Free Writing Exercise

Today we spent several hours in a writing workshop with author, journalist and director of the Alpert Award in the Arts Irene Borger. While the fellowship has been amazingly instructive, my one complaint is that the schedule has left little time for writing. This is one of the reasons I've been putting up videos on Snarky Tofu, a cheap trick that screams "I have no time / am too lazy to write"

So I was grateful for the chance to sit down and write today, and to workshop a bit with both Irene, who is both a Vipassana mediator and an amazingly nurturing facilitator. Writing happened in two 20-minute bursts, and was done longhand on yellow legal pads. I am posting the first of these exercises, which took exactly 20 minutes to write, unedited and as written six hours ago. Though my normal inclination would be to edit this into something prettier, perhaps even salable, I'm going to post it here as is, both because it captures the experience of both the encounter described and the workshop itself (experiences separated by only a day,) and because I won't have any time to edit anything in the near future. The only direction that we had for this exercise, after drawing up a sort of connected word diagram, was to begin with the phrase "This is how it comes to me."

Though I didn't have a working title, I am currently going with

Junk Sculpture Artist

This is how it comes to me, this memory. The smell of cigarettes. The artist is a heavy smoker. During my brief stay, 20 minutes more or less, he smoked at least two cigarettes, maybe three, Marlboro perhaps; I didn't see the package. I wanted them to be American spirits, what the hippies smoke, trying to believe that they're harming themselves less, or maybe a home-rolled. Had they been, I would have bummed one and snuck off into the desert for a surreptitious piss and smoke, or, better yet, stood with the artist himself, smoking together under the curved hanger shed beneath which a mere fraction of his life's work lies spread and clustered in found and reborn glory. A moment lost, this potential bonding in unhealth and need. But I did not need at the moment, though I wouldn't say no to one now as I sit writing this. And so, my interaction with the artist was perfunctory, shallow, though my interaction with his work, one sculpture in particular, was deep and sensory, and best of all, recorded.

(Ahh, you exhibitionist, narcissist you! But this is the critic speaking now, and you, dear friend, are meant to be standing outside until called upon later.)

Noise. Beautiful, discordant sound. This is the second part of the memory for me. A pounding sound, rusty strings being hammered by Christmas ornaments on rusting wires, and later by a massive wrench, and later by rusted spikes. All of this – Junk Sculpture – all of the sorts of items you might find strewn about while searching for food, drugs and ammunition in a post apocalyptic video-game, the stuff of color for a ruined world, meant by the designers to be looked at and discarded by your avatar. These things were the stone, the bronze, the marble of the junk artist's work, of his world. I was happy to be allowed to pound the junk sculpture as long as I did, until one ornament fell off and long after. When I told the artist later that the largest of the tin balls had fallen off and skittered unbroken across the cement floor he laughed and said “haven't figured a way to make them stay on for long.” This may be a direct quote. I am, after all, a professional journalist.

Later on, in a restaurant along the main strip of Joshua tree, among poorly thought out sandwiches and an unordered potato salad, the artist came in to dine with us. I was torn; I wanted to discuss life and work with hum, but he was surrounded by the thick aura of years, perhaps decades of Marlboros, permeating his hair, his skin, his clothing and being. Like my father once was, before he got too old to fool his third wife, who would not tolerate smoking. Even as I thought this, repulsed by the odor of cigarettes, I found myself wanting one, as a desert sacrament. I was secretly relieved when the artist pulled the heavy iron chair from next to mine and dragged it up-table to sit on the other end. Lunch was disappointing, and I wondered if I would have had the cognizance in any event to have conducted a proper interview, to have asked the artist how a nice Jewish boy (I seem to have remembered that he was a nice Jewish boy, born in Long Island with a number after his name indicating familial lineage - note to self: further research on artist needed. Don't we Jews generally not have numbers after our names?) transformed so beautifully from a thing of high society into the person that he would become, a desert dweller, living in an aircraft hanger, surrounded by treasures gleaned from the desert, treasures stolen from the detritus of culture found in dumpsters from sea to shining sea, from all across this air conditioned nightmare.

Perhaps I will ask him another time, when we next meet. Maybe we can sit together, fellow New Yorkers, men transformed, like the artist's work, transformed from our original forms into other things entirely, two men of the desert, sitting and smoking, listening to the coyotes howl.