Perreaoult Letters
								Book 4 2000
October 5, 1997
				Book Cover
						forum properganda
Dear Heather Fuller,
The purpose of these letters is to act as an explanation, an exploration of the meaning and purpose of the art that I find myself creating. To begin I believe that I must return to the past to find the root of its development. This requires that I divulge information that perhaps I would rather not have become public knowledge. Therefor I will muddy the waters a bit, before we are far into the story. At least in this way, I ultimately retain control.
I do not recall when I first met you Heather Fuller, I do remember that you presented a relief to me in a place suffocating with an atmosphere of degradation. You were a volunteer at the Community for Creative Non Violence. A shelter in Washington DC that housed over a thousand people. I had come to this awful place completely though actions of my own recklessness. Discouraged by the America painted to be something other than what it was, I had vowed that I would not participate. This then was my private little war.
For you other people reading this Heather is a poet; she shared her poems with me as well as with others. I too had been writing poems at this time; I had been writing poems for some period of time. Unlike painting, poetry was an inexpensive art form that required only pencil and paper. I wrote poems because my mind would not stop ranting if I did nothing. Like painting, poetry for me stops the endless argument. I do not know if this is the way it works for Heather, other poets or artist; it is the way it worked for me. The entire concept, image and process of making a painting would appear in my mind. I am not sure of were all of this information would come from, I suppose that it is the result of adsorbing large amounts of information-books. "Or maybe not" Also I would practice lucid dreaming, controlling the activity of my dreams redirecting their randomness to serve my conscience purpose. "That was also a cheap activity!" I developed also the ability to somehow force images to become visible from otherwise arbitrary sources, much the same way that a person would see a butterfly in the shape of an ink blotch. I do not know if many other people did such things. I only know that it is not spoken of very much. It makes me wonder if most of the unexplainable things that people think they see are just anthropomorphic images that their brains are simply seeking to explain.
Once you get into the habit of looking for images in stains on the wall, you begin to see recognizable things all over the place. See there!.. The Virgin Mary! And once one person sees a commonly recognized image it seems that most every one can see it. So there, you should now see; the whole thing comes to me at once. If I cannot then commit it to the surface of a canvass, or white it down; then the terrible monster of a thought that it is reverberates though my mind, looking for kinks, mistakes, ramifications, sources, of origin, connections, prejudices, presumptions, the list go on. The only thing that stops this maddening cycle of questions and answers is the next cycle of looking for an answer that I don't seem to have a clue about- this means more books. Once the book period has then passed again one should think that it ends but that would be naive, no it doesn't end there, it doesn't end until we are firmly entrenched in paradox.
This I suppose is the ultimate reason why I make art, whether it be painting or poetry. Art is limited to the medium in which it is made, unlike my mind. With poetry the trick is to get it down on paper fast enough so that you do not lose the original intent of the thought. Every thing else in poetry for me is making it feel right as words. Painting is another matter all together.