The Utopia of Language

and the Writer's Exile

When I write, I yearn to convey to others the sense of infinite, electric possibility that used to seize me so often when I found an amazing cultural artifact for the first time; a book, movie, album, or art exhibit that stretched my boundaries or transformed my internal world. I remember feeling this when I encountered Germ Free Adolescent by X Ray Spex, a UK punk band fronted by Poly Styrene, a teenage girl; Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend; Thomas Bernhard’s Gargoyles; Vera Chytolova’s Daisies; Harry Smith’s Heaven and Earth Magic, Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual… the list goes on and on (and gives you a sense of my personal predilections).

I felt a similar, magnificent expansion of imaginative and creative capacity when I explored psychedelics or first visited festivals like Burning Man. I felt it when I initially saw a Jeff Koons’ exhibit of porcelain kitsch figurines at the Sonnabend Gallery. Wanting to understand why I was so impacted by this “shock of the new,” I interviewed Koons. This led to a friendship between us.

I have a particular fondness for cultural singularities — for artists or groups that produce only one amazing thing before they go mad or disband or somehow lose their mojo (Daises and Germ Free Adolescent fall into that category; another example is the single ‘TVOD’, by The Normal, their only release). I suppose, if you think about it, artists often express just one insight or add a particular new tonality. This launches their public careers. The rest of their work follows, more or less inexorably, from that first disruptive flash of innovation. I am, also, a fan of eccentrics. Even Koons, although a massive commercial success, was, in real life, a uniquely odd character, a weirdo.

As one gets older, one tends to feel these kinds of aesthetic shock moments with less frequency and less power. There is nothing like being a 15-year-old and opening up some eagerly awaited new record, peeling away the staticky plastic wrapping to pull the vinyl from its sleeve, almost trembling with expectation. There is nothing like going to Burning Man for the first time and weeping with sorrow and amazement when someone says, “Welcome home,” feeling to the depth of your soul that this is the case — that you have never been home before, and now you are.

Currently, I am reviewing some previously beloved works to see if they still hold the same electric charge for me, even if not to the same degree. For example, I am re-reading Roland Barthes after many years, allowing myself to get lost in his labyrinthine insights in books such as Image, Music, Text and, particularly, Writing Degree Zero.