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Alex Nodopaka
in conversation with Matthew Rounsville Part 4 
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Alex Nodopaka: I immersed into your Silver Ripples poem. It appears you were inspired by fingerprints against a bus window maybe. You made them come alive by giving them a life of their own. Consider introducing that event into the poem which will help the reader position themselves in that frame of reference. Nothing wrong with a little guidance, not everything must be a metaphor but here could be an allegorical image. By any means it is an excellent draft though it could be considered a finished product as is. I like your step by step explanation of your progressive creative process.
Matthew Rounsville: Juliet is doing well. She's walking and working. Two days ago she took a test to see how far she could walk in fifteen minutes, and she's already in the normal range for her age group. It's a little strange. She's so mobile now that I forget the trauma that she's been through. We were at the grocery store last week, and I looked at her, and the question, "Why are you limping?" popped into my head--I'd completely forgotten everything, because she's able to do pretty much everything now. I'm pretty sure that I won't be able to do two more drawings in the next week. I have one drawing, but it's just a figurative sketch, maybe not the sort of thing I'd really want to share, since it's a sort of shorthand, more of an exercise to see if I could remember what a person can be. I've more recently started something--I've completed its architecture, general plan, but the execution requires that I study something--grass, moss, tangles of things--to be able to do well--I could just improvise it, but I feel as if that would be inaccurate, and I'm debating with myself on how to approach the bulk of it, since it's simple and doing it well might not really be noticeable. I could do automatic drawings, but I consider them more of an act than an art, when done by me. It's sort of like what I was talking about with expression--spontaneity is just another thing to me with obvious values but not very high on my hierarchy of aesthetic values. Faubion Bowers, in writing about Alexandr Scriabin, wrote that his late period works all have the "appearance" of improvisations, yet they were, in a way, rigorously formulated. I'm a lot like that--the vitality to me is what I put into something, even if it may not be so to others, who might want mess or emotion--it's not that I lack either, since everything I do is imbued with emotion and has a degree of nonlinearity to it, but that's what I really feel is more complicated than what I can express in a given moment--there's always something more, something more fitting, something other than what I can churn out without thinking--even if the end result of my deliberation is something simpler, less. I'm making my way towards something, learning vocabulary and syntax. The problem with me is that I am essentially religious--even though I don't really believe in anything--so anything I set my mind to do I view as metaphysical and desperately important to myself--so there's an act of understanding what is beyond me that is required coupled with a precision that is beyond me and fear of failure despite knowing that doing anything but failing is impossible. So, like Busoni, I cope by considering everything as a study, a sketch pending a me greater than I am. Art is always deferred, sort of like Joseph Joubert's novel. If you really want to show something now, I can do a couple automatic drawings this weekend. I just started writing, too, and that is eating up a lot of my free time. I've abandoned "Description of a room", postponed "an edifice", and came up with something new and horrible that I'm trying to understand, because underneath it I feel is something political, if subtle beyond recognition as such, and I have no idea what politics really is/are. But I just started writing a sort of autobiography-- I don't consider autobiography to be strictly possible, but I am stringing together themes and images. It's just as much an autobiography of literature, vision, and thought as of me--an expression of medium. The main question I have right now is how far I will go. There are things I've done or experienced that perhaps shouldn't be said. The tone is generally Elysian, and I don't think anything will be lost by omission of that sort. But isn't the point of this complete honesty, regardless of consequences? Poe wrote in "My Heart Laid Bare" that complete honesty would incinerate the page, if written, but I think that a better formulation would be that the self or literature itself would be altered, possibility having been stepped over, past--completion of honesty is a way of ending what was, requiring something new to be where it had been. In that way I kind of feel like writing this is necessary for me to write anything else, anything I want to write. The peat from which new flowers spring. 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. The coincidence of Midlope and loup and loupe and loup garou is simply fortuitous. I have no intention of going on a metaphysical limb and I would suggest the same for you. However, how odd your association of me contemplating a very small font for the printing of our article. The reality of this consequence is my intent to share your existence as an artist and a writer and being confronted with the limitation of space in our Vayavya magazine. That answers all the mystery right there. In respect to assigning anything to do for you in the context of this "interview" is out of the question. Your focus is your college at this time. Alex Nodopaka: Matt, Thank you for an in depth detailing of your artistic and otherwise pursuits. An artist's life is always a mystery especially with such well-rounded and complex individual as you. I hope our readers will derive solace when they face an artist's or writer's block and take a peek at your path. |
