DIAGRAM :: Marcia Aldrich

INFLAMMATORY QUESTIONS

(after Jenny Holzer's Inflammatory Essays)

Marcia Aldrich

Was it in Mr. Hinderlie's class your junior year in high school, when you had to compose a story from scratch every night for three weeks, that you began to think you might be a writer? It felt like riding your horse without a saddle, your skin next to his. Why were you surprised by the full-throated ease of what came out of you?	You didn't want to be consoled, did you? But then no one ever consoled you, no one even tried, so that would be a stupid thing to want. Didn't you want to burn, to feel the chafe and the rub?	Or did it start years earlier in the sickbed when you had chicken pox and all you wanted to do was scratch? Wasn't it then, reading Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, propped up by pillows looking out onto a landscape of swirling snow, that you felt them calling?
What in the world was Mr. Hinderlie thinking, assigning a story a day? Dinner finished quickly and you retreated to your room to begin what lay ahead of you. What did lay ahead of you? There was no path to follow, just the open field of the page. Where did the shape of the sentences come from? Will you ever understand the voice that carried you to places you didn't know you had inside you?	Was it in those early days in college when your typewriter vibrated on the desk, its powerful motor electrifying the dorm room? Can you say what impulse seized you to put your hands on the wizard device, to pump its keys and make an unknown thing upon the page?	Remember how you gathered each morning in high school waiting for the inner doors to the chapel to be unlocked? Remember your weird anticipation as you flowed in with the others to sit on one of the straight- backed chairs in two rows on either side of the center aisle. Remember how you wondered what the sermon's message of the day would be. To yearn is to seek something missing. What were you missing? Are you missing it still?
It didn't seem possible, did it, that you could be a writer, coming from a family of insurance salesmen, dentists, and pump inventors, who wanted no more for you than to marry a rich man? Marry, they said. Marry, they urged. Marry. But that was the last thing on your mind, wasn't it?	What held you back—the incredulousness of your family, or your own self-doubt, or were those one and the same? That self-doubt, started so long ago, hasn't changed much, has it? Your family's view of you travels with you wherever you go. How far would you have to go to be rid of it?	When you are introduced at a reading, why do you think that person is someone other than you? Will you ever feel, when you take the podium, that you haven't risen above your station? Why have you always thought of yourself as a secondary subject, a minor character on stage, the maid carrying platters of food?
When you found your mother's suitcase in the crawl space, why did you open it? Did you think there were secrets inside that your mother didn't want you to find? Was that the first transgression of the rule that we should respect what belongs to others? Didn't you know there was something wrong about opening it?	Was opening your mother's suitcase your first act as a writer? Why did you have to know what was inside? And did you really think you could stuff what you found back in? Didn't you know your mother's suitcase was like Pandora's box?	Once opened, never closed. Why do you return—to open the suitcase over and over? Do some wounds refuse to be worked through once and for all? Why do you want to relive the tumble of little photographs documenting your mother's and sisters' happiness, spilling out on the cold cement floor, feel your heart rise up at the image before you?
Could Professor K. have been deluded about your talent all those years ago, and might you have built your life on his mistake? What if he simply wanted to sleep with you, and it had nothing to do with your hidden greatness? Can you separate desire from discernment?	On Keats' gravestone: Here lies one whose name was writ in water. Do others wonder if what they've written will last? Or are they content to write, publish, and do it all again?	Is it possible to tell true talent from all the false pretenders? And if it does matter, how does it matter, and when will the true sorting take place?
You didn't want to be consoled, did you? But then no one ever consoled you, no one even tried, so that would be a stupid thing to want. Didn't you want to burn, to feel the chafe and the rub?	What in the world was Mr. Hinderlie thinking, assigning a story a day? Dinner finished quickly and you retreated to your room to begin what lay ahead of you. What did lay ahead of you? There was no path to follow, just the open field of the page. Where did the shape of the sentences come from? Will you ever understand the voice that carried you to places you didn't know you had inside you?	Could Professor K. have been deluded about your talent all those years ago, and might you have built your life on his mistake? What if he simply wanted to sleep with you, and it had nothing to do with your hidden greatness? Can you separate desire from discernment?
Was it in those early days in college when your typewriter vibrated on the desk, its powerful engine electrifying the dorm room? Can you say what impulse seized you to put your hands on the wizard device, to pump its keys and make an unknown thing upon the page?	Or did it start years earlier in the sickbed when you had chicken pox and all you wanted to do was scratch? Wasn't it then, reading Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, propped up by pillows and looking out onto a landscape of swirling snow, that you felt them calling?	Was it in Mr. Hinderlie's class your junior year in high school, when you had to compose a story from scratch every night for three weeks, that you began to think you might be a writer? It felt like riding your horse without a saddle, your skin next to his. Why were you surprised by the full-throated ease of what came out of you?
When you are introduced at a reading, why do you think that person is someone other than you? Will you ever feel, when you take the podium, that you haven't risen above your station? Why have you always thought of yourself as a secondary subject, a minor character on stage, the maid carrying platters of food?	Remember how you gathered each morning in high school waiting for the inner doors to the chapel to be unlocked? Remember your weird anticipation as you flowed in with the others to sit on the straight-backed chairs in two rows on either side of the center aisle?	When you found your mother's suitcase in the crawl space, why did you open it? Did you think there were secrets inside that your mother didn't want you to find? Was that the first transgression of the rule that we should respect what belongs to others? Didn't you know there was something wrong about opening it?
What held you back—the incredulousness of your family, or your