"Driving from Anchorage to Homer takes just over 4 hours.
As I arrive, I'm listening to an episode of This American
Life, in which Jelani Cobb talks about the activists
from Ferguson who have died mysterious, violent deaths.
This listening overlays the coastline
and the ice-covered mountains, now
visible across the pristine bay, with burning cars.
A woman speaks of death threats while I
drive past a sign that says, welcome to Homer.
Shaggy, off the side of the road, that's a moose.
Where exactly have I driven myself?"
I feel like Tucson has a Homer connection.
There's a lot of people here who spend time there.
So if Homer is familiar to you, welcome
to this interpretation of it.
"In a gray journal I've jotted down, go back,
recreate a space you can't return to.
On the plane ride over, two white men
discuss the Illuminati loudly, a conspiracy
about the left that the president has been retweeting."
This was in the last presidency.
"I was sitting across from them in the last row in front
of the bathroom and people pushed their bodies
into my face while moving by with such pillow-like ferocity,
such sparse apology.
It was best to pretend it wasn't happening.
It was like something Marina Abramovic
might ask people to do to her.
My first night in Homer, I dreamed
there are flashlights beaming into the windows
of the tiny house.
My dream self tries to call my Airbnb host,
then slinks down from the loft to see out the window
that there are small monkeys who are also the cast of a show I
can't quite recall.
I take pictures of them.
A student recently explained that you're only
allowed to write about dreams once in your writing life.
I blurted back, that's for fiction.
This manuscript has become a grid of small white rectangles
on my kitchen table.
I've left space between some of the rectangles.
And now, I'm making collages to better visualize
what those spaces might be for.
Some might call this procrastination.
I've cut around the billow of a pink explosion
and layered it on top of a gray square.
There's a jolt of blue alongside an oval made
of cotton-candy-hued beach sand.
In Homer, I drive down the spit, a stretch of land
that curves like a sloppy Spiral Jetty
into the bay, covered in bald eagles.
I drive slowly, remembering the play I once
saw in a red playhouse called The Electric Kool-Aid Antacid
Test.
It was like watching Christopher Guest live.
There's an almost carnivalesque area
with a disintegrating ship and piles of colorful ship stuff."
I have a really strong vocabulary
for describing things that you find on a dock.
"Then two rows of shops facing each other, a ferry terminal,
a huge Chinese restaurant.
You can buy art, and candy, and Indigenous halibut hooks.
I've spent three summers here with women
I've dated without access or much access to a car.
I marvel at how many miles we walked
or biked to get to a tent or a cabin with no running water.
Now I drive a compact rental car and stay
in a tiny house that has been decorated with, I imagine,
the guidance of Chip and Joanna Gaines."
A lot of HGTV people here, I like it.
"The floors are that gray, brown wood popularized by HGTV.
There's a sconce with fake flowers.
There is a small loft up a set of steep stairs.
There's just enough room for a couch along the windows,
punctuated by a small table.
A heater that is meant to look old-timey lurks
underneath the stairs, a bathroom
beyond the kitchen with a bounty of clean, white towels.
I lay copies of Lorna Simpson's paintings
on the couch like an altar.
All along the spit, Sinatra sings
When I Was 17 on the car radio.
It is a very slow song like an empty dance floor.
It is lonely.
And it supposes that 35 is the last point in this man's life
you will ever feel young.
I feel all of my ages now, imagining those selves walking
or biking along the water's edge.
If I were going to choose a quotation
to describe my relationship to this place,
it would be this from Renee Gladman, quote,
'I began the day asking the individuals
of this group of my ex-lovers to map a problem of space,
but not the problem that involved
the anxiety of whether they could or could not draw,
nor the one that asked how it was even possible to translate
problems into lines.
Rather, I meant real problems where you had to think about
where you were in a defined space and what your purpose was
for being there.'
I asked out K, my college girlfriend, with a quote
from the film Crossing Delancey.
I crafted courtly emails in a rush of adrenaline
to entertain my friends.
On our first date we drink sweet, hot beverages
at a quiet bar in our small, midwestern town.
Someone was wearing cowboy boots.
It was me.
After the first--" Thanks, Lisa.
I lost my place.
"After the first night at her co-op,
I woke to go to the printmaking studio, high off of her,
living out a scene from the movie I had and had not
imagined for my life, rumpled sheets, morning
light, and an empty art space.
After we graduated, she moved to Alaska,
lived through a rose and slate-skied winter
with her best friend in a cabin with no running water.
She had a day job, assisting a dog musher.
We were on again, off again when she got a dog
and named him after a tropical bird.
I moved home to California and had panic attacks,
looping the golf course where sometimes I
might jog past Dustin Hoffman.
I looked at the ocean a lot, and worked at a bookstore
in a mall, and cried constantly in the self-help section.
I boarded a flight from Montana to Los Angeles when suddenly, I
got the idea to get off the plane
and buy a ticket to Alaska.
I kept unbuckling my seat belt, thinking
I would march down the gangplank,
go up to the counter, and fly to Fairbanks.
It was the middle of winter.
I had no coat much as I do now because I came from Michigan
and forgot that it's cold at night in the desert.
So the thin white man next to me turned slowly
and asked if I was OK.
