Roma, Bologna, Palermo

Bernini’s S. Teresa, in Roma

Cara Clara,

Since last writing I spent a few more days in Lisbon, and then flew to Roma, where the producer I intended to stay with at the last moment became scarce, did not communicate until the the day before I was leaving to ask if he could at least invite me to dinner or lunch. A little late, a little too little. And then he made excuses. Ciao ciao, ciao ciao ciao. Italians never say “ciao” just one time. So I checked into a cheap hotel near the train station, managed to see some friends, a bit of Roma, and moved along. I was somewhat taken aback how, like Lisbon, Roma – at least in the center and in Trastevere, where we lived – had become overwhelmed with tourists and had changed itself to serve them. Sad. When I left in 2002 I had thought to myself that it was too big to be destroyed, as Venice and Firenze had been, by mass tourism – but I was totally wrong. The Roma we had lived in no longer exists.

Borromini‘s Capella San Carlo at Quattro Fontane

I was able to see a handful of friends – two of them, Eliana Miglio and Lucia Gardin, who were both in my Roma film Uno a te… and then also Roberto Perpignani, well-known editor (Taviani brothers, Bertolluci, others), and Guglielmo, who is from Palermo but has long lived in Roma. There were a few others I had hoped to see, but life conspired against it. I then moved along, taking the train to Bologna where I stayed a week with Marcella’s sister Chiara, and saw, briefly, a friend, Pina Siotto, who is a vegetarian cook and published writer about it [https://vegetaliana.it/it/chi-sono]. She also has an on-line course for it. If she were my cook I could easily become vegetarian myself ! And I wandered Bologna yet another time, seeing some things I hadn’t seen before, and enjoyed it architecturally and as a kind of example of urban design. I did manage to go to a few photography, art exhibits and a museum as well. It is a very wonderful place, civil, lively, orderly and hosts the world’s oldest running university.

At someone’s on-line recommendation, having said earlier that I am fond of visiting cemeteries, I also went to the Certosa there, and it was indeed interesting. I spent more than a few hours wandering it, taking many photographs. It is not as old as some, but has an interesting range of styles, of how differing generations regard death and how to monumentalize it – at least for the rich.

And then I flew from Bologna to Palermo, where I am now, and will be at least for the next month. At first I stayed a few nights in the center, taking long walks each day – 15km the other day. Yesterday came to Mondello, which is a small beach enclave to the north – technically a part of the city, but at a remove. I can get a bus ride to the center and be there in 25 minutes or so. For the next month I expect to go there every other day or so.

I am considering moving here, and perhaps making a film here, despite my problem with the Roman producer. As usual I will probably, if I do one here, do it for nothing – which seems my preferred manner in the last decades.

Images of Palermo

Mondello, in the winter, is nearly empty, like many beach towns on the Mediterranean. It offers a release from the intensity of Palermo, which is very alive and vivid. I need to play one against the other.

Meantime it seems Covid-19 carries on, with lock-downs now happening all around. Not yet, I think, in Belgium, but next door – in the Netherlands, Germany and one supposes it may get there. And here. I hope not for your sake – enough time in constricted circumstances. And now the newest variant, threatening to be far worse than the earlier ones and render the vaccines perhaps useless. But we must wait and see.

Be safe and well, Clarinha. Whatever happens with Covid, and all that, I hope you are able to still do what you wish to do, and to be happy in your life. I will write again soon.

Amo-te,

Teu pai

Jon

PS: This may be the last in this blog as it seems I am about out of space for it. I’ll start a new one, volume 4.

Uma Lettera para Clara: O Contágio 11

Cara Clara

Another month has slipped by, time turned languid and indistinct in this new coronavirus world where all the usual markers have been erased. Instead a constant drumbeat of “news” – the number of cases here and there, the ever growing list of the dead, the let-up/lockdown now grown into a numbing rhythm, all of which collude to seem to make time and its previous cadences evaporate – it simply slides by like the smooth waters of a river meander.

