It's An Odd State To Be In,

I See Myself As Someone Who's Been Saved By Writing. God Knows What I Would Have Been, Become Or How I Would Have Ended Up Without It.

For We Live With Those Retrievals From Childhood That Coalesce And Echo Throughout Our Lives, The Way Shattered Pieces Of Glass In A Kaleidoscope Reappear In New Forms And Are Songlike In Their Refrains And Rhymes, Making Up A Single Monologue. We Live Permanently In The Recurrence Of Our Own Stories, Whatever Story We Tell.

You Can See That The Care He Took Defiling The Beauty He Had Forced In Them Was As Precise And Clean As His Good Hands Which At Night Had Developed The Negatives, Floating The Sheets In The Correct Acids And Watching The Faces And Breasts And Pubic Triangles And Sofas Emerge. The Making And Destroying Coming From The Same Source, Same Lust, Same Surgery His Brain Was Capable Of. (on New Orleans Photographer E. J. Bellocq)

I Love The Performance Of A Craft, Whether It Is Modest Or Mean-spirited, Yet I Walk Away When Discussions Of It Begin - As If One Should Ask A Gravedigger What Brand Of Shovel He Uses Or Whether He Prefers To Work At Noon Or In Moonlight. I Am Interested Only In The Care Taken, And Those Secret Rehearsals Behind It. Even If I Do Not Understand Fully What Is Taking Place.

We Die Containing A Richness Of Lovers And Tribes, Tastes We Have Swallowed, Bodies We Have Plunged Into And Swum Up As If Rivers Of Wisdom, Characters We Have Climbed Into As If Trees, Fears We Have Hidden In As If Caves. I Wish For All This To Be Marked On By Body When I Am Dead. I Believe In Such Cartography - To Be Marked By Nature, Not Just To Label Ourselves On A Map Like The Names Of Rich Men And Women On Buildings. We Are Communal Histories, Communal Books. We Are Not Owned Or Monogamous In Our Taste Or Experience.