close to the knives

"I have always loved my anonymity and therein lies a contradiction because I also find comfort in seeing representations of my private experiences in the public environment. They need not be representations of my experiences - they can be the experiences of and by others that merely come close to my own or else disrupt the generic representations that have come to be the norm in the various medias outside my door. I find that when I witness diverse representations of "Reality" on a gallery wall or in a book or a movie or in the spoken word or performance, that the larger the range of representations, the more I feel there is room in the environment for my existence, that not the entire environment is hostile."

  - from "POSTCARDS FROM AMERICA X Rays from Hell" in Close to the Knives by David Wojnarowicz. The perfect work today to reflect on what form rage can take, on the experience of artmaking as trying to make sense of mortality, as trying to come up with an alternative narrative. Today a gloomy day a mother-day am surrounding myself with mothers - Jean Rhys' Good Morning Midnight, Close to the Knives, Elfriede Jelinek's The Piano Teacher and Wonderful, Wonderful Times. It is a day not for new reading but for rereading, for steeping.