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  • Writer's pictureBecka

Episode 2.4 - Sick at heart, disgusted and mighty disappointed

Updated: Apr 7, 2020

What follows is a transcript and photos from a live blog in response to episode 4, series 2.

photo: Paul Wade


Today's letter started with a massive grouch on Jack's behalf.

I'll think about the exact content thereof in a bit, but for now, I'm going to take the format of the letter as a provocation.


Agitation

It's been beautiful and sunny for days, with a general warming trend and now suddenly it's colder again and grey. I'm tired. I slept well, but I've been dreaming lots and dreaming strangely. People I know but haven't seen in ages are floating in and out of my dreams and then people I watch online but don't know in real life turn up. Last night, for example, I went shopping with Natalie Winn from Contrapoints and ended up trying out this amazing maroon leather jumpsuit with matching blazer that I really wish existed in real life. It was one of those dreams where you have the sense that you could - and perhaps actually should - wake up, but you don't because the dream is so lovely and so you prolong it. In this instance it was mostly that I was just so pleased to be shopping.

Agitation/Reflection


This letter is three pages long and the entire first page and a bit of the second is devoted to Jack's distress over the camera. I don't understand cameras well enough to get exactly what is wrong with it, but suffice to say "it should be thus" and it is not.


Going back to what I said about shopping - that I like doing it. I like looking at things - there are so many things in this letter. So much stuff. There are slip covers, multiple cameras (another profit-making venture, this time time the money could be tripled), there are wedding presents, Buicks, jeeps, honeymoons to New York.


A part of me is surprised by how much attention there is to acquisition here. I wouldn't think that I'd be terribly concerned with getting stuff during a war. It doesn't feel like a prime area of focus.


It's becoming a bit of a refrain, but again, I wonder how much the concern with the material world is a coping mechanism. It anchors one. As if we're weighted down with thingness.


photo: Paul Wade


That made me think of this photo, so I went and found it. It was the idea of being weighed down with things that made me remember it.


I remember taking this photo, remember the sense of physical weight. But when I look at the photo, I see it's just paper - none of it was heavy at all.


The memory of the sensation differs from the reality. Or at least what's evidenced by the record of that moment, or the moments adjacent to it.


I am very tired today.

I have a sense that my mood is a bit like Jack's. He's not going to the cinema tonight, because he's not in the mood to be “appreciative."


I want to dig into this, this "appreciativeness" - is/was that the default setting for watching a film? For engaging with art generally?

It feels like the headspace you'd try to get yourself into before watching a play performed by primary school children. Like well done, A for effort! kind of thing. Did Hollywood cinema need to be approached in a spirit of appreciation?


Maybe he means it more broadly - as in art appreciation classes. Appreciation in this sense is more about the cultivation of spectatorship, right? How we know what we're looking at, how we calibrate ourselves to receive.


It strikes me that each of these definitions posits an active relationship between the work and the spectator. You can't just schlump in with arms folded and a pissed off expression on your face. You show up ready to offer something - your attention, your sensitivity, your intellect. I like this respect for art.

The words of others.


A significant part of this letter concerns the words of others. This is the first time Jack or Winnie have extracted an entire section of someone else's letter, verbatim. It drives home for me that this is the sole means of communication they have - apart from posting cameras back and forth across land and sea.


There are so many means of communication at our disposal right now - obviously - and obviously we get to play a game of curation regarding what goes where. What I say as opposed to what I write and where and how I write it - all of this is spread across various media. Here, on the other hand, it's just the letter. She won't know unless he tells her here.



I'm tired today. And it's cold. There was a brief burst of sunlight earlier, but the sky has gone white again. it does not feel like April. We are now in the same months, the letters and I.


<<insert inevitable T. S. Eliot reference here about April, cruelty, etc.>>

Let's leave it here, for today. I remain

Your loving hubby,

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