cold hot cocoa
and they say you should never meet your idols...
I did not know that this ice cream shop was open in the wintertime. One day I will find a metaphor with enough imaginative power to envelop all that you are. For the time being you will break out of every box. And I will promise not to send you letters. But that doesn’t mean that I will not write them.
Today in my letter to you, I hemmed and hawed over the proper measurements of suffering and self-sacrifice that will suffice in the realm of meaningful art praxis. And I remain unsure on the numerics, but remain convinced that in the absence of tragedy, I am sure to inflict a worthy ill. Just to even the score. If you’d been dealt my hand, instead of yours, what would you do?
Tomorrow is the last chance to correct my Letter To The Ivory Tower before my fate is decided. Last week, Alice Diop said “ces films portent en eux [des] questions…les films [qu’elle] fait partent toujours d’elle-même.” In essence - each film she makes asks questions, the very ones she is asking herself, questions we as ourselves. And these films come forth from her - a kind of pro creation. There is always part of her within them.
That is much is the basis of making authentic work, though. Isn’t it? If the work is not clearly prompting thought, or debate, is not a reflection of the artist’s own psyche (or pieces of it), can it be authentic? I believe everyone should listen to her speak. Every time that I do, it is like listening to the first 50 seconds of Beethoven’s 7th Symphony (the Allegretto). You can sense the rhythm. You can feel something brewing, when she speaks. Something being constructed just beyond your view, in her words. These worlds, she constructs. Keep listening.
On the notion of translation - translating ideas, taking the suffering, the pain whether world- or self-inflicted, and turning it into something. By now, if you were listening carefully, you’d have gotten to the part where the first and second violins are soaring above the orchestra, the wind instruments floating now just below with their incandescent harmony. That soul-stirring percussion. Ever-staccato’d1. Therein lies the key. Just then, the muses descend in a flurry.
My hot cocoa is cold. More, another time. Enjoy the rest of the Allegretto.
x
TC
not sure if that’s a word but spell check didn’t like the word staccatoed so I took another stab at it.