Alex Nodopaka
in conversation with
Matthew Rounsville

Part 3

Alex Nodopaka: That's a very absorbing introspective discourse. Your statement is so all-encompassing I wonder how you shall handle the problem of the cliché artist without falling for it yourself.
 
However, I think the basis of our correspondence may fit that desired goal because I must say that not only do you write extraordinarily well but the content of your self-revelations is indeed original. My one note of caution to you is preferably to not tackle the subject of your book in such a way as to lose the reader in a myriad of possibilities without the possibility of focusing on a manageable number of characterizations. I mean like many Russian novelist have literally overpopulated their plots. Just because they received Nobel Prizes is not simply for their literary feats. That, I do not try to diminish, but I am certain that politics of the times contributed to them being medaled.
 
In respect to your need to discover more about the 'her' in your literary endeavor your described path is obvious, and since it is fictional the proper enhancements of characters will be the fruits of your imagination.
 
As for me I have submitted Flash Fiction and a variety of artworks to a dozen magazines on-line and hard copy in the last month. It's waiting time now.
 
Sometimes I wonder about the meaning of this and that and rationalize that it is about as it should be because if I actually would dwell about the meaninglessness of it all, I'd conclude that our spiritual teachings have been false from their inception. Basically we are our own evolution and we're finite. Period.
 
My artwork, frankly speaking, has been at a philosophical halt for maybe 40 years except that I have been in an automata mode for as long. Basically a return to all past isms.
 
Matthew Rounsville: Thanks for the image. I like to gaze at things--art can be like food or air to me.  Superficially, it reminds me again of microscopic views, this time of crystals--how, looking at a sparkling rock, it seems so orderly, and, conceptually, technically, it is supposed to be this neat grid-work, but when you look at it closely it is made of all these centers, zones of order, a sort of class of general behavior, but nothing all that predictable, for all the reason that is embedded in the structure or generative principle. Weathered scaffolding, neural clusters, eddies/cells. The red a staining, hemoglobin in transition, somber stellar bodies communicating, some amalgamation of fluid and granular.
 
The book is something I'm slowly preparing for. It will take some time, since I really have no time to work on it until the summer (if I'm not doing labwork)-- and, the way I write is sort of like Kafka-- it needs to be as much of in one fell swoop as possible--to be experienced fully, as continuous as possible, however discontinuous its superficial form may seem. It might be more of a constellation than a book, proper. There is maybe a "story" there, but I don't want to really tell a story-- tableau vivant, getting across rich imagery (communicating an experience), probing into things. So there will be these prose poems, sometimes all image-- what they're doing to the house, to each other-- sometimes in the form of memories or excursions into the world-- sometimes meditations on who they are, who they are together, the things they do-- and the way they do them. 
 
Memories are probably important, this outside within. I don't know about how memory works for other people, but my memories aren't of events, aren't narrative of situations or actions. They're all sensorial--like two days ago, the sun out, the way the quartz/mica in the sidewalks was glistening, so it seemed as if the sidewalks were emanating this pulsing light, and I felt, above it, like I was swimming in some sort of ocean of flashes, above it yet immersed in it. I would have a hard time describing what happened during the day, what I did, because, to me, those are things that are so complex as to be beyond me. Remembered conversations are hard for me unless there was something strange or affective about the conversation. I think of memory in the way Merleau-Ponty thought of psychological trauma. Freud basically put forth the idea of the traumatic memory as an active force, a causal agent from the past.   For Merleau-Ponty, however, there was no "force" as such--the psychological disorder was just that, a sort of strange structure of the mind, including the traumatized memory but not because of it, as such--the event is gone, so the force is no longer present; the disorder, the traumatic memory, is only a big deal because it is a part of a current structure-- there is no active past, per se, just a disordered present. Scratch out the "trauma" (maybe), and that's probably what memory is to me-- something belonging to the present, in a context of the now, a sort of sense-action, inner, that avails itself on the present, with all of the many structures and processes that are going on, now. They're kind of like what Blanchot was doing when he spoke of the subject as a "neuter", a he or it instead of an I-- this me that was, object-me, me I can regard. I think that's a major way to determine what I am now, by objectifying who I think I have been. Which is like an introverted version of what Merleau-Ponty and present-day Phenomenologists describe by the "embodied" mind, the body as a social experience, more of an overt objectification, being-in-the-world via the body, the social body, others-- that's a horrible description of a complex thing-- but to a Merleau-Ponty disciple, maybe a Husserl disciple, it is almost contradictory to think of mind without body, because the body (social, a manifestation of desires and intentions) is necessitated by the mind and vice-versa--the self might not be a self as such without the hyper-reflective (inner, social, cultural) phenomena of the body. For my purposes and from my experience, the body is cut off, a horizon, or this horrifying imposition of something alien to me (sometimes), so maybe memory has to become the body, in a way.
 
