Dear ___ - I have a lot that I want to say. I'm seeking your sympathetic ear as someone perhaps motivated to respond to my condition. I have been dwelling in some dark thoughts as of late, and while I can say they are desperate they have yet to get the best of me. You have always served as an embodiment of darkness for me, in your demeanor, your attitude, your aesthetic... Your project is a shimmering mineral of the darkest ore.

Articulations of the CASTE OF CHARACTERS: ___ as the node of darkness. Here's a real person that personifies qualities that I would hope to embody, yet struggle to contain. Writing to ___ is writing through ___.

We observed darkness in each other immediately upon meeting, reflections of the same shadows manifest through music and imagery of morbid fecundity, a violent corporeal disfiguration, of veins and innards turned outwards, shit and piss, puss and cum, swirling together as a productive life-force flow, shadow music of low guttural tones, of the earth silken rock cold and still, blood colors and muscular textures, masticating and grinding harmonies to spit out a frayed realism. If I were to formulate a question for you, I would ask how you conceive of your position within all of this, as I paradoxically also consider you to be one of the more luminous and positively charged human beings I've ever encountered, miraculously adept at keeping your head above water while continuously wading through the shit of bottom feeders. So what is this position you put yourself in? Is it swelling, inevitable, stewing in fantasy or mythology, or something more banal, mundane?

I'm interested in how you orient yourself to your work specifically. How do you carve out your projects everyday, and in the long term? Your trajectory seems steady, tried and true, "dialed in" (as you say) to a lineage and a history, knowing where you come from and what you stand for and (seemingly) where you are going, permeating a confidence which is intimidating while also radiating your charismatic allure. You and I are probably more different than we are similar concerning our modes of expression, but this is precisely the point, exactly why and how you come to mind, to my mind, in attempting to articulate my own relationship to the discipline of art making before the gaping chasm of continuous looming dread endured through relating to the material world - the difference between those two worlds. Are your drawings, with all their mind warbling details, a form of engagement or escapism from the world? A silken cocoon woven around your existence, over your eyes, a constrictive world harboring dreams, a delicate instrument for manifesting internalized desires, although I wonder how they dance through populations organizing their knowledge with signs, symbols, prices, and percentages. We understand what something is by comparing it to what is already known, hesitating before novel articulations of the void, mistaking the effluvial space between cracks for substance where there may be none - we are fallible and it's a beautiful and horrific condition. Graphite and ink on paper, of profound scale and detail, is bound to particular lineages - albeit rich - dating back to Persian manuscripts, Indian scrolls, Chinese maps. Where do you derive your influences? What do you see in them? Your position is truly original, always brewing and creating, in the true modernist sense of genius, yet you also are reluctant to take pride in any title of recognition, always so humble in supporting the work of your peers. Is the darkness the goal, the symptom, or an obstacle along the path of some place more elated?