gateway into everything everywhere at once. I could feel myself falling apart - sense the collapse of my cells.



This isn't your fault. You just happen to be there and you don't stare back. It's engulfing. One tends to get lost. Without wanting to, without conscious intent, your breadth returns to an endless labyrinth of thoughts inside my head.



Who knows where it all comes from or where it might be going?

jeremy

To Ludwig Wittgenstein (first letter)

Dear Sir,

When you enter my thoughts they become both admiring and suspicious. I'm trying to resolve it. The way you've dismantled intellectual pretension (the self-interested rational mind, the sophist-exploiter) seems to remain so vital. All propositions now appear to fail in attaching meaning to their signs.



There is hope and a balanced confidence to be gained from this, but the accomplishment has come from such a privileged place (both inherited and procured) -- a place irretrievably complicit in maintaining a pre-existing hegemonic order. Only someone who doesn't have to work (so the folk wisdom claims) can romanticize the virtues of manual labour. After experiencing the humiliating impotency of illiteracy, the patronization of a more learned class, discrimination of any sort, can you really obtain a kind of mystic grace in silence?



You once said, amongst many other things, that knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement. I don't think you could exist now because of this. The system you played in has become too specialized - too competitive. Philosophy as a professional sphere, just like all the others, can no longer accommodate maverick behavior, self-reflexivity -- thought. Besides, you never published enough. Academia has become another service industry with the usual labor practices. If you don't do the job the way you're asked to somebody else will.



Your Socratic ways would be on the street now - a reanimation of mythical conversations on the margins of decent society, but without title or affirmation, without money in the bank, without inclusion in the canon.

jeremy

To This Picture of You (twelfth letter)

I want to believe your stare meets mine.

Pretend we are in a state of confrontational arrest

(an impossible truce).



You are still and I move involuntarily.

I'm unfixed while you are dead.

Your look is always over before mine begins.

To Stumbling In The Dark (first letter)

I have chosen you more than once and this is not to say I have abandoned free will or some semblance of reason in these moments of decision. You've given me hope when all other options seemed oppressive (and certainly not my own).



I'd rather fight my fear than swallow my pride. This is not as noble (or perhaps as retarded) as it might seem, for I'm always longing for discovery. There is some pleasure in it, yes, and also more than a little quiet desperation.



You offer the new, the unknown, the possibility of something not yet comprehended within the morphology of things as they are or appear to be. There's no need to panic. After all, pain and death also wait in broad daylight. Sometimes they sit visibly upon the faces of the living, smothering them over the horrible familiarity of years.



I would rather struggle -- even within myself -- even without the means to see what I am doing or what it is I will be confronting. Safety must be earned instead of accepted. How else does one attempt to know one's self?



While indulging in these kinds of self-absorbed quests, the brute forces of reality remain indifferent. The parasites of darkness have free reign. A humanitarian aid worker will be raped to death on the job. A country rube will become an addict after one night in the city. A young idealist will be forced to eat shit until broken.



Whatever you do, don't run to the light (that's what I think to myself anyway). There's no way of knowing what's behind it. It's like the dark, but with an essential difference: the light, in these instances, is always sentient and usually self-interested.



I would rather embrace you and retain my will. Private and public space cannot configure or present themselves against you. Even the departments of time lose their organizational powers.



Are you Freedom? Are you its cost?

jeremy

To This Picture of You (eleventh letter)

I want to believe your stare meets mine.

Pretend we are in a state of confrontational arrest

(an impossible truce).



You are still and I move involuntarily.

I'm unfixed while you are dead.

Your look is always over before mine begins.

To My Old Ties (first letter)

Why do I pretend that you'll come in handy? You remind me of past humiliations and desperate straights. You sit there like a bunch of shameful mementos. Your knots contain the constant threat of destitution.



Please Sir, may I have another?



It's a good thing I've kept you around despite this. You're like shed skin or broken shackles. You are the bonds that have not held me (at least I like to think so). I survey you occasionally so as never to forget.



I imagine an escape from the horrors of a Noir dream. You become a rope-line to pasts that never were -- times that should have been. You suspend cocoons of romance and nostalgia.



It's ridiculous.

You mark servitude in the end. You wrap up those who try to play the game. You choke out other options. You haunt private longings for liberty and happiness. You obscure their possible meanings.



People try appropriating you, to diffuse you, to mock you, to generate agency for themselves, a little autonomy -- whatever. It doesn't seem to do much except make things worse.



If you could coil, spring and kill, you would.



I know you want to break me so I will always keep you close. None of you are going into circulation. You are loyal to brutality. You would side with the authorities.

jeremy

To Pierre Berton (first letter)

Dear Mr. Berton.

I finally got around to reading one of your fifty books. It was the last one you ever wrote, Prisoners of the North, and now I regret not bothering sooner.



The truth be told Mr. Berton, you were about as appealing to me growing up as getting maple syrup for a birthday present (sweet and wholesome, not really my own, creepily nationalistic, kind of boring). I vaguely remember watching a documentary you narrated about the Gold Rush town you grew up in. I was at my grandparents' place (on my Dad's side) and they didn't have cable. We were given damp no-name potato chips and flat ginger ale. I didn't realize how privileged I really was.



I used to wonder where you were coming from. Why did you wear those bow-ties? It has been suggested in some quarters that Canadian History is more boring than Hell. Maybe you were lying all those years to spruce things up a bit. This was a suspicion of mine, but I know better now. You were a Prisoner of the North yourself (as you rightly point out in that last book). No one chooses to be born. No one chooses to be a part of all this death and violence and forgetting -- not in the beginning -- not perhaps before the beginning begins.



The tundra. The delusion of a clean slate. The imagined call of Liberty. The refusal of friends and family. The rejection of time and history. The promise of leaving the human race. The denial of first peoples. The lure of reinvention. The perpetuation of unwitting indentured servitude. The laughing blue-blood ghosts of Old Europe amongst the caribou.



It's as if we're always shaking off these red-neck legacies -- the dirty work of Empire and the misguided shame of poverty. I've wanted to believe in the New World and the eventual possibility of a True Republic - get excited about it despite myself - but I am a prisoner too. Modern life serves very few and I'm pretty sure I'm not one of them. Maybe I should try calming down a bit and applying for work at the CBC.



Your chapter on John Hornby gets to the heart of the matter.

"You can fully realize how miserable I feel here, " [Hornby] wrote from England to a former partner between forays in the tundra. "This senseless life is detestable. How can people feel justified in leading an aimless existence?"

No one would ever want to starve to death in The Barrens like he did (bringing innocents down with them). That's not how you get out of this cold fortress. And so here we are Mr. Berton. Here we remain, with this doomed company you've collected. It's somehow a bit comforting. It's almost tolerable. It's as if we know better.

jeremy