Friday, May 4, 2007

the last resort

has always seemed like a place, somewhere you could go, at least in your mind, if all other options seemed exhausted. i once met this very sad woman when i was selling my jewelry in ohio. she was not sad to the world; there she saw beauty, but the sadness was a tenor, red wine, wildly inexpressible. she told me she had gone to oberlin's bead paradise, not buying a thing. she said she wanted to wait for when she really needed it, when she didn't have anything left to go to. i don't remember her name. the earrings i made yesterday, three lines of batiked shell, are a part of the last resort. she told me not to change. i was 15 then. the earrings changed inevitably, but i think yesterday's she would like. the prescription not to change is perhaps part of the last resort, as is the sense that you can't choose to find yourself there. and it seems to remain to be a question about the illusion of choice, since once you're there, the sense is that you don't want to leave, even if it's the contradiction imposed by the situation that keeps you--the overwhelming sense that any choice you do make would be not the right one. As the title of one of Indian Jewelry's albums reads, "I hate it hear; i never want to leave." Deleuze (Expressionism in Philosophy), thinking about Spinoza, says it more dogmatically: "Individuals rarely "decide" in the strong sense of the term. What they mistake for their will is most often only ignorance of the passions which lead them to prefer certain actions to others."

1 comment:

Unknown said...

comfort, patterns and the familiar or chocolate, chain smoking and blushing are a way in which the last resort come to me. oh do i like to push my door open and smell the inside of the murphy bed. so is it that palpable illusions come in a series?
cyber hruss,
a(rtichoke)