David Blanton
No one had heard any differently. We'd all been assuming that we'd just keep on doing what we'd been doing—so when he showed up on the warehouse floor with his enormous drooping canvases and his clarity of phrase, we began talking like new arrivals. You might say "he opened the window in a stuffy room" as though you were a syllabus poet, and that would be just fine! Why should anyone be so critical of what "you might say"? Eventually we got the whole story, by which I mean a more useful version than the one serving a clutch of egos. He had been living in an apartment where they permitted you to do whatever you pleased regarding the kinds of books you read and the kinds of paintings you built from whatever you had around, while the freedom they gave you was also just good-old-fashioned neglect. That apartment, seven years of it, had done something to his brain, in particular the segment of the brain assigned to wet streets in the middle of the night where the individual goes to hear talks given by established painters. In the mornings he began having what can only be described as business meetings in breakfast diners. At one of these meetings he was introduced to a new and moody philosophy whose inventor called it "a machine for becoming decent." He let himself get so saturated with this philosophy that he found himself making new friends without even trying. They invited him to gatherings and parties held in venues booked to satisfy an appetite for incongruity. He didn't need to do anything but be himself and many fresh complexities would come rushing to surround him. He might have said it was "a new phase" of his life, had he been around people who spoke that way. A small room of strangers admitted him, sat him down, and identified themselves as spokespeople for the possible. They claimed to hold full power of proxy for their absent and inscrutable bosses, but when the bargaining got into such matters as the hanging of clothesline across vast interior spaces or the question of supernatural entities that reminded everybody a little too much of nineteenth-century spiritualism, the spokespeople betrayed the low caps on their capacities and made him want to leave the room, which he did as soon as he politely could. In a sense, however, he did want to thank them for helping him to perceive the fundamental wisdom of the middle way, the innocence of the grid, and just how crucial it was going to be for him to step aside with a massive lunge that would look goofy and exaggerated in the action of it but afterward would be subject to no adjectives whatsoever. Emptiness might have sounded like neutrality but it wasn't; in part it was merely a matter of his not making ugly or destructive things. After that he was granted full membership to a library of dissertations on gravity, tensile strength, the poetics of space, the revolutions of the ordinary, and the commentaries on loveliness. The place offered an anonymity that meant he could come and go as he pleased; plus all checkouts were on the honors system and there was nobody around to monitor how "rigorous" he was being while the movements of his very own body told him both where to go and when. None of this is to say that everything clicked from then on. He still had the almost weekly experience of meeting himself in a room he could have sworn he had already cleared and then having to make that all-too-familiar trek down to the curbside where you were allowed to leave things and forget you ever had anything to do with them, including own them. What was different now, though, was the looseness of the connections. Many of the attachments had a lot more slack in them, and in each case the absolute number of contact points had either multiplied fantastically or had concentrated to just two or even one beautifully correct coordinate. Frequently the result in either direction was the same: the emergence of a new feature of the earth, exposing to the naked eye new ridgeline patterns and new color structures. With more play in the cables and more give in the frames, the question of fear simply didn't come up. It wasn't that he was fearless; it was that the entire plane of fear and fearlessness had wilted and floated away. One morning he was collaborating with a group of miraculous talkers who made everything they said really sink in, and they somehow got it so that everyone could move between working and not working without breaking things up into sessions that you had to make choices about. So he was right there with them. The general will in this case was idling and not stalling; it was something you could take pleasure in, and yet things still got done. They came up with a piece that was around twelve or thirteen individual pieces not in any sequence and in all honesty just plainly unrelated. They went to a hillside and ate from plastic bags; they took care of each other when they got sick; they concocted a little house in which the stanza breaks were lost in pagination and the biting flies sometimes made it past the screen door and you didn't have to have beliefs at the ready for any old buttonholer who decided to make an example out of you and in the backroom there was a window that showed you a wall of plant life every bit as alien as anything you'd ever noticed anybody dream up; they built a seating area; they refused awards; they were strictly logical the way capillary action is strictly logical; and they went forward by tunneling down, which really made him feel at home. He didn't want to be part of a school any more than the rest of them, but that didn't stop him from talking about them in the first person and telling, when he was asked, the truth about the basic principles underlying those great draping gestures of theirs, those whimsical and messy and patient systems that reorganized the sky. He was with them when he showed up on the warehouse floor, even though we all thought it was only him. We were too busy trying to take in what we were perceiving, and too many of us were overly concerned with getting it right as early as possible. Some of us remember him saying on the first day, "I keep going back and forth on what the preposition should be. Out of? Alongside? Along with? The only one I can rule out is 'about.' That's the one I'm really trying to get away from. We might just need to invent a new preposition altogether. When's the last time a brand new preposition came along?" He had us talking about the secret power of prepositions as though there wasn't already an entire discipline devoted to it. He didn't speak that way himself; it was an effect he had on the rest of us. His own concerns went other directions, even if those other directions were always hidden from us until he returned and mentioned things about where he'd been, and even then we got only a small part of the picture. The question of what truly concerned him never was answered. I heard him say once that he liked to be a little bored and that he liked being in the company of a certain someone who didn't come into it with bullet points. We all wanted to believe there was something to learn, but there was only his person and their persons, not any additional thing we could call "something to learn." That didn't stop us from trying, though. We studied as though there was something to study, and he never faulted us for it, not once.