Toward a Definition
I had a dream recently that’s been sticking with me, but I didn’t record it when it happened, which means it won’t make it’s way into the lectures so I can use it here. In the dream, I was at a party with a bunch of artist and writer friends—the ones I can picture who are real people from my life happen to be poets. I think we were celebrating someone’s something—a publication or a prize or something like that. At a certain point, I shyly slipped into the conversation that I’ve been working on these lectures, which I didn’t know if they knew about. A few people said they did, and that they liked them, which pleased me. Then they asked me to tell me more about them, and I spouted out a few pointless words before saying I didn’t know how to talk about them. And then everyone started booing me. That’s about all I remember.
I can’t help but wonder if the dream’s saying I should spend some time figuring out how to talk about my lectures. And then I think I’d rather ram a sharp stick into my ear canal than do that. I’m not going to make this a big principled stand, though I think there’s something to be said in that context. It’s more that I don’t really know what they are. I could talk about some of the more conscious impulses that led to their creation. I could describe some of what I’m reacting against—in our culture, in my psyche, and in the lectures I’ve already made—when I make a new one. But that’s about a third of what I address in the lectures, so why be redundant? There’s my natural inclination against art that needs contextualizing (what I really mean is art that relies on contextualizing, that seems to offer nothing but context), as well. But most of what I’ve just discussed is quite distinctly what the lectures are not. So maybe I can say the Corona Lectures are everything that’s left once I’ve peeled away all the things they are not.
But then, what do I even mean when I’m talking about what the Corona Lectures are? Do I mean what they have been? Do I mean to include everything they might be? Both categories are about setting limits, but the former contains a much narrower range. What has been vs. might might be. Actuality vs. potential. (Interestingly, while the former is the narrower, that set is the one that’s growing, while the other shrinks with every decision.) It’s like being a person, like aging. It’s also like being a citizen of a country in which a good portion of one’s fellow citizens want to limit the range of the nation’s possibilities to allow only a return to what it has been rather than venture into the realm of what it might be. Our political situation has thoroughly colonized my thinking.
So for now I’ll stick with the idea that the Corona Lectures are a remnant—they’re the universe of all possible decisions I could make about what to include minus the decisions I’ve already made about what to exclude. It sets a marker, leaves the window open for new ideas to creep in, leaves me space to operate that isn’t too much space. For now, that’ll have to do.
