#2

to imply, to constrain, to force, to encourage, to prohibit

Dear friend, hello,

My nature seems to be not only against planning but also against working against my nature. There is something I’ve been wanting to address here, related to the form of—not the public letter as such—but the Substack form, to try to understand it, the same way one tries to understand the form of the sonnet, for example. What does it imply, constrain, force, prohibit, encourage, how can I embrace it or work against it (even if I can’t work against my nature). There is no space absent of structure, as we know, but what is the structure here?

Will I really follow this thought along to some conclusion?

I could say, for example, that I will only improvise when I write here. But that would be a definitive statement and the following week I’d labor endlessly over three sentences and prove my (fickle) nature once more.

But, I am looking for a form.

One of my aims in writing here is to tangle through form, content, and feeling issues I’ve been considering in recent years (or is it “all the years”?), in understanding my relationship to art as one who makes it, in language (mostly), some relationship to which I’ve forgotten or which has been transforming itself under-current-ly while I’ve been attending to life problems and thought processes elsewhere and of other kinds.

But also my relationship to art, its usefulness, its uselessness, generally. I have spent my life in love with all the forms, but lately heart mind body have so changed their relationship to the encounter I don’t recognize myself when I am in form’s presence. Who is having the encounter and what does she want?

Reader, frequently in these recent years, art has failed to move me. Am I dead?

There are some things to say about “Substack” as a form, this odd, public, you-can-pay-for-it-or-not, charge-for-it-or-not, into-the-inbox form, its blankness, its a-proprietariness, its commodifiable form, its pressure-to-perform form, the way it is adjacent to the social-media form but not (not yet, not entirely) of it.

Substack is metricized. It presses its metrics upon the writer, sending weekly tips for better engagement rates and better open rates better click through rates and upgrade rates better subscription, referral, signup rates.

Substack presses its aims and inclinations at the writer, it ascribes value based on rates, it demands I consider whether my engagement rate is high enough to warrant the expenditure of energy this letter-drafting requires, mine in writing it, yours in opening it—let alone in reading it.

Substack presses its engage-ification of the practice of writing on its writers.

But so what? The page is still blank.

I like to consider these offerings momentarily material, small sculptures to be handled, turned over, set aside.

It is not that art has failed to move me. Feeling can feel intolerable, is that it? One ought to choose wisely. One object, one note, one image, one letter: sustained, sustaining, deafening, destroying.

That you invite me into your inbox each missive shocks me. Too intimate, too direct, too possible! I could write anything to you, and that frightens me.

Your friend,

Suzanne

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