Jim Fahey by Eileen Myles

I’m deep into The Importance of Being Iceland, a collection of travel essays in art, all by EM herself. I got it in September, but I only started reading it in early October. I have dog-eared a lot of pages, and tumbl’d a lot of quotes. This book is resonating with me, in significant ways, and often. Here are excerpts that really hit me, from an essay she wrote about going to therapy. Jim Fahey is the name of her therapist. 

I had a job, but I didn’t have enough money for say a hundred dollars a week. I needed a cheap shrink. The whole thing was beyond me, but I really was in trouble and was willing to pay somebody to be on my side. That was how I felt about it. Everyone was either Jewish or middle-class in new York and they all had shrinks. So I was going into the inside room in the world that I knew. It was not church, it was not God. I was pretending there was an inside of me, and it could be found in a room in the world. (page 256) 

I had amazing moments with him [Fahey]. I remember the morning, honey coloured, the room got mellow and deep when he asked me Eileen can you tell me any time in your life when you did feel safe. It was like a thunderclap. Before my father died. It was like my life folded. I did have an inside. I just hadn’t been in it for most of my life. I had a home. It was gone. It was devastating. (page 257)

I was doing a performance and I invited him. I didn’t know if it was right. but I did. And there I was performing and looking down I saw Jim and I’m not sure it was a good feeling. I didn’t know if it was right. And when we talked about it he told me that after I performed I looked at the audience and I smiled, but it was an uncomfortable smile. Not open, maybe kind of false. I think I smiled in response to that and he said like that. I felt like I knew what he was talking about but I didn’t need to have him tell me about how creepy I was. I mean it was already hard to have this kind of dry heart, or feel you looked that way, like a hard window. (page 258)

5. Why did you choose to hide your poems in the skin of prose?

Interesting, I never really thought of the poems hiding. I believe in confusing the distinctions between what makes poetry and what doesn’t. I feel like poetry is everywhere, you just have to have the lenses on. As far as why I chose prose I think it goes back to my long-running preoccupation with surface level representations and the silent movies that run inside of our heads. I stare at people in the subways and think about the pivotal moments, memories, and private indulgences that shape them. I basically want to know everything everyone doesn’t know about everyone. (I also imagine resting my head on every subway rider’s shoulder and wondering what would happen, but that is a different set of questions). Prose looks unassuming, it’s conventional, it’s the surface level. Prose lets the reader walk right in while serial killers and unsettling narrators can wander freely inside.

— Tess Patalano, interviewed by J. Bradley for PANK Blog. 

Excerpts of “A Triptych (abc)” by Eugenio Dittborn

a. The Running Omelet

4. The author owes his drawings to the straining of human bodies as they traverse great expanses; he owes his drawings to these bodies in the throes of violent physical exercise: these bodies issuing into photographs and abiding there, fixed, because question marks are fixed.

5. The author owes his drawings to observation of the human face in the course of rigorously regimented group occasions: luncheons, athletic performances, weekends at the beach, boxing events, weddings, underwater fishing championships, condolence calls, anniversaries, dance competitions, singing festivals; he owes his drawings to these rituals as shown on television, fables and in published photographs.

9. The author owes his drawings to the complementary and contradictory relationship established by the vertical and the horizontal when they meet, engendering the most fraught and fertile situation in the whole graphic language: perpendicularity and its only begotten son, the dot.

b. Track End

1. The painter owes his works to the human face, unique and generic in its somatic constitution, hunting ground of the photogenic, asymmetric in its hereditary configuration, apt for dismantling and reassembly in the production of dreams.

2. And he owes his works to the dyslexic schematism, stereotyped melancholy, intractable application, documented assembly and lunatic delicacy of the Photorobot and Identikit picture.

7. And he owes his works to the body of the photograph, embalmed in and by the photocopy, repository of photographic remains; he owes his works to the invention of the photocopy of the photograph, an invention that automatically chars, perforates, pales, iodizes, drains, congests, weakens, dehydrates, shrivels, shrinks, stifles, rusts, burns, salinizes, pollutes, tars, frays and erodes the skin of the photographic body, preserving it in destruction.

c. Toolbox

4. I owe my work to the observation of liquid secretions from the human body deposited as spills on fabrics, stains that disrupt, interfere, disarray, dishevel, interrupt and tinge, stains that stain.

5. I owe my work to watery substances, oily substances, spilt on absorbent, woven, dry, opaque canvases, unbleached linen, jute, sail canvas; I owe my work to the uniformly retarded movement of the aforementioned substances once they have penetrated the aforesaid tissues.

7. I owe my work to the use of proverbs, definitions, adages, anthologies, set phrases, litanies, riddles, verses, conundrums, all texts found ready-made in speech and writing which like public photography are common coin, dead stars in movement, commonplaces.

8. I owe my work to the connection and propensity for scenic conjunction between written commonplaces and photographic commonplaces, a connection that by shaking shifts and by breaking taints the over-currency in the commonness of these places.  

(from The Archive: Documents of Contemporary Art, edited by Charles Merewether)