"Is not writing an act of privacy" -Ron Silliman (The Age of Huts)

Writing is an act of privacy as well as an act of desperation. Writers are the literary equivalent to voyeurs, sitting on the crowded subway contemplating how they will express themselves intimately from a distance. It's as if we desire to scribble down the most private inner conflicts of our being in a lined notebook and leave it on a park bench somewhere, hoping someone will find it and read it and maybe one day we will get a sense that it impacted someone. It's as if writing is an act of sadism in that sense as well. We love to torture ourselves with maybes and possibilities.

Sitting on the subway, heading home last night at around 2 a.m., there was a man talking to himself. He pointed to the sleeper portion of the subway, asking aloud by his movements what they were all doing sleeping. Its always those having a conversation with no apparent person that frighten me the most. Staring at the ceiling of the metro car he murmured inaudible questions, looking frustrated at the lack of answers. Turning to my boyfriend I said, "he seems to be talking to God, or the subway ceiling, and it is quite possible that they are one and the same. Oh ceiling of metro, why don't you supply me with answers?" he seemed to say. Leaving the subway, he looked sarcastically out the doors, as if having a belabored conversation with another gentlemen. I wondered if he was legitimately crazy or practicing his acting skills and then I wondered if I could be a believable nutcase.

Sitting in a literature class in college, I remember looking around the classroom and picking out the people that looked weird enough to be writers. I based this assumption on the majority of writer's pictures I've seen in the back of their novels. They always look like they were caught off-guard in the midst of the strangest revelation they have ever had. That or someone has just run by and rubbed mayonnaise in their hair, both explaining the expression on their face and their awful hair. I silently wondered if I was weird enough looking to make it as a writer.

Some writers, such as Ron Silliman have an intensity to their photography that suggests they are stuck in the realm of writing as a way of being in life and have lost all ability to commune in any other medium with living beings. This is what I aspire to. I want my photograph to say a combination of "I did not get my picture of the world by satisfying myself of its correctness," and "She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder."

* quotes from Age of Huts by Ron Silliman and Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neal Hurston