<HTML>John Walter is a film-maker who has done a few years of research in order to make a film about Ray Johnson. He has compiled a huge remarkable archive of interviews with people who were acquainted with Ray, only a small fraction of which is used in the film. Reviews of the film usually mention mail-art and Ray's contribution in the form of a network, hence my mention of the film here-&-now. The story by Edgar Allan Poe has been discussed in my essay about Ray's essay in Correspondences, the book/catalogue published by Wexner Center with Flammarion. William Wilson (13 letters) is associated by Ray with Marianne Moore (13) and Marilyn Monroe (13). Moore and Monroe both have bilaterally symmetrical initials, MM, while Wilson is a reverse, WW, but still is symmetrical, a mirroring. The story by Poe can be used to illuminate the living and dying of Ray Johnson. He sometimes expressed the feeling of being twins, the good Ray Johnson and the bad Ray Johnson. In Poe's narrative, when William Wilson kills the bad William Wilson, the act of murder is effectively a suicide---he can't kill his bad self without killing himself. Some psychoanalysts interpret suicide as a displaced murder---that is, that the person kills himself or herself rather than the person who is the intended object of the murder. If Ray Johnson was murdering the bad Ray Johnson, the effect was his dying. He phoned me the Wednesday before his drowning to discuss the word "murder"--we divided it in two, read it backwards as in The Shining (redrum), etc. He left on a small table a note that he clearly had doodled about murder while we were talking. I don't know, of course, who his suicide might have been murdering, if it was. Yet hypotheses are necessary for a period until the astonishing details of his drowning settle into a fairly clear picture. John Walter's film offers several different perspectives on Ray---points of view that begin to construct a well-rounded picture---but does not offer its own theory.</HTML>
