"Dear X,
You were in my dream last night. I was looking at you from behind and you were bent over doing something so that I could see that you had a tattoo on your lower back...The tattoo on your lower back was quite large. It was a still life - of sorts - a pitcher, fruits, vegetables, a half-filled glass, among other consumables. It was, in short, the view into a refrigerator. You know when you're kind of hungry but not really and you feel you want something but you don't have anything specific in mind and you just go to the fridge by some unstoppable compulsion and you open it up and stand there gazing, half conscious, not really looking, just wanting but not exactly wanting anything you're seeing? Well, exactly that was what you had tattooed above your ass...she's a genius, I thought. Extraordinarily inspired, I realized the only way to overcome the embarrassment of my old tattoos was to go out right then and there and get a new one. Then I woke up."
- Dexter Sinister
The first finding, a piece of paper containing this excerpt, picked up at the 2008 Whitney Biennial in April. I never read this paper when I picked it up, but obviously found the installation interesting enough to warrant taking something to remember it by. I have been thinking about getting a new tattoo not so recently (think: for at least a year). The more persistent feeling I have, however, is that I stand in the front of the refrigerator and there is something I want, something, I just don't know what, yet it is something very specific, and I don't know how to get it. This is my life.
"Although you are interested in the body, sensation, but you want to see how far sensation can be taken from the body itself -- the beloved, in these poems (unlike, say, your work last spring), more remote, the pain less acute, the separation more complete."
- Saskia Hamilton
The second finding, a short note on some poems I wrote between January 2008 and April 2008. A very acute, and on my own reflection, correct, observation. The pain is replaced by more pain, or less, or merely the difference between the two. The separation is enacted, rather than imagined, or projected. Separation of body. Separation of identity. Separation of thought.
A woman whom I do not know told me recently that she found it courageous that I once said: Abby is pretending she knows what she is doing.