Here in America we are treated to a cascade of social and political shocks as the world most people imagined to be stable and constant instead crumbles at our feet. I more or less foresaw all this, so it comes as no surprise for me. For most the people I know, and for the broad populace here, and I think across the world, it comes as a rude slap in the face of expectations. The future is not at all what most had imagined it; our complex high-tech world is not doing as it was thought it would, warding off all things difficult while giving us endless toys. Instead it is collapsing, and exposing all its inherent weaknesses.

The last time I wrote I’d just been busy working on a new film here in Walkerville. After Gary left I set it aside mostly, and aside from stray thoughts in mind, I have not yet returned to it. I must shoot some more before the end of the month, when I imagine I’ll be leaving. Instead my mind has lost focus, and I’ve mostly wandered doing some pastels, a bit of writing, playing my songs, and letting my mind meander in its own meadows.

Photo: Pat Munday

Photo: Pat Munday

A poem from some weeks ago, when the colors began to change:

autumn’s russet symphony
ochre oxide tawny tan yellow red
ground to earthy dirts
intaglio of leaves
skeletons embedded in decay
flung to the wind
fall

haiku lives

Photo: Joanna Pocock

I read in the news that Covid-19 is surging again in Europe – France and Spain especially, though not so strongly at the moment in Portugal or Italy.  Of course in the USA we are “leading the world.”  To say it seems clear that the coronavirus will persist in changing our world, seemingly for the worse, though as I wrote in my blogs back in March, perhaps in some necessary, if difficult to accomplish ways, for the better.  It is too early to tell how this will all play out, though it is clear what seemed the future last autumn is no longer so.

 

Like you, Clara, my life is hanging in a kind of limbo, a bit directionless until the outlines of our shared “future” reveals itself more. For the time being I “tread water” just to stay afloat, which in my case means I remain in America, drifting eastward. In some weeks I will drive to Chicago (in a rented car), to stay with friends there – a month or more? All unclear. I hope to get back to Europe, though seemingly not until next year.

And I suspect your life is similar, the “future” held back until things begin to clarify. Your name is in there, “clarify” – become clear, find clarity. I hope you do find that, and that you are able to be happy even in the foggy nature of our present.

dead birds fell from the skies
littered the ground
sang no songs
but muted though they were
they told a story

That is what I am trying to do here in Walkerville – to find the story, or really the many stories of this place. It is a poor town, mostly filled with poor people (30% in “poverty”) with all the usual problems which this brings – sadness, drinking and drugs, violence, a bent psychology that afflicts almost everything.

Houses along Daly Street, here in Walkerville.

I hope in these days you are able to carry on with whatever it is you wish to do – your school is meeting or not? Or is “virtual.” I have seen notice of your film and look to find a place on the net to see it, but so far I cannot find. It would be nice to be able to see it. One day, perhaps.

Here is a short film I made a while ago – perhaps I already sent to you? – made with an artist, Danila Rumold (see her website at http://www.danilarumold.com). She had sent me some photographs taken out the window of an airplane as it landed; I saw them and immediately saw a film in them and asked her if she had more and if so to send them to me. She had 15 or so. I made this with them:

Mountains as Mountains

And one day, perhaps, I will see you again.

Amo-te,

Teu pai

jon

Uma Lettera para Clara: O Contágio 5

 

Cara Clarinha,

It has been two weeks since my last letter, two strange weeks in which time has changed its form, no longer cadenced to a “work week” of Monday to Friday, and then the weekend.  Instead it is a lingering time, seemingly longer but shorter at the same time. Today and yesterday and tomorrow all seem to meld into one, simply “time.”  For those unaccustomed to this it must be far stranger.  I have never had a regular job and so the work-week for me never starts or stops, and a Sunday for me is the same as a Wednesday. For others this interruption must be far more difficult.  And likewise being kept at home, again for me is scarcely different than my usual life – when and if I have a place to stay, I tend to stay in most the time, busy with what is going on inside my mind, making things, painting or writing or singing or shooting or editing.  I hardly notice any difference now through myself and my life, but only as reflected in what passes or does not pass out the windows.

