Broken: A Plague Journal (24 page)

full text:

My dear Mrs. Colmey,

You are the
last
person I would have expected to write to defend the late Mr. Hughes. My apologies for misspelling his surname. Truthfully, I couldn’t be bothered to care when I wrote my review; fact-checking is the responsibility of interns. Let us for the moment set aside personal differences (I am familiar with your painting practice and your work at revitalizing Cornish, and for that, I applaud you as an admirer) and analyze your involvement in PEH’s books.

We all know the story of the manuscript at the bottom of the cardboard box; please don’t insult my intelligence. I commend your willingness to seek the publication of the third novel in the
silver
series, given the unflattering character summary of you young Paul wrote in both
an end
and his online journals. I commend your willingness, yet lament it at the same time. What you’ve given the literary world is a horrid tangle of self-serving scribble hardly worthy of a hand-written diary entry. Empower yourself, woman! Can’t you see what he was writing about? You. He wrote about you in the most selfish, vain way possible; your side of the story has never been represented. All the readers are left with is but a shadow of whom I assume you truly are. That, in and of itself, is unforgivable. Had I been you, I’d have burned that cardboard box and been rid of that man.

We can only forgive so much to mental illness. I hope someday that you see what you’ve done.
Broken
will only serve to inspire future generations of conceited young authors.

Ms. Thara Ruskin,
associate editor
NY Times Book Review

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search results: [[
Paul
+
Hughes
] + [
personal
+
journal
+
2002
]]: [translate: standard] :

author: Paul Evan Hughes.
title: “hovering.”
publication: 28 June 2002.

[
la biblio[“o]mnithèque universelle
confirms textual probability to statistical significance +/-50%]

full text:

through it all, i’m still crazy

this veil of dream i weave around myself

.

moon behind gauze: walk, because. that’s all there is. stumble. through tripping grass, barefoot. thistles, prickers. shred. flesh. but at least i can feel something, anything. not him, not now. he’s asleep.

stumble into black, smoke inhaled, exhaled, tears under gauze: moon. walk: because.

if this is a test... how much more can you take from me? how much more before i am broken completely?

whispers into that night. shards of a song. two songs. more. words run together, thoughts: none, because. there is this, but it isn’t stillness. there is defeat. replacement. there are silences begun, and

all i ever wanted was forever.

there was happiness in those months, happiness in those years. in that life. in what existed between us and between Us. i’ve lost. so much. and. the mind. it consumes.

i’ve considered locking myself away in a place where chemicals will wash the blood from these wounds. for a while. just to get away. from this. from

and i trip, fall into a rut, grass, stems: gouging pathways into palms. mud. water. wash my face with this dirt, rub mud into those wounds so that they’ll scar and i can be reminded someday of how far i once fell.

things will be okay. not now. not for a long time.

and tonight someone seemed genuinely concerned. thought i was joking at first. when i told her that i’ve slipped into a deep depression. slipped? falling, falling, feels so much like i’m still falling and there’s no end in sight. subtractions. how could anyone ever love this? broken? man?

it is better that you’ve escaped me.

take

take me

take me to

take me, too.
 

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search results: [[
Paul
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Hughes
] + [
MFA
] + [
Goddard
] + [
advisor
+
response
]]: [translate: standard] :

author: Pam Hall.

[recovery team notes signal shatter; text incomplete.]

[
la biblio[“o]mnithèque universelle
confirms textual probability to statistical significance +/-50%]

excerpts:

...] [I] feel pressed to note and name the “tone of voice” that runs through these pages. Paul, you have such a powerful (and yes, engaging, seductive, inspiring...) “positive” voice. I cannot tell you, as both your advisor, and as hopefully, a friend, how fine it is to share it and the energy that it carries... energy, which, yes, is also
in
the work and thinking and just kind of leaping out of everywhere[…

And here I want to take a small stab at pulling out what I suspect might be an important thread of practice even though it might be obvious. This shift in your voice, (and I suspect in your eye)... this joy, this more active attitude, represents for me what I have meant all along when I share my little platitudes about “practising your joy” or rigorous play. As artists, almost everything we do depends on our “seeing”... our gaze, our perceptual “attitude” or stance. Our work in the world begins with how we “see” the world, yes? With how it excites us, makes us wonder, invites our curiosity, or interrogation, or awe, or even anger... So it seems to me that part of our “task” is one of making ourselves, keeping ourselves in a state of sharp-eyed-ness... raw receptiveness... “good looker”... yes, “see-er/seer.” This is part of practice... fundamental I think to the next step or layer... which leads us into “making” or “poking at” meaning. And, if this little “theory” might have some truth, then it makes a profound difference “where we look from”, i.e. our Point of View, our stance, or what I call the “attitude of the gaze”. And we
need
more than one.

The gaze of “beginner’s mind”, of child enchanted, of pissed-off cynic, of broken heart, of deep despair, of wild, erotic heat, of heart in love, of brain on fire... are just a few that we might bring to the way we dance our work into the world. And just as I would argue for diverse vocabularies for expression, different strategies for different discourses, so would I argue for diverse “attitudes of gaze” or perceptual stances or POV’s[...

…]It really
is
the “eye of the beholder” that creates the thing “beheld”.

…] can we become fluent enough, flexible enough, skilled enough to select our lens, to call up that stance or attitude most needed by the notions we are dancing with, or are we victimized by a single purpose POV forever, and cursed to frame a lifetime’s vision from within a single “attitude”?

…] there is a fundamental thing afoot here, Paul, a “quickening”, a new way of “seeing/looking”... and it is beginning to sing through you... Pay attention to it. Find out how to call it up when needed[…
 

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search results: [[
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music
+ (
John
+
Cage
+
Farley
+ {
middle
+
C
})]]: [translate: standard] :

author: Brandston, Ken.
title: “The New Cage: The Experimental Revival from Cornish to Prague.”
publication:
Journal of the American Musicological Society,
February 2010.

[recovery team notes signal shatter; text incomplete.]

[
la biblio[“o]mnithèque universelle
confirms textual probability to statistical significance +/-33%]

excerpts:

...]and consider the following journal entry recently decoded from the private writings of self-styled wunderkind Hughes:

…]
newfound love of john cage’s music now forever tarnished by biographical research. you should know why unless you’re completely ignorant of cornish alumni.

MethodStructureIntentionDisciplineNotationIndeterminacy
InterpenetrationImitationDevotionCircumstancesVariableStructure
NonunderstandingContingencyInconsistencyPerformance(I-VI).
—
”Dream”: In a Landscape: John Cage.

there has to be a reason for these webs.

Mentor and ethnomusicologist Dr. Michael Farley presented an intriguing posthumous analysis of Hughes’s musical mentalities:

“The Hughes boy... He was a different kind of young man. Please don’t take that the wrong way. He just thought too much. The kind of thinking a person does when they can’t sleep, but they also can’t stop listening. Not hearing; it’s not an issue of hearing. He couldn’t stop listening.

“He told me once that he’d figured out that that ringing in his ears was a ‘C.’ Took him a while, since he wasn’t the kind of technical musical student I usually get. I asked him to play middle C on a piano once in my Musics of the World class, but he couldn’t.

“His dad had tinnitus, too.

“But he said that that sound, that ringing, it was a ‘C,’ and I played it on the piano, and he just nodded his head.