Sorry We Missed You

Dear Alex,

I want to say it plainly, that last night I dreamed the perfect song, though it’s possible I’m getting the facts wrong. It might have been the obverse, songs and dreams being matters of equivalent exchange. Anyway, in the dream the refrain of the song involved themes of luminosity and youth, and in the morning owing to a grief of awakening, I was naturally caused to think about your work, where there is often a protagonist and a longed for thing (a presence and an absence), these constitutive, but also items of an equivalent exchange—and when I refer to “light” in the song of which I dreamed, I mean “enlightenment,” in a photograph, e.g., the physical thing, photons, and also enlightenment as a thing written with a stylus, the hook returning to bedevil you, Alex, as if to say that what you have written you have written: of a time lost, of lost promise, of quarry ponds, of lookout posts abandoned, of loves thrown over, of cherished friends now further apart, and above all songs half-remembered and mumbled, until in an evening the songs come to sing you, their inevitable narrator, and you try to get them down on a negative, real or imagined, scribbling down the formulae before and after you depress the shutter. I can almost tell you the secrets of the perfect song, mostly sort of a I-IV thing, containing a hint of gospel, and some mid-sixties soul, and some occasional repetition of the phrase I saw the light, or more exactly She saw the light, it’s all just out of reach, and I can’t remember exactly. You know already having photographed this material, and having catalogued what you left behind, what is almost always left behind, wherein the alchemist searches for her completeness in the trace material of residuary apartness, what you have written you have written, now open your mouth and sing.

Blues on the Ceiling, Blues on My Ceiling, 2021, single channel 4K digital video, audio, 5 minutes 40 seconds, video stills.