Tuesday, August 9, 2011

8



Another August 8.  I have a strange feeling today, a broad emotion, not unbeautiful finally after many recent days of anger and angst and fear and all those terrible small emotions that have filled me like a charge, like an extension of static electricity from a computer.  Quite literally, I've been captivated enough by the news of the USA's debt crisis and attending worse political crisis that I am under the undue influence of too much light from the computer screen.  Now, finally, it's like the skin of that emotion lifts and I find underneath it what I've been waiting for: a more serene and quiet speaking.

Tomorrow I play Stephen Spielberg in conversation with Andy Warhol and Bianca Jagger in a video made by an Austrian artist.  The dialogue is all about how I (Stevie S) swallowed a transistor when my father presented it to me and told me it was the future.  I miss my own father.  That feeling of the man who could come home and tell you how it all would be, how it was, how the world (that great place waiting for me that I imagined so thick with order and schematic) was, and how it changed.  I spend my mythic time now (I mean the time we always devote to figuring out symbolically our place in existence) deconstructing a lot of that authority, finding less comfort there, seeing how distorted those old tales made my thinking.  And then every once in a while, smarting with wounds that are the particularity of my experience, I want to be absolved of difference, I want to have a father again in the old way, from a place of universal uncomplication.

This August, against my romantic impulse, I stayed in New York.  To do bureaucracy, the digging in, the paying of bills, the not being absent.  To make a life more firmly here, not fly away with all that action's attendant confusions.

So I feel today, tonight, like I did when first I was a kid and thought of the peculiarity of Augusts, when the summer begins to remind me of a lion contemplating a burning sunset.  What was this lion for?  What long walks will stretch out?  In August, I find the equivalence of yearning from life and yearning from the other side.  Like here we ghosts and mortals tango, waltz, and do our little flying acts.