I know that Portugal is also in “lock-down” and presumably you are having to stay “home” – whether this means for you with your mother down the street from Jardim Principe Real or you are instead, perhaps, somewhere with Tiago, I don’t know, though I hope for you it is the latter.  I am with friends here in Portland, though if circumstances permit it I may go back up to Port Angeles next weekend, if my friend Steve – who appears to have had the virus – can come.  As I mentioned before I have suspicions I have had it, in a mild form and continue to have diarrhea, not bad but not normal for me.

This week Mark and I went for a trip up the spectacular Columbia River gorge.  On the way the big electronic traffic billboards said “STAY HOME” and “STAY HOME & SAVE LIVES.”  There were the usual trucks, trains running along the river full of coal, and not many cars.  The signs turned our little journey into a “guilt trip.”  Mark took a few time-lapse shots of landscapes, and I sat down to try to re-learn drawing, in this case with scrub oaks as my teacher.

In sequence as I did them, learning.  Thick graphite stick.

Mark’s shot – taken about 20 miles from his home in Portland can be seen here.

And so the days drift by, the news shouts about the coronavirus as it spans the world, and the impacts on the economy.  Big economic people talk of a Great Depression, and in the US the government sends out checks of $1200 with Trump’s signature on them, and Secretary Mnuchkin, the head of the Treasury here, imagines that this will last a normal family 10 weeks !  Such delusions.

The signature of a very insecure man.

This being America, there are folks with guns – not for hunting but for killing as many people as fast as possible – now parading the streets, our version of Hitler’s Brownshirts of the 1930’s.  Trump encourages them.  In the last few days they’ve gathered in a number of places, asserting their “freedom” as Americans to do as they wish.  May the coronavirus teach them it cares nothing about their silly flags and guns.  As you may have read, in the United States we appear to be handling this plague about as badly as possible.  Of course, as ever, we are NUMBER ONE!

For reasons I don’t understand, the past months – before this virus came along – have been a fertile time for me, with a gush of poems coming up.  They just happen, with no effort, though sometimes I must rush to scribble down a line or two before they evaporate in my mind.  A strange matter, this creative stuff.  Here is one from last week.

 

those things didn’t really matter
we’d thought they did and then, somehow
they didn’t
it had taken a long time to figure it out
and some people never did,
they thought all kinds of things mattered when
they didn’t
what really mattered wasn’t much
it wasn’t lots of money or fame or whatever success
you’d imagined was your due
and it wasn’t papers on your wall saying you’d done this or that
or silly statuettes saying you were champion bowler
and all the other things people like to drape around themselves

it wasn’t being boss or CEO
a hotshot sports or biz guy or politico
all those things meant almost nothing
like the busts in rome, in the pincio
noses broken off, graffiti scrawled across them
cigarettes stuck in stony lips
two thousand years or ten
it didn’t really matter

what mattered was you’d had a life
learned a little maybe
been humbled now and then
and figured out how to love
and then leave

 

Since last autumn there’s been lots of poems, enough for a small book.  And meantime the film, Tourists, is almost finished, awaiting one last little sequence but the actors are not both here.  Perhaps we’ll do it on-line.  And awaiting a little music.  And then another film for no one, in that it is clear things are and will remain radically changed.  I think in the coming year most festivals will collapse (along with many other things) and when things have sorted out, the film/media world will be drastically changed.  It is something which will surely effect you and your plans for the future – something you might want to think deeply about.

James Benning copy of Jesse Howard painting

I did try the last days to record a handful of songs for the little – well, actually it will probably be a bit long, 90 minutes or more – thing I am doing for you.  A kind of memento of songs and poems and thoughts so you have some idea of who your father was, as for now, that has been taken from you, solely by your mother.

And another poem, drawn from these strange days:

a sullen silence stilled the air
becalmed, floating on a windless sea
adrift,
listless ghosts shuffled past
thoughts suffocating in their minds
first and last
tomorrow loomed ahead, unclear,
a fog of doubt choking out the view
where once they imagined how much they knew
now knew they knew almost nothing

it was a hard lesson to learn

Amo-te Clarinha.  Be safe and be well.  I love you.

