<HTML>Upon first looking into Craig J. Saper?s book, as usual practicing sortes virgilianae which I do with new books (ah, and old books too), with eyes closed I opened the book by chance to put my finger on a passage. Thus I found a quotation from Alison Knowles, with a footnote of nineteen lines from her. I adore Alison Knowles, who as the mother of twin daughters has shared a graceful rapport with me, the father of twin daughters a few years older than hers, for at least forty years, from before she married Dick Higgins, when she kept a pet racoon in her loft on Broadway. Alison and I exchange information and good will, and touch hands as we quietly understand each other, both of us having survived an awful lot of ordinary uninspired humiliations in the precincts of art. Old age in the art-world is no place for sissies! Alison is so generous that when I gave her back a large work of art from the 1960s, probably financially valuable (I have been offered alleviating money for it), she immediately gave it back to me. What do I now? The essay I wrote about Alison so long ago is taken by Craig Saper, not to about her work by her friend, but to be written by her. Oh would that she would claim my words as her own! I would be honored. But wait: vanity prompted me to look in the index, where I was gratified to find the name of my mother, May Wilson, whose ashes are maybe thirty feet from where I write, under a rosebush since 1986, mulching in the downpouring rain. A show of her art is scheduled in Gracie Mansion Gallery for December 2001, so a reference to her is timely. Here?s a moment when a son can be proud, for Craig Saper quotes May Wilson, ??(another participant in the NYCS),? ?Correspondence is spelled correspondance? the truth for Ray Johnson is not correspondence to actuality (verisimilitude), but is correspondence of part to part (pregnant similarities that dance).? Damn! I wrote those words in 1966 and signed my name to them. Maybe the cut of the umbilical cord had not set me adrift, or we were symbiotic, or synergestic. So now, here-and-now, at just this moment my time --09/10/2001 6:05:53 PM ? I inserted my finger into Mr Saper?s book, hitting the words, ?makes the critic as intermediary ?merely superfluous?? (p.90). Ah, so the problem is with critics, hence artists are credited with the words of a critic. And actually as a critic I was beginning to feel merely superfluous when two of my essays were credited, one to a friend, the other to my mother. I haven?t read this book yet, I was feeling it out to get acquainted, touching it into becoming my book. But now I?m a little wary, for if I can?t trust a book in two places, how can I trust it in a third and a fourth place? Now I have flipped through at random, and have read, ?Among the evidence was a postcard sent to Johnson?s home address that arrived the day after his suicide.? That is false, it does not correspond with the facts, if only because his drowning was on Friday the 13th of January, only four people beyond the police knew until I began phoning people the evening of Saturday the 14th, the next day was Sunday, and that postcard does not continue the story of Ray Johnson?s life in any illuminating, compassionate or magnanimous way. Can?t his drowning be taken seriously as what it was, his fulfillment of religio-philosophic goals of becoming WATER-IN-WATER? Pranks about his dying, and David Hickey quoting that Ray?s drowning was a great career move, are violent violations of the truth, being smart-aleck about dying, as though jokes could deprive dying of its seriousness. Ray died as a poet and a philosopher, and some people believe, as a monk. I make many errors, and work to correct them, so I really will be patient toward this book, hoping that reciprocal charity will be extended toward me. Let me insist: I really have good will toward this book, and am excited by its possibilities, even if two misattributions do excite wonder like that of Miss Prism in Oscar Wilde when she learned that a young man had lost both his parents. She judged it rather careless of him. However, as little as it matters that I wrote about Alison?s The Big Book, and about Ray's Correspondence School as early as 1966, if the passages can be brought to bear usefully in Mr Saper?s themes, then I am happy to have been useful. But gee, Craig, was it anything I said?</HTML>
