I Love Dick by Chris Kraus Page A

Virilio’s right—speed and transience negate themselves, become inertia.
    You’re shrunk and bottled in a glass jar, you’re a portable saint. Knowing you’s like knowing Jesus. There are billions of us and only one of you so I don’t expect much from you personally. There are no answers to my life. But I’m touched by you and fulfilled just by believing.”
    Love,
Chris

    New Year’s Sunday was another sad and melancholy day. Gray-black fog hung around all afternoon ’til finally darkness crept in around 4:30. Sylvère and Chris stayed in bed ’til noon, talking, drinking coffee, then finally got up to take a drive. A flock of crows perched on the bare trees beside the farm on River Road. The countryside seemed dismal. For once, Chris understood the world of Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome . She was chilled by all this “charming” ancient squalor. Driving past the cabins, logging stumps and farmhouses, Chris felt the claustrophobia of a life among people who lived here 50 years ago, several to a room, afraid of freezing, starving, afraid that one of them will catch a contagious and incurable disease. People who’d never been to Albany let alone New York or Montreal. An Incredible String Band cassette was playing in the car—a traditional ballad called Job’s Tears about winter, death and heaven.
We’ll understand it better in the sweet bye and bye
    You won’t need to worry and you won’t need to cry
    Over in the old Golden Land
    Don’t you see why the people here actually looked forward to dying? A fellow schoolteacher’d told her once how all the gingerbread on the houses here—the stars, the crescent moons—were patterned on Masonic symbols. Clearly the people felt themselves in need of some protection. And how did The Incredible String Band, four attractive hippies in their 20s, ever manage to locate the desperation behind rural folk religion? Maybe they just thought the songs were pretty.
    Chris considered using her studio visits at Art Center to testify about Dick, exhorting all the students there to write to him. “It will change your life!” She’d write a crazy tract called I Love Dick and publish it in Sylvère’s school magazine. Hadn’t her entire art career been this unprofessional?
    Sylvère and Chris walked a little way towards Pharaoh Lake, got cold, went home, had tea and sex and took a nap. Then they got up and started the long job of unpacking boxes.
    They spent the next week at the house with Tad and Pam, installing new old windows, cherry floors and tearing down partitions.
    EXHIBIT M:   SCENES OF PROVINCIAL LIFE
    Thurman, New York
    Thursday, January 5, 1995: 10:45 p.m.
    Dear Dick,
    Tonight we went to the Thurman Town Court as plaintiffs against our former tenants, the O’Malley’s, sandwiched in between the bad check writers and drunk drivers. This should pretty much evoke for you the world we live in. We can’t imagine you in that position. Actually we can hardly imagine ourselves there. When it was all over and we won, we both agreed we couldn’t care less about material possessions. We were just sick of being had all the time by everyone, even these stupid hicks who we sued for non-payment of rent, and who will eventually get the better of us. Oh Dick, I wish you were here to save us from life in the provinces.
    Signed,
Charles and Emma Bovary

    The next day, Friday January 6, (Epiphany) Chris drove to Corinth to replace some broken glass in a medicine chest. She felt totally attuned to this upstate January day…dazzling ice and snow turned scrunchy from the cold, Corinth’s army of welfare clients, former mental patients and the semi-self-employed walking around town, settling into four more months of winter. She loved the way the clouds turned pink in the afternoon and noticed how the season changed, the subtle shifts that made January different from