Your father,

jon

 

A recent painting of mine in gouachePhilip Guston

Amo-te, Clarinha !

Uma Lettera para Clara: O Contágio 4

Watercolor, Jon, 2006

Cara Clarinha

As the tsunami of news about the coronavirus invades every corner of our days, and we see the vacant streets, and begin to sense the severe economic realities falling into place, the pall of gray grows dense.  I personally had seen this coming long ago so I am not surprised.  For me it was never in the last four decades a question of would it come, but only when – in my life-time or not.  As it happens it has arrived in my life-time.

As I am writing this now, I have some symptoms of COVID-19 going on in my body – diarrhea, which has been on/off for nearly two months now, and not usual for me.  And a little vague heady something, which may all “be in my head,” psychosomatic sensitivity amplified by the surrounding environment of panic and fear.   I am about as far from being a hypochondriac as one can be, very seldom going to a doctor, so again, not usual for me to be swayed by such things.  But having foreseen this situation in no way immunizes me against it, and while more or less “healthy,” I still fall in the demographics of those most likely done in by the virus: male, older than 70, modest hypertension (controlled with 20mg a day of Liprinosil).  The most problematic matter for me is that here in brutal America, I have no health insurance, so perhaps should I require some kind of intensive care they’d say, “sorry” and toss me out the door.

Jon, 2006

On a happier note, I’ve been busy in the last week or two, recording videos of myself, singing my songs – for you.  I have been posting somewhat rough versions on Facebook, and you can see and listen to one here

And if you get there and want to hear the others, they are on my homepage if you scroll to them: https://www.facebook.com/jon.jost.9

Along with these, my friend Christian Ravaglioli, a wonderful musician who lives in little Piangipane near Ravenna in Italy, has put up the album we recorded a year ago.  He put in a lot of work in post, filling out the background beautifully.  It is on Spotify, Apple,  Google and Amazon.

For a look at my thoughts on the coronavirus, you might read this blog post:

https://jonjost.wordpress.com/2020/04/01/the-corona-conspiracy-a-fable/

Along with everyone else in the world, I wait to see just how profoundly and deeply this event transforms our world.  As suggested in my little fable, perhaps it will be for the better once the worst and most dangerous phases have passed.  Unfortunately those who lead the many political systems around the world are corrupt and inept, blinded by their own narrow interests, and there will be no good answers from them.  We must hope or make sure they fall by the wayside.  For the moment most of the world, having been left unprepared for an event like this, are in denial and shock.  Soon, as this ceases to be a momentary hiccup in their sense of normality, we will see anger.  This will be a dangerous period, during which the old political hands will try to channel that anger to their own interests, in the usual manners – setting one group against the other, redirecting the anger away from themselves.  We already see this happening.  If we surpass this stage and arrive at a sincere acceptance, seeing how terribly our societies have treated the earth, there is a chance for something better, though the cost already is high and will be much much higher. But this change is needed if we and the earth with its present inhabitants are to survive the insult which we humans have so carelessly and stupidly delivered to our only possible home.

 

Amo-te, Clarinha !  Be safe and be well.  I hope we both are able to pass through this and that I will be able to see you before I leave this little sphere we live on.  I love you.

Teu pai

jon

 

After doors in Ragusa, watercolor, Jon

Amo-te, Clarinha !!

 

 

 

 

 

Uma Lettera para Clara: O Contágio 3

Cara Clarinha,

The days now pass in a dense fog, one of mis- and dys-information, a tidal wave of news from around the world, of how many infected, how many dead.  Each day the numbers leap, each day the social responses become harsher.  Now it seems half the world is ordered to stay at home (if you have one).  Highways are empty, hospitals are full.  In Italy corpses line the corridors of some places.  A plague is upon us.  Not only that of this virus, but of our own ill behavior.  One feels the sense of dread thickening in the air, the fear of change, drastic change, casting across the sky like a leaden cloud.  While some suffocate literally, which is how one dies from the coronavirus, metaphorically we are all suffocating, choking on a blunt reminder of what we have actually done to our globe and ourselves.  The skies clear.  And somewhere deep inside some clarity begins to come into focus, and those suddenly not working 8 to 14 hours a day, frantically going to and from, buying things of habit, find time to think a moment.  And other things become clear: that the frantic world in which your job, your life, your imagined future were all invested may just vanish.  And it may.

