Jen Hofer & Patrick Durgin

     Buffalo, New York & Mexico City, Mexico

March 11-20, 2002

     The self exteriorized, intersected, tornadoed into another whirl, a landscape different or perspective shifted: to purposefully seek out an interruption in the normally scheduled programming or the vocabulary of difference invited in through the back door, and the front door. Where one reads, from the gists and piths of the roots reggae classic by the Mighty Diamonds (1975): STAND UP TO YOUR JUDGMENT—one reads inscribing the further predication of an-other, right where one finds (not founds) them. Finding yourself affected by conversation of an other order: tricks and seductions to lure attention, reeling, in, a multiple commitment to speak, to listen, to be understood and earnestly to take part in the making of understanding. Because sometimes—or, as it happens—it’s essential to forget the essentials and get on with it, enter what’s happening with what-have-you, which is entirely different from evasion or erasure.

     What has been useful (inspiring) (friendship) (across geography, philosophy, time zones) in a context which defies description is a purposeful (false i.e. constructed i.e. multiple) framework through which to filter indigestible, unthinkable details. When I think of the enabling technologies involved and encouraging this “unthinkable” communion typically only enjoyed by lovers (“exquisite corpse”), I think of the arrowhead: a “first thing” in this sense, a solution to the problem (i.e. how to get it in but leave it in) occasioned by an ethical liaison, and an inter-specific one between Native American societies and what we now call “eco-systems”—the forgetting is the semblance of simultaneity and makes each thing a first. A thinking directionally—it points to where—a movement towards and in the movement of semblance and resemblance there is simultaneity, and forgetting so as to open a path (entry wound) for remembering; when I think of collaboration I think of letter-writing, of a diary gone public, of taking a walk through an unfamiliar street with a familiar unfamiliar person. And I also think of the polyvocables in Hannah Weiner’s clairvoyant writings—when first seeing words (those “silent teachers”) on the passerby as she tried to make her way through the NYC streets (dictation, on the other hand, is an exercise in memory).

     Perhaps collaboration is a way to make purposeful (yet without ordering—a pleasurable lack of consolidation) the interference which is daily (in this case urban) existence, not post-everything, but in-medias-everything: an occasion for pause with a hand in the air as if to greet or salute, and at the same time to get a palpable sense. Hope against hope, it may still be our best bet to alleviate the tyranny of the plot.