Muttering about mattering and charged with change.

So, have you looked at these quotes that were left as comments after my last posting? Major props to the reader (who I don’t know, which is awesome) who laid these sweet selections on me.

Standout line from therein, for me, is the wickid simple following:

"The challenge for the artist is to search for the good and make it matter..."




It’s not even the “good” that is operative for me in that quote (though good is good and I’ve always wished to find a way to do it), it’s the “matter”. To Make Things Matter seems a worthy charge for anyone… maybe the only really worthy charge I can think of. This idea could share a room peacefully enough with my recently discovered idea that artwork could be justified as, at the least, a plea for increased attention. To small things and large, innanimate and warm, geological and intangible. I’d like to be part of the brigade that marches for mattering.

Further: Wim Wenders, whose name and films are also coming up a lot in my recent conversations (and therefore whose stills are littering this entry), has been quoted as saying that a film that makes people believe that change is possible is a film that is worth making. Dig it, Wenders. Hope someday I'm bold enough to say: an artwork that makes people believe that mattering is possible is worth arting. Gah.




This idea, that art might give a viewer the idea that things can change and that it matters (or that things matter, and will change) brings me a long way from where I was when I started this blog and felt entirely devoid of justification for art. Not to imply that I’m all edified and illuminated and now wake up clear of head and mission and have no doubts. But we’re getting somewhere, yes? Maybe someone viewing my work-- or any work for that matter-- will get a tiny, important inkling about transformation by viewing the evolution of a surface, or suss out something about scale and stamina and about who or what is watching them and the relevance of a few words that have been stuck in their heads.



Still…

Speaking of change, does anything ever?
Our directorial friend of the unusually pronounced, alliterative name is probably talking, in the quote I mentioned above, about the kind of change that involves regimes and rights, hunger and honor and horrors. Being just a small nub of a thinking person, and having just spent the long thanksgiving weekend revisiting several very, very long-gone, crucial characters and places from my past, I guess I’m thinking about change in the lifeliving, personal sense. Change and un-change in personality and instinct and strength and dynamics and my own persistent, undeniable retardation. Being visited by the past makes me aware of how much my life and the world has changed, if precisely by illuminating the ways in which I, and that same world, have not.



The morning after one such visit, this weekend, I woke and went on a bike ride. I’d been rocketed for a night back to the time when I first came to this city—and now in daylight Providence looked different. Or, I should say, the city looked profoundly like itself to me in a way that it hadn't in quite some time. The port's ships were such tankers, so steaming, saltside and iron. The stacks were smokey and the architectural variations had names and sat on hills, and out of the blue I truly knew where I was in a way that I hadn’t in quite some time. I was looking at things in the way that you look at things when you are into making art and you think “I must make it so that everyone can look at things in this way: like they matter intensely”.

And I was so grateful to my visitor for reminding me of this way of looking and also I looked familiar in my pants and also my books looked like they were supposed to on the shelves. Like someone had wiped a glaze of hustle and bustle from their spines and I could savvy why I’d put them there in the first place.

There is a Same that things must Stay to if they’re to be - and have ever been - what they’re meant to be. There is durability, and there are things you’ve always known and are perhaps sometimes in danger of forgetting. I am not sure, in the end, that I want to assure a viewer or reader That Things Can Change, or That Some Things Are Immutable.

On the other hand of the defying-time's-erosion clock: There are other things that, despite the really shocking evolution of my life in the past decade, I am not so glad to find the same.

I just spent an evening sitting next to someone I’d been missing for over five years— and so quickly during that evening I fell back into a kind of silent understanding and subtle hinting and flailing hoping and enough unspokens and unspeakables to sink an invisible ghost ship. Our cups runneth over with quiet. Everything was as loaded as a tortilla chip about to break off into the onion dip of history.

And I do not like being unspoken, unspeakable, dipped. Unspeaking and broken-spoked. I have changed much and I have been away but here was this person, and with him here was this familiar feeling of choking warmth and lonely wonder. Jeez. But I thought… But it’s not… It’s still just like it ever was. I can still be, in a word (two), hopelessly young.



I now have no idea whether anything changes. Except for muscle mass, area codes and the delivery systems that candy manufacturers use to gimmick up the old standbys. You can get butterfingers in the shape of potato chips now and my thighs are strong but maybe this does not signify anything.

I am thinking about what I should have said as I sat next to the old friend who I was so glad and disturbed to see (so glad and disturbed, in fact, that I opted to use champagne in order to see THREE of him because if there is one thing that stays the same it is this defective—undeniably retarded— decision making mechanism in my drinking head).

It would probably simply be "Welcome Back".




And I’d whisper it to you from this close range,
where everything’s altered, but nothing is changed.