Reading tea leaves is a nice mystical thing, like Tarot cards and astrology charts.  Some like to do these things and some take them seriously.  I instead read other things – hard, often unpleasant facts, social, political, and physical realities.  I do not come to conclusions because I like them, but because that is what I see, piecing one thing and another together.  For now many decades I saw this kind of conjunction of realities coming together to produce something like what is going on now; that at some point the stresses constructed into our society and our way of living – our “life-style” would become too great, and it would all quickly collapse.  Not long ago there was a period when catastrophe theory was academically popular.

While I was long ago familiar with this theory, though I had hardly “studied” it, I had an interesting experience which took the theory out of the sterile world of academia, and put it right in front of me.  Back in 1975 or so, I had driven all the way from Montana in a VW van, to San Diego and on all the way to the East Coast.  It was for my first screening at the Museum of Modern Art.  The van had no brakes, and it is a long, interesting story, but best told another time.  At all events I went for a screening in New England, meeting for the first time Peter Hutton (who died 4 years ago, come June), and saw his wonderful films the first time.  And he saw my Speaking Directly, which he liked and he wondered how I could like his films, so very different.  Some people seem to think one can only like work that is the same as one’s own.  We became good friends.

From Speaking Directly

Where he lived there was a Porsche garage, and since they are VW’s underneath, I traded them a lid of the world’s worst grass I’d grown in Montana, to fix my brakes.  At the time the Tet offensive was going on in Vietnam – that was the last military action by the Vietcong against America – and they were moving into Saigon and American troops were fleeing, taking helicopters from the roof of the US Embassy.  That was on the radio while the mechanic was taking the wheels off my van to fix the brakes.  The wheel drums were rusted onto the spindle, and he explained rust was a crystalline structure and when the tool he was using applied enough pressure the structure would suddenly collapse, and the 30 kilo piece of steel would just pop off.  He advised me to step back as I wouldn’t like that landing on my foot.  A few days before the US government had assured the public that in Vietnam all was stable and not to be concerned.  Standing in that garage I put the two together, the rusted corroded matter of my van, and the corrupted, corroded social/political matter in Vietnam.  The same.

Peter Hutton and New York Portrait 1

And so today as the COVID-19 pandemic sweeps the world, it is quite similar.  The economic system which we have built under the rubric “globalism” under “neo- liberal” ideology, which is really just capitalism unrestrained from its own tendencies and unchecked by regional forces, has, in combination with modern medical practices – meaning from the last 100 years – and other factors, including our methods of agriculture and manufacturing, all come together to make this rupture.  It is an unsustainable system and finally the stresses on it have caused it to stumble, and fall, just as did the rusted structure on my van’s wheel, and Saigon, when there was enough stress to break the seemingly stable system.

Whether this virus will accomplish such a rupture or not in the long run, it has certainly in a very short period caused a great disruption in our “life as usual.”  While there are now, of course, various conspiracy theories as to just how, who, what, why all this has happened (that the US did it, China did it, etc. etc.), my sense is that while it was not deliberate, it is a consequence of our cumulative actions and abuse of the natural world in which we live.

Philip Guston

I would hope this great break in what we thought of as “normal” would give us pause about resuming things as usual once this has passed.  That we would, globally, and locally sit down and seriously think about what it is that we have done so terribly wrong – not just to produce this virus, but to produce the ultimately deeply damaging and unhappy world we have created.  For this to actually happen I think this current crisis must last into the summer or autumn, enough of a shock to our sense of “normal” to settle in deep enough for us to stop and reconsider everything.  So I hope.  The hard-nosed observer of our cultures, though, has his doubts.

