Mitchel Cumming <█████████████████████ >
To: Josh Schwebel <privatejosh@gmail.com>
Hi Josh,
Thank you for this, your understanding means a lot. I sense that everyone feels similarly at the moment, but it is still confronting to say it out loud.
The lapse in focus and motivation that you described is exactly it. I find it so exhausting that all our energy still runs towards those parts of life we know to be ridiculous out of necessity, leaving little for the bits we want to sit with.
I'm so glad that the idea of a text produced in dialogue works for you, and will start to collate a series of questions we can use to begin.
I'm equally excited by your suggestion of working together! I come back to your practice and our past discussions so often, seeing all the places where our aims and thoughts overlap, and it would be a thrill to think together in a more concerted and consistent way. I like the way you phrased the possibility, too, as being "structured by exchange". I've been thinking a lot about correspondence lately: the slippages it allows for, held within the slipperiness of the term itself (and of course, both of these opened up so beautifully by your own delivery slips). Maybe as a way of starting off, I'll share this short collection by Jack Spicer - After Lorca. Alongside speculative "translations" of Lorca's poems, Spicer presents a series of letters written to the poet's ghost, which suggest that all of poetry depends on exchange. As he puts in very succinctly in one missive: "Things do not connect; they correspond..."
Love and cheers,
M