___ - you are missed as our friendship seemed unique. I'm writing you to rekindle a memory of the radicality of those times. Wherever you are I hope you are still painting because I think the world needs your images now more than ever, which is to say desperately, as desperate as you are to produce them, or once were, in the flames of my memory. I remember your practice of Aikido as a striving for an impossible equilibrium, offset by the disastrous relationship you have with art - serving more as a poison than a nourishment, but perhaps a necessary illness. I wonder if you feel healthier now that you have divorced yourself from the creative curse. What does it take to be an artist? Would you consider yourself to be one, still, now or even then? I would, of the highest caliber, which is to compliment your internal integrity if not your external composure. You always had supremely satisfying answers to that question, concerning individual responsibility and powerful statements of energy and intuited truth towards your practice. Your project was clearly formulated, consistent, not to say static. On the contrary, you and it were perpetually in flux, crawling inside to out and back again, leading me to believe I never knew (or could ever know) any semblance of your wholeness.

What is ___ the archetype of? The fool or the genius? An apprentice with no patience, eventually seduced by the sensual world, or else doomed to perpetual struggle brought on from lack of connection. Desperation honing the edge of a quivering blade. If he were to play a role, what would it be? How could I convince him to play it for me, to play himself? That was always the dream: ___ walking around the city, eating food, painting in the studio, and I'm always behind the camera, behind the scenes, facilitating everything so he can simply create.

I want to ask you: where does it come from? How have we become so desperate, and for what? How would you classify it, this condition? I want to ask you about sacrifice, sabotage, your willingness - even eagerness - to self-immolate according to a higher cause. Does your art practice - to the extent that you still have one - aid in keeping you integrated or contribute to your ever-increasing alienation? Is it the source of your alienation?

We once formulated a master plan for art world infiltration, to perpetuate our own propaganda, an ideological virus through which we might implant our influence upon the world via clandestine conduits, through the back door. It consisted of you in the role of the artist with me serving to negotiate your relations to the world, an ambassador to your genius and juggler of words, so that in the end we would both be satisfied in achieving what we wanted from the arrangement - art that kills without compromise and without regard to any other. This mythology of the tortured bohemian, standing at the periphery as outcast pariah, would be interpreted through the historical-critical-philosophical-theoretical language system to make it legitimate, to build a bridge with language so that the public could engage with it, between the psychosomatic/psycho-sexual/dream-like fantasy miasma that you inhabited and the cold concrete reality of the world looming beyond the canvas. We agreed at the time that no one can - or should - do it alone, as everyone must succumb to the toxic allure of the dollar.

You betrayed me. You threw your paintings away and I rescued them from the dumpster, only to have you sell them off the wall without me knowing it. I won't hold it against you because I've been betrayed by many of my closest friends of this period... You always made it clear that you didn't want to get too close, that you would eventually break away and I would never see you again, so I can't be too surprised or disappointed now that this reality has come to pass. I admit my own role in it all as well. I was a mess, probably still am, but I was also honest about it, as were you. It's the honesty which bound us, I believed.

I need collaborators. The works we produced together were incredibly significant for me, especially and more so because they were collaborative, occurring through extended processes of dialogue, and for this realization I thank you.

The letter to ___ should emphasize the dislocation from social norms and the resolidification of the independent unified individual in contradiction to the normalizing tendencies of society to an absurdist level of heroicism.