Matilde, in Portrait

The other day, my “other” Italian family, with Tilde being the messenger, sent me word that so far they are all OK (the older of them are in their 80’s so this is very risky for them, and they live in Lombardia where the virus has hit hardest to now).  And she sent me photos of her grandchildren, writing she hoped it would make me smile.  Which it did, though also it brought tears to my eyes, thinking of the possible world they may grow up in.  Unless, as I suggested above, we seriously and deeply change our societies, their values and behaviors.

Famiglia Rebosio

And as the world has indeed changed, so has the little modest and really not very important world of cinema.  Festivals are cancelled around the world, including Cannes. Productions have come to a halt (a big animation feature my friend here in Portland, Mark, was working on has stopped for two weeks, for now, but I imagine it will be at least two months and perhaps more, or perhaps it will simply be stopped despite its Oscar winning director).

With the changed circumstances I have decided to post Pequenos Milagres on-line, for the moment for free.  Aside from the last minutes of it, it is a joyous and beautiful work, so perhaps in these hard times around the globe it might make some joy for people to see it. I hope so.  And for you.  Preferably see on a good screen and with a good sound system or headphones.   It is here.

From Pequenos Milagres

I assume you are, like many others, staying at home.  I hope things go well for you, Tiago, and your friends.  I am staying as best I can in, avoiding other people and trying as best I can to not contract the coronavirus.  And if I do I hope my body can deal with it.  I have no medical insurance so I don’t really know what would be done with me if I required hospitalization – though I would, I think, try to refuse it.  We shall see.

Amo-te, Clarinha.  Be safe and be well.

I love you

Teu pai,

jon

 

Uma Lettera para Clara: O Contágio 2

Edward Hopper

Cara Clara

What I write here is not happy, for you or others.  I get no pleasure from telling you these things, though, unlike most people, I long anticipated this, so it does not come as a surprise to me.  It was not a matter of if, but only when, and what might the trigger be. In this case it is an invisible to the eye entity, a virus, which thanks to globalization has spread around the world in mere months.  That same globalization has also inflicted vast damages we only now have begun – far too late – to acknowledge and at least pretend to act upon. This is a deep complex matter, one as trivial as plastic bags (which while “convenient” turn out to be lethal), or as harrowing as human nature – how we humans actually behave, historically.  As I think it is not so likely that your society in Portugal, and certainly not mine in America, will tend to discuss these things, I do so, here, for you.

Philip Guston

I see that Portugal has joined Spain and France, Italy and others in bringing to a stop the normal activities of our lives – schools and businesses closed, gatherings of people banned, confinement to one’s house.  We are, almost globally, now quarantined.  I have friends in Iran, in Italy, and elsewhere, and have been in touch with them.  Their lives are for the moment radically changed, and I think as the true realities of this coronavirus unfold, they will be changed far more than imagined now.  This will not be a temporary 2 or 3 or 6 month event, and then everything returns as it was.  It will be a profound jolt to our societies and their systems, and will force us to completely change them, or die.

As you can see here, it is the United States which is mostly in debt, public and private, in the world economy. Ironically the US Dollar is the monetary lingua franca, and in economic crises, such as is happening now, investors flee to the dollar.  I anticipate this soon coming to a stop, which will cause a global upheaval in the financial world.  And the “real” world.  It will also relieve me of my modest savings.  I keep waiting.

Soon harsh economic repercussions will surface, with businesses closing and collapsing, and a vast chain of matters which are closely linked – but which our society because of its complexity tends to hide and also deliberately obscures for us – all will be effected.  For you in Portugal, where 10% of your gross domestic produce is centered on tourism, (in Italy it is 13%, in Spain 10-11%, France 8%) the effects will be immediate and hard.  And this is considering only those things directly related to tourism; other things reliant on it – restaurants and shops, and all the things which serve in some degree those tourists.  To say, for countries such as Portugal one of the first impacts will be the losses incurred from tourism slowing to a trickle, and then the local effects of that.  Those hardest hit will be those places most heavily invested in tourism as an industry, among them Portugal.