I don't have any websites for art--I haven't really done anything in a long time, and, even then, I've always viewed everything as a sketch, a study for something bigger than what I could handle in the moment. So everything has been disposable to me--the act itself more important than the product, whose existence to me is either a progressive fading from the initial impulse or else a question or koan that urges me to do something better. Nearly nothing I've done I consider to be external to me, an object. Thinking back, maybe only things I did as a child, because they felt so real to me, or as a teenager, when drawing was like learning about the world, so finishing something felt like gaining something, knowing something, although, coeval with that were also criticisms of what I was doing (the more I knew, the more I could pick apart what I was doing). In college art became something different--I had visions, literally saw things, and art was an attempt to reproduce them--never quite right--since then nothing has been what I needed it to be, but, paradoxically, it's felt better, because there are times when I resonate with that inner image and feel transported--a lot like what I imagine it is to be a ballerina, when every step, every arabesque just flows into the next.
 
I feel like I haven't properly responded to your email, but I have so much work to do this weekend.
 
Alex Nodopaka: This is an ideal point when our correspondence must end. I mean in terms of putting artificial pressure on you and having that underlying pressure that did not exist until my last letter expressing interest in publishing our but actually your correspondence.
 
Until last time it was natural and were we to continue in the same vein it is risking of becoming superficial. Well, maybe not that but definitely cerebral instead of organic as it has been.
 
That's the one way, without any original preconceptions that I intended to communicate with you. So from now on you are free to be yourself again as you were all along until now.
 
I have been reviewing last night many of your artworks in my possession and had a difficult time selecting 2 more artworks for the purpose of the Vayavya interview. Now I think, why not a single artwork? And the other 2 details of the whole? The one you already made and the whole of Vayavya writing to center on just that art piece? Of course as the sole art editor of the magazine I am also interested in being original in the sense of publishing something out of the ordinary, just the same as an artist seeking the sublime but never finding it. So how about it?
 
Matthew Rounsville: I've gotten a little suspicious about expression. It's a little like sex or drugs, and doing it alone starts to get monotonous. I'm an extreme of social reservation, but there are certain people with whom I've gotten very close, very fast.   I think it's illusory--this giving of everything you have. After a while it becomes superficial, in a way--it becomes this surface, instead of a depth. So I could go around expressing myself and do it well, but in the end something is found wanting, something missing. A sort of gaping "what else is there? what is beyond that?" So a growing preoccupation for me is that next step--I could go around continuing to make noise, to close my eyes and travel, but I think that's a simplification of who I am, a limitation that was necessary at the time but now feels like a shutting out of a great deal. So I've done it, but there are other things I want to do.
 