I kept rising to disembark.
For some reason, I told him everything.
He listened calmly and suggested my relationship with K
was not contingent on me flying to Alaska on a whim.
I flew back to my parents' apartment.
I thought I might be a nanny in France
and was saving money without making any plans.
One day after hearing a friend's roommate had moved out,
I asked my manager if I could transfer to another bookstore,
and moved on a whim to Boston.
When K invited me to spend the summer with her and Homer,
we'd been on a long pause.
It was a gorgeous depression of winter.
I walked to the bookstore, modeled with my clothes
on for a drawing class near the Alewife stop
at the end of the Red Line, saw Eternal Sunshine
of the Spotless Mind in the theater.
I was sleeping with a coworker who
had freckles and the most delicious gap in her teeth.
In Kinds of Water by Anne Carson,
the speaker describes a pilgrimage along the road
to Compostela.
She writes about a river underneath her hotel window
with a big waterfall, quote, 'There
is a dark shape at the edge of the falls
as I look down, knocking this way and that
in the force of the current.
It would seem to be a drowned dog.
It is a drowned dog.'
She goes back and forth about it, quote,
'Could there be a sculpture of a drowned dog on the ledge
of an ancient waterfall?'
End quote.
The first time I read this passage,
I felt quite positive it was about the time
when I sat with K at a restaurant
alongside a river in Fairbanks.
There was no dead dog.
The memory has a pleasant feeling,
the gray sluice of water below, a strange trip
so far into nowhere.
It must be the sensation of coming to an edge
and looking over a fragment of an afternoon from that time.
We took a walk from a friend's cabin toward an intersection.
I remember feeling the degree to which we
were inland like barometric pressure, a sensation
at my sides.
We were surrounded by a nostalgic version
of the colors pink, and green, and yellow, and light brown,
like experiencing summer for the first time.
A character in a TV show is named Prairie.
And I keep imagining something about her is relevant here.
We crossed a bridge between Homer and Fairbanks
where my girlfriend told me trucks had been knocked over
by the wind.
There was a moment in what I recall a silver light
when I seemed to say to myself, Alaska, Alaska.
There must have been moon then.
We stood next to a car on the edge of a road between cities.
Like eclipse, it would have been an off glow.
The dog named after a tropical bird
would one day die on the night of a total eclipse,
a short-legged black baby with ears
like an art teacher's haircut, who scream-sang at squirrels.
Carson writes, "The moon makes a traveler hunger for something
better in the world.
What is it?
I will vanish.
Others will come here.
What is that?
An old question."
Lorna Simpson has been painting glaciers, human-sized,
cataclysmic, eviscerated ice overlaid by a deep blue wash,
tumbling ash, full spectrum of gray, volcanic clouds,
nothing whatsoever warm.
I have long loved her photography,
which is often paired with text and has an archival feel.
Bodies of evidence laid out with numerical precision like slides
on a light box, clinical, amid a world of white space.
Whereas these paintings gut, they
are unfurling and torn open, a wound before the blood comes.
A Vogue article explains, nature hasn't looked this turbulent
in a painting since J.M.W. Turner.
According to my father, the ghost of J.M.W. Turner
used to visit Gordon Parks.
The dead painter sat--" I just found
the most beautiful portrait of Gordon Parks
in my dad's archives.
I'm really excited about it.
I wish I had some of his pictures today.
"The dead painter sat on the edge
of the dying photographer's bed and told him stories.
Parks was writing a novel about Turner
at the time called The Sun Stalker.
Robin Coste Lewis uses the titles of paintings
to create poems, refracting the meaning of Black womanhood
in her book, Voyage of the Sable Venus.
In class I assign students to mimic her approach,
harvesting language from the titles of art.
In my notebook, I reassemble words from paintings
by J.M.W. Turner and call it an explanation
for his appeal among Black artists:
The Battle of Light and Color.
The Decline of the Burning of the Modern.
The Shipwreck of Moses Rising through Vapor.
The Fighting Peace.
The Burial of Becalmed Heaving.
His Mouth, the Fighting.
Porch of the Deluge.
Crossing the Alps of Empire.
Rain, Slave, and Speed."
All right.
I'm just going to read one more short section.
"I first heard about Matthew Henson
when an art professor showed us a sneak peek
of the video project True North created
by the conceptual artist Isaac Julien.
Inspired by Julien's stark photographs
of Black skin against blue, light snow,
I wrote about Matthew Henson's journey
to Antarctica in a letter to my nephew
who'd recently been put into solitary confinement.
Something in me positioned the prison cell
against the glacier, an immediate and insistent binary.
I was newly discovering meditation
and interwove the letter with stories
from the Anapanasati Sutta about the Buddha's awakening.
I wanted to give my nephew ]proselytize] the sensation
of space.
The glacier made me feel as if I were
on the very edge of the planet.
One time I called it a jewel that adorned my quiet life,
as a freedom of movement could be crystallized, cut,
and set into a ring.
But ice is a lock, a container of suspended time.
During a conversation with Fred Moten about The Black Outdoors,
Saidiya Hartman talks about the effort
to produce a thought of the outside while in the inside.
She speaks of trying to produce an outside,
trying to create an opening."
Thank you so much.
[APPLAUSE]