 
  Walker Evans

As these effects multiply we are likely to enter a deep recession or a depression.  While for the moment governments are stepping in to assure an income, and to try to establish a kind of stability this will most likely last only a short while.  All kinds of economic activities will shudder and come to a halt – small and big manufacturing, retail shops, one thing after another, jobs will be shed, and the economic fluid will freeze up.   As is happening now, the market shelves will empty, work will disappear.  And under the social stresses politics will take a hard and ugly turn – as it already has.  We can expect a turn to whatever form of authoritarianism/fascism the current times will make.  In Europe immigrants from Africa and Asia will be refused; perhaps those already in Europe will be forced out.  Or killed.  This is what happens to people and societies when they are put under great pressures.  It is not nice.

Dorothea Lange

I am not a Cassandra, and don’t really know what will or won’t happen in the near future, but I have always been a keen observer of our world, of our history, and my conclusions are usually “hard-nosed” and realistic.  Others often say I am cynical, or that I exaggerate and usually see the worst.  And this may be true, though if only because I do not like to sugarcoat what I know of history, or what I have experienced in my own life.  Your circumstance is an example of what I know people to be capable of doing.

For my own amusement or interests, I usually post a little morning mini-essay on Facebook.  Sometimes about the arts, photography, or some current matter in the headlines.   This is what I posted today:

As the globe shuts down in a panic for toilet paper, the other shoe looms in sight, hanging overhead, waiting to drop. It will be followed by a cascade of other shoes, like a heavy rainfall. Once the absurdist scramble for butt wipe has ceased to be funny, and reality takes hold, one will see that the 1.5 trillion instant bucks the Fed tossed at the Sacred Market, will seem as fruitful at the Don’s cavalier tossing of paper towels at Puerto Ricans not so long ago. The US government is now 23.5 trillion in the hole. The US private debt – you, the store down the street, the big corporate campus across town – is 27 trillion in debt. Shortly these will all grow suddenly and then under the strain of illusionary wealth, turn into a chimera in the desert.

The USA, holder of the God Almighty Buck, refuge of finance whenever there is a “problem”, is about to enter a deep recession, or more accurately a depression. Then banks will collapse. The world will be joining us as we powerhouse ourselves into the vast hole we have dug in the last 40 years. Like a black hole in space it will suck in the big and the small and all your happy assumptions about tomorrow – the trip you were going to take this summer, the new car or house you planned to buy, the fancy exotic whatever you meant to fly in for a treat – this, plus, oh, paying your rent, the electricity bill, or eating are all about to get problematic. Ain’t gonna be like it was again in 3 months, once we get “through this”, everything returned to “normal”. Coffee will not be $4. It just may not be at all. Likewise your 401K or your “savings.”

For the moment governments will attempt to ward off this collapse with a range of “tools” – they will throw money at everyone trying to keep the illusion viable. This will fail as the money itself is an illusion, a social agreement which has already collapsed, just most people remain under the sway of the Wizards of Wall Street, executors of this mystical con. When palliatives like tossing phony money doesn’t do the trick, martial law will be installed. Jackboots will join the cascade of shoes.

And when the dust settles the world will not reassemble itself to something like you feel familiar with. Millions, and in due time billions of people will simply not be here as the system which sustained them will have proven unsustainable. If usual patterns are followed, these enormous social stresses will result in common human behaviors – lashing out of those near enough to lashed out at; growing hard and callous about all but your tribe. Killing and finally war. In this case probably the last war for our species.

Cassandra told you.

I hope that I am wrong about all this, though I am certain, at least in some respects that I am correct.  Our system is unsustainable, it is collapsing now, and will continue to do so.  Whether it does so in the manner I have described, as drawn from historical examples, I would hope not.  I would hope we humans would be able to step back and calmly, as intelligently as possible, move to change our course.  There is, sadly, nothing in our collective history which prompts me to think this is probable.  Quite the opposite.

