I Love Dick by Chris Kraus Page A

afraid. Tonight I didn’t see the moon at all until about 8:30 but suddenly, driving north on 81, THERE IT WAS , deep & huge like it’d just risen, nearly full and red orange like a blood tangerine. It felt ominous, and I’m wondering if you feel as I do—this incredible urge TO BE HEARD . Who do you talk to?
    On the road today I thought a little bit about the possibility of creating great dramatic scenes out of material that’s diaristic, vérité. Remembering Ken Kobland’s video Landscape/Desire —all those motels, everything flattened to a point where you don’t expect a story and so just settle in for the ride. But there has to be a point, to give some point to this shifting landscape of flapping laundry, motel bathroom tiles. Perhaps the aftermath of something? But aftermath rarely is that way. You never sense the “aftermath” because always, something else starts up along the way.
    To initiate something is to play the fool. I really came off the fool with you, sending the fax, etcetera. Oh well. I feel so sorry we were never able to communicate, Dick. Signals through the flames. Not waving but drowning—
    Chris
    December 23 was the brightest clearest winter day on the road across the Poconos into upstate New York. Dark red barns against the snow and winter birds, Cooperstown and Binghamton, colonial houses with front porches, kids with sleds. Her heart soared. It was the image of American childhood, not hers of course, but the childhood she’d watched as a child on TV.
    Four thousand miles away Sylvère Lotringer sits reminiscing about the Holocaust with his mother on rue de Trevise. She serves him gefilte fish, kasha, sauteed vegetables and rugelach in the tiny dining room. There’s something comical about a 56-year-old man being waited on like a child by his 85-year-old mother, but Sylvère doesn’t see it this way. He’s started taping their conversations because details of the War remain so hazy. The Paris roundup following the German Occupation, the escape, false papers, letters coming back from all the relatives in Poland stamped “Deportee.”
    â€œDeportee,” “Deportee,” she intones, her voice like steel, rage keeping her so vibrantly alive. But for himself, Sylvère feels only numbness. Was he there at all? He was just a child. Yet all these years he’s been unable to think about the War without tears springing to his eyes.
    And now he’s 56 years old, and soon he’ll need another plastic hip. He’ll be 63 before his next sabbatical. The young Parisians in the street belong to a bright impenetrable world.
    Chris arrived to an empty house in Thurman, the Southern Adirondack town she and Sylvère discovered when they were looking for an “affordable estate” seven years ago. They’d come upon it one November driving down from a Bataille Boy’s Festival in Montreal that co-starred Sylvère and John Giorno. Leaving Montreal they started screaming about which bridge to take, and hadn’t spoken since. Chris’ own gig at the Festival had been furtively arranged, a Bataille Boy’s favor to Sylvère, but when they arrived her name was not on the program. Liza Martin took her clothes off to an enthusiastic prime-time crowd; they put Chris on at 2 a.m. to read to 20 drunken hecklers. Still, Sylvère didn’t understand why she was unconsolable. Hadn’t both of them been paid? On the Northway near Elizabethtown a pair of falcons flew across the road: a fragile link between themselves and Liza Martin’s g-string and The Falconer’s Tale of medieval France. They stopped to walk, and Sylvère was eager to share something, so he shared her enthusiasm for the Adirondacks and two days later they bought a ten room farmhouse in the Town of Thurman just west of Warrensburg, New York.
    EXHIBIT K:   MESSAGES FROM THE COUNTRY
    Thurman, New York
    December 23,