nebraska, flat line

Destination Lincoln. The snow makes the day feel out of time. Black coffee, the flat of white covered grain or when you can see a light storm stretched out to the horizon, the weight of it, straight road, backtrack to I-80, the weight and non-stop of it. Don't close your eyes when you're driving. Snow or sleet or rain or the afternoon or a gas station in the middle of nowhere with the keys locked in the car standing in the freezing in flip flops because you can't feel the gas with your toes when you wear shoes, and even though they are too small, you can slip the shoes against the souls of your feet that like to feel themselves against the accelerator and you can set the pump to automatically feed gas into your engine while you reach over the seat to look for the perfect object to leave behind. It's already the case that the door is locked and you put the gas pump back in its little hanger so it can rest.

A man who works in the gas station wants to help. He bends a coathook like he's giving my car an abortion, jimmies the window away from the frame and tries to catch the lock inside with the handle. The lock won't turn. He calls a locksmith.The locksmith has to consult a book and I think, man, I am here in the middle of nowhere in the freezing cold and this guy has no idea what he's doing. He keeps having to pull out different tools because the lock won't turn. After, maybe an hour, he tries, out of complete frustration, to turn the lock the opposite way. And of course, the door opens. I told him to turn the lock the wrong way. That's why it took so long out in the cold. I'm fascinated by my arrogance. What is it in me that doesn't trust that people in a strange place have their own knowledge?

I've been listening to Toni Morrison's A Mercy.

All I do in Los Angeles is drive around and listen to Toni Morrison and wonder what could be the purpose of living. I've been thinking about her much because when I graduated from undergrad in May of 2001, she was the commencement speaker. It really stuck with me because she talked to us for real. She told us, the eager, hungover 21 year old crowd in plastic white gowns ready for beginning, we were inheriting a broken world. And that it wasn't our job to save it; just don't hurt it anymore. And I've been thinking much the last 10 years what that looks like. The generation charged with keeping very still. I think it has something to do with compassion (like this - If it's not apathy, not turning away, it suggests an impossible compassion. How can one be present to broken-ness in helplessness? In vulnerability? As if there were another way to be present...) but I'm not sure.

Her writing is hard and hypnotic and sad, an in-the-body sad. she writes around holes. And after listening to her writing, I hear something uglier and unbearable in her request that I didn't see before. Because I think I've been carrying around this feeling like "don't hurt it anymore" becomes a kind of saving, but in her writing, the release is more complicated. Like Beloved where the bottomless needy thing is not defeated or free at the end of the book. The characters survive her, but she is still, still in the river. She could come back. She needs to come back. She has a remembering that is needed. And the forgetting of her is a violence. There is no not-hurting in the world. For what, then, does one live? And her writing feels like a spending time with this question in the direction of greater complexity that comes with intimate relationships and away from answers.

So, this book, A Mercy, is set in colonial America. The project involves showing an America that might not have happened. A messier time where everyone was an entrepreneur trying to pull something off - how to grow food in an unfamiliar soil, what crops would make you rich if you had a lot of land, making a family with unfamiliar people... it could not work out. It could so easily not have happened at all. It also involves writing a world where the concept of slavery becomes separate from race - the lived reality of white indentured servants- who do not have the piece of paper that says when their service is complete, of women who are wived, of a free black man's accusation to a young slave woman who loves him that she is a slave because she has come to know herself as a slave in her mind. In the world of this book, slavery is an oil slick surface coating everything and there are perpetrators and victims but there is no freedom. The concept - slavery - some kind of sad thing - with its own life and power - some kind of sad thing - cannot be contained in a person. Only it is sad.

I visit Lincoln. I have coffee at the quirky and quality coffee shop, The Mill, with my CalArts classmate Joel Egger, who is working to start a for-profit arts and eating place in and for Lincoln. Responding to the need for sustainable and local art making. Stay tuned for greatness...

In the parking lot on my way out, I get a phone call from the woman who I met in the Denver art museum. She's driving this way and we agree to split a hotel room and stay up til 3 talking about our books on tape and Israel. She lived there as a teenager and she says there is a church, one building, that at least 5 different religious groups consider a holy site so everyday the church is a house for a different worships. Same house. So much room for god.