German children with a kite made of worthless Reichsmarks in the 1930’s

In the early 20th century, what to you must seem another world, for complex reasons the world fell into an economic depression, which in Europe and Asia stirred nationalist sentiments, which, in a short period generated World War Two.  At the end of that war, within my lifetime, the sophisticated society which was Germany – a society of brilliant music, literature, and visual arts, well organized and intellectually deep had degenerated to a place which had made this – which everyone knew about but pretended not to know. And they did almost nothing to stop it.

I know that seeing or thinking about these things is not easy or pleasant.  Our society does all it can to divert us from seeing such things – things which our societies do everyday, though usually far away, in Africa or some “other place.”  Things, like the concentration camps of Germany, which people “did not know about,” because at bottom they did not want to know about them.

Soon you will be 23, on March 27.  The world you will face on your birthday this year will look very different from the one you celebrated in one year ago.  It is actually the same world, only with a mask taken from it, with realities which were there but were better hidden and are now revealed.

When I was your age, I was in prison, for having refused to serve in the US military.  On my release in June 1965, the Vietnam war had taken over the headlines of the world, as had the Civil Rights movement in my country.   While I was in prison, a friend and brief lover of mine before I was imprisoned, committed suicide.  Her name was Kathy Handler.  While in prison I wrote the text for a film in some way reflective of her, and on getting out I made the short film TRAPS.  I had no money, and everything was borrowed, it was except for one shot done on “printers tails,” which a friend in a film laboratory gave me (this is a very very slow merciless stock not intended for shooting, but to print on).

https://vimeo.com/49187285   Password: TRAPS2018

In the following year I also shot another short, 13 FRAGMENTS & 3 NARRATIVES FROM LIFE.  It was based on a real person, a young woman who studied art at the Chicago Art Institute, and reflected her view, while my own views, a form of critique, is in a voice over.  Again I had virtually no money, and the form of the film – as would become normal for me, was dictated by that reality. There were no retakes.

This was the mythical 1968, when the world seemed on the cusp of a revolutionary change of some kind.  There were upheavals around the world, assassinations, mass gatherings and it seemed the world trembled.  It was exhilarating and at the same time full of fear and anxiety.  Very much, in a very different way, as it is now.

https://vimeo.com/49187281       Password: FRAGS

I know that what I have said here is probably depressing.  It is not nice, at your age, to hear that the future looks dim, that there are massive problems which you cannot really change, and that you are, along with everyone else, swept along by a fate which you do not feel you chose.  I know in part because I, and many of those around me at the time, felt much the same in our youth.  Many did not – they simply ignored reality, and circumstances were such that they could.  For you, this is perhaps no longer an option: reality will press itself upon you whether you like it or not.

Helen Frankenthaler

The beginning for a new book of poems I am putting together:

12/05/19

Empty.
Room
glass
page.

Among the things I am doing now, especially as going out is not advised (at almost 77, I am well within the kill-range of the coronavirus) is making large prints of a sequence of photographs taken three and some years ago, while walking the beach near Ragusa, Italy.  They are pictures of almost nothing.

These kinds of days hang heavy on everyone, as people find their assumptions ripped apart, their plans for a future which never existed except as thread of neurons crackling in your head, and they ponder what their lives are and will be.  It is one of those experiences which we humans seem to willfully provoke for each generation.  A great war, an economic peak and collapse, some distinct event that galvanizes the whole of a society, or in this case, the entire world.  In this sense, it is “normal” – we manage to do it again and again, though typically we collectively forget.

I know these will be difficult times for you, not just tomorrow or the next days and months, but probably for a long time to come.  Your hopes and dreams will be cast out, whatever plans you had forced to be set aside.  It will be difficult for us all.  In the next days I will write you again, and try, as best I can, to suggest ways for you to cope, without sorrow or sadness, without despair, with this new situation.

Philip Guston

Amo-te, Clarinha, and I am deeply sorry events were such that we have been unable to see one another in the last 19 years.  You know why.

I love you

Your father

jon

 

..

..

.

…….

.