W.D. Clarke [at] protonmail [dot] com

[here's poet Joseph Brodsky commenting on the subservient role Art plays in Plato's republic]
[image]

To want something with sufficient fervor is to want it beyond the possibility of ever getting enough of it. Is it this longing, phenomenologically keen enough to strike some of us as fact, that has led religious thinkers to posit the existence of eternity, the logic being that we seem to need it? Desire is as good a guide to truth as anything else, but until eternity arrives, we will have to find somewhere to fit our appetites. One way to proceed is to shrink them—first by making concessions to smallness, then by framing contraction as wisdom or virtue. This is the minimalist tack, and these days, it is on the rise. At every turn, we are inundated with exhortations to smallness: short sentences stitched into short books, professional declutterers who tell us to trash our possessions, meditation “practices” that promise to clear the mind of thought and other detritus, and nostalgic campaigns for sexual restraint. These adventures in parsimony each make their own particular mistakes, but they also share a central failing. There is nothing admirable in laboring to love a world as unlike heaven as possible. All things are too small, but some things are less small than others. Even if paucity is inevitable, we can still fight emptiness with fullness. Better to order the third plate of pasta. Better to graze each word once.

• Minimalist literature & decluttering gurus;
• Absence/lack vs. longing & excess in love (featuring Roland Barthes; the art of excess in the films of David Cronenberg (and her own marriage);
• A genealogy of the psycho-sleuth nexus, from Poe to Hannibal;
• The mindless omnipresence of Mindfulness, Inc.; Voyeurism (featuring Bergman's Persona and Almodovar's Talk to her, and Rothfeld's own online stalking habit);
• Eating disorders & mysticism (feat. Simone Weil);
• Me Too, Post-Consent Feminism, and the ‘New Puritans’;
• How the oeuvre of Sally Rooney, Fifty Shades of Grey, and Twilight ≌ ‘Normal Novels’;

“We’ve got to stick together,” said Predrag, lifted his face to the sun.
“Who exactly are we?” I asked.
“The American Dreamers. There aren’t too many of us left.”
*
I sent Purdy an email, thanked him for dinner, told him how thrilled I was to be work

“We’ve got to stick together,” said Predrag, lifted his face to the sun.
“Who exactly are we?” I asked.
“The American Dreamers. There aren’t too many of us left.”
*
I sent Purdy an email, thanked him for dinner, told him how thrilled I was to be working with him on this tremendously exciting project. I used all the dead language. Dead language would keep me alive

He was a throwback papa, reminiscent of another time, another texture, his affection gruff, or else a bit reined in, but all the more palpable, that full-hearted but fatalistic love from before people used “parent” as a verb, when you might sit on the stoop and watch your children play in your barren rented yard and believe that life could work out. It was horseshit, of course, nostalgia for a nonexistent past, but it warmed the cheap parts of me.

Our group raised funds and materials for the university’s arts programs. People paid vast sums so their spawn could take hard drugs in suitable company, draw from life on their laptops, do radical things with video cameras and caulk. Still, the sums didn’t quite do the trick. Not in the cutthroat world of arts education. Our job was to grovel for more money. We could always use more video cameras, more caulk, or a dance studio, or a gala for more groveling. The asks liked galas, openings, recitals, shows. They liked dinner with a famous filmmaker for them to fawn over or else dismiss as frivolous.

An ask could be a person, or what we wanted from that person. If they gave it to us, that was a give. The asks knew little about the student work they funded. Who could blame them? Some of the art these brats produced wouldn’t stand up to the dreck my three-year-old demanded we tack to the kitchen wall. But I was biased, and not just because I often loved my son. Thing was, I’d been just like these wretches once. Now they stared through me, as though I were merely some drone in their sight line, a pathetic object momentarily obstructing their fabulous horizon. They were right. That’s exactly what I was.

“Sir, so that I may promptly repay you, with interest, may I enquire as to where you reside?”

“In a fabulous and secret universe of the mind.”