Sorry it has been so long since I have written but when I was leaving the little fishing village out there at the edge of the world on that little bus driven by the little old man that never looks you in the eye but always keeps to his schedule of crossing the real boundary of the glacial lake pressed up against the sky by those reindeer lichen-covered black mountains holding up the waters like a mirror to Narcissus whom may be a metaphor for humans but sure as hell acts more like the sun revolving around the earth every day just so it can see itself illuminating all those little people and sheep running around bleating for their young ones to come shake their tales for more milk and climb ever higher towards unknown crests so yeah up there on that very same crest as I was crossing the threshold of that real boundary and also the imaginary boundary that separates the whiskey and whimsy and wonder and also the fish smells and rhubarb smells and that peculiar swollen sour milk smell of the iron-filled earth being churned up endlessly by 10,000 tickling waterfalls that always remind me of the 10,000 things that the Buddhist monk or was he Taoist described as a number which could be any number but also precisely that number which is the number of everything that exists in order to understand that all these things can still be counted of course if you want to but really isn't it just a big waste of time and I think this conversation also took place on a mountain top or maybe at the base of the mountain kinda like when we tried to have a conversation about postmodernism while smoking cigarettes and counting the icy peaks and suddenly laughed about how stupid the whole thing was so let's just go back to magic yes so anyways I was on this bus cresting the mountain with the little old man with no eyes for me and I was thinking about how I wanted to leave something in the house so that there would be a part of me there but I really didn't have anything to leave because I only brought what I needed and everything I made was bound up into a tight little digital package so I left some shoes sitting there on the shelf like others had done before me and that somehow seemed quite fitting because it represented not an absolute departure but a dedication to return, a kind of eternal return, like a song called a soliloquy, like a sun. Sorry it has been so long since I have written but when I was returning to the mainland of Europe I realized that it wasn't home that I was returning to but some other place that was very familiar but lacked all those smells which dictate to my brain that brain which is me and no other that it is returned to a kind of numinous space that instills calm and comfort and allows the lungs to decompress in that manner which can only occur when a journey is truly completed as in the sewing of a final stitch or the closing of a circle around a void which cannot be located again kinda like this conversation we were having while smoking cigarettes I think it had something to do with magic and skepticism and by magic I think we were both nodding in a calm understanding that what we were really talking about was the possibility of real change in matter and materials and also in ideas and ideologies and therefore also the world at large that we were living in like a kind of spell that casts a net of hope and brings in all the shimmering iridescent fish that would bloom into ever more fish which are not fish of course but again this kind of magic which is not spells of course but again this kind of effervescent efflorescent incandescent percolation of whiskey and whimsy and wonder maybe we could call it enchantment or reenchantment or simply magic and we could oppose it to that other thing we were talking about which is skepticism and the necessity of maintaining it - not cynicism mind you! - but skepticism which is to question and probe and I guess at its most extreme terror takes on the form of a scientific scalpel destroying the fleshy bodies as it slices into ignorance and sheds light upon rational understanding but in a softer tone of voice with softer moist eyes and softer rounded mouth and softer unwrinkled forehead we could call it just another kind of desire a particular and necessary desire to know which is not so different from that thing we were calling magic but perhaps one is based on a proliferation of knowledge and the other a nurturing of wisdom though which is which I am none the wiser. Sorry it has been so long since I have written but I have been quite preoccupied with finishing this book about energy and finishing these sculptures about energy and finishing this music which may or may not be art but is definitely about energy and trying to remember that thing I said to someone one time about how artists love to describe what they are doing as some kind of flow or flux or investigation into a resonation a pulse a frequency a color fetish or sometimes just as energy when they can't make up any other names for it unless they are some kind of amateur scientists also which everyone seems to be these days so they have all kinds of other words for the energy which may be a wave or may be a particle but anyways I wanted to make all this art about how silly the whole thing is but maybe I'm just turning into one of those artists that just talks about energy and I think the reason is because I've become drunk which is to say intoxicated inebriated ecstatic not on the ego but on the prospect of attenuating such attention on this flow coursing through all things that I remembered to remember to forget about the making-fun-of and instead allowed myself to be swept away by the thing itself which is in fact no thing at all but just this movement which we could call energy or perhaps you would prefer magic or linguistic aikido or poststructuralism. Sorry it has been so long since I have written but you are always on my mind and I think about your polar bear all the time and look at your other projects and try to imagine the stories and complexities informing them and think that it would be nice if we could do some kind of project together and what it would be like to come to Idaho or Alabama or Arkansas or wherever the fuck you are to sit on a porch and shoot beer cans and listen to that almost imperceptible hum that the fireflies make as they illuminate the bioluminescent bacterial cultures bubbling up in their translucent torsos and yes while I'm riding my bike around through these busy streets filled with busy people all shuffling around with their businesses I sniff the sweet smell of cold decaying leaves and crack a smile when I think about how good it was that none of our conversations ever reached any kind of definite conclusion because if they did they would not have felt nearly so authentic and I think that's what a conversation about magic or enchantment or postmodern diasporic installation art is really about anyways.

If you're coming to the fjörd we should have another cookie bake-off because it was an excellent tradition that can only become a tradition if its repeated, along with this conversation. See you there.