Having had a distance from art for so long, I view it differently. There is still that compulsion, and I still have inner vision, but I feel a greater need to integrate a greater terrain of my experience. For so long art was quite literally my body--I felt undefined unless outlines, shades, scars started to form, to feel as if I was capturing myself, pinning myself down. But maybe that is a sort of rigor mortis--a freezing into posture--and, maybe, now, I can appreciate the fleeting and the evanescent, don't need the definition, even find the definition a bit lacking, the way most photographs feel like omissions to me. I'm finding that I'm getting better at putting into words the things that I was always intellectually preoccupied with, in conveying their senses. And like the way the texture of the page often informs a drawing, and how my voice spontaneously adapts to a different timbre when singing over a different instrument, I'm becoming more aware of the medium, relationship to me, the work, and the medium--the finalized image/music/literature both all of that trinity, and neither. So a wider net, greater attention to the substance of what I'm doing, more ideation (without being intellectually steered), more interpersonal, transpersonal--more of an object, a trajectory that isn't me but is what I've always been drawn to (which self-portraits and self-expression could only run tangent to).
​I feel like I'm coming up on something more interesting than what I've done before, not as immediate, or differently immediate, but of something with which I can agree, which I feel I can defend to myself, something with room for expressivity, which probably can't help but be expressive, but whose form can handle a bit more.
 
For fun a couple nights ago, I started writing prose. Which for me is like watching a movie/surveillance cameras with extremely small focal fields. A young woman becomes taken over by the notion that she stinks, that there is this inner dirtiness to her that emanates from her. The opposite of obsessive compulsive disorders--where dirt is external, waged battle against. For her it's helpless, inner, existential--it's she that needs the cleansing, but nothing can do it. I found the writing process unusually agonizing, they way, as a writer, I am constantly disrupting the phenomena of the story--that cascade of sense-evoking details--in order to interpret, prepare, organize. After five paragraphs, I stopped, because I was actively disliking the writing--which was fine, in its way, probably, but so conventional as to be virtually nothing. What I found that I am after is a sort of living surface where phenomena and author are qualitatively identical--association, recall, statement at the same level as phenomena--so the writing itself is a string of objects, a kind of a field of a writhing, foaming list.
 
Alex Nodopaka: We all respond from a personal perspective but when we meet other individuals that have experienced our experiences we  relate to them even more. So, for instance thanks for introducing me to Richard Dadd. I relate to portions of his mental state such as his Lilliputian perspectives. I recognize a familiar but temporary state of my own mind during my medical depression of some years ago. And I really mean temporary because it did not repeat those experience except in an state of cerebral intellectualization when recalling the effect of feeling microscopically small in an colossal world and shifting mentally and simultaneously between the macroscopic and the microscopic. Without doubt these are tricks of the mind. Of course we can advance the thought of alternate worlds but those alternate worlds are ever present only under the duress and stress our mind undergoes.
 
And of course, having experienced the many facets of your own condition, by returning to normalcy, you are confronted with an experience that others do not have. In effect you do have an additional perception of the world that the majority of others do not have.
 
I wouldn't want our correspondence to lead you back to a self of another time. I am glad you seem to have escaped it narrowly. I suggest we limit our exchanges to no more than twice a week. It'll give ample time for us to reflect in between. In any case, it is I that needs that time as my writing is less effusive than yours though my interest in your life process is intense.
 
Matthew Rounsville: Pardon my cerebrations. Configuring/reconfiguring. There's this rhythm to me. Periods in which I rock in place, taken by the rhythm, unbearably intense to everybody, including myself. This need for meaning and beauty, perhaps only believing in the latter. This feeling that what I'm needing/anticipating-- that idea, that germ of something that should spread virally--that it's just beyond my reach. So, in those (these) moments, that is solely what exists to me--this possibility, possibly an impossible possibility, a moment of transfiguration which makes everything else feel irreal (sic), the shadow of a greater degree of intention. It's nothing you did--a building up in me towards something, needing an outlet--any form of interaction, communication, a makeshift vesicle into which bits of it can fill.
 
Thanks for the photo--that effect was similar to my initial instinct of what to do.
 
Sorry for the confusion. When I feel as if I'm communicating to someone who I feel can feel or understand me at some level, I lose all sense of context.
 
Maybe it would be better if you asked me questions or almost give me an assignment of sorts? When I write, a texture takes over, and I doubt whether or not I'm saying anything. And if you give me 1, 2 months, I can have some art to show for it. But with what you're trying to do, maybe it would be good to have something very old, for juxtaposition, perhaps to see how little of some aspect of me has changed. And maybe also a juxtaposition of my actual life--the measured regularity, the dearth of genuine interactions, the shell I inhabit, inchworm progress--with art, which is constantly swirling to me, what it is to me, what it can be, populated by aporias, because I stare so hard at it that it blurs.
 
And maybe my history, psychologically, is important. This trauma, this experience that I emerged from, I think, but by which I am still marked--this barbed chaos, which sort of frames the world for me, because I can't really believe in absolutes, laws, and solidity after having a sustained experience that seemingly nullified all life, world, and ipseity? Because by all probability, I shouldn't be here or be here in the way I am now, after that, after such a thorough collapse--so I kind of feel like I'm a prisoner, perhaps in some Kafkaesque penal colony, that has suddenly been released, without any reason. I made it out, but what is out anymore, after everything that happened? So I feel that, as a schizophrenic, I've been blessed with this amazing clarity, a sort of transparency of mind, an ability to observe what's going on--but as a person it's almost the opposite, it's all confusion--how did I end up here?  what am I doing?  can I do anything? what am I? So art is this amalgamation, for me, of intersection and horizon--desires, as well as my sort of dual awareness of those Richard Dadd-esque thickets of mind, of incommunicable intensity and also a human aspect which is mysterious to me, so I can only behave by treating myself as a sort of object. There's a weird combination of horror vacuii and a need for truth and purity.
 
Thanks for the photo--that effect was similar to my initial instinct of what to do.
 
Sorry for the confusion. When I feel as if I'm communicating to someone who I feel can feel or understand me at some level, I lose all sense of context.
 
Loupe. When I was hearing voices, the primary voice named me: Midlope.   Etymologically, it was fitting. The other day on the phone Ariel told me that it reminded her of the French word loup, especially loup garou--which was jarring--this half-transition to monster. The word loupe reminds me of that. I write with an extremely small script, so a loupe would be useful for anyone who had access to my notebooks.
 
Maybe it would be better if you asked me questions or almost give me an assignment of sorts?  When I write, a texture takes over, and I doubt whether or not I'm saying anything. And if you give me 1, 2 months, I can have some art to show for it. But with what you're trying to do, maybe it would be good to have something very old, for juxtaposition, perhaps to see how little of some aspect of me has changed. And maybe also a juxtaposition of my actual life--the measured regularity, the dearth of genuine interactions, the shell I inhabit, inchworm progress--with art, which is constantly swirling to me, what it is to me, what it can be, populated by aporias, because I stare so hard at it that it blurs. And maybe my history, psychologically, is important. This trauma, this experience that I emerged from, I think, but by which I am still marked--this barbed chaos, which sort of frames the world for me, because I can't really believe in absolutes, laws, and solidity after having a sustained experience that seemingly nullified all life, world, and ipseity? Because by all probability, I shouldn't be here or be here in the way I am now, after that, after such a thorough collapse--so I kind of feel like I'm a prisoner, perhaps in some Kafkaesque penal colony, that has suddenly been released, without any reason. I made it out, but what is out anymore, after everything that happened? So I feel that, as a schizophrenic, I've been blessed with this amazing clarity, a sort of transparency of mind, an ability to observe what's going on--but as a person it's almost the opposite, it's all confusion--how did I end up here?  What am I doing? Can I do anything? What am I? So art is this amalgamation, for me, of intersection and horizon--desires, as well as my sort of dual awareness of those Richard Dadd-esque thickets of mind, of incommunicable intensity and also a human aspect which is mysterious to me, so I can only behave by treating myself as a sort of object. There's a weird combination of horror vacuii and a need for truth and purity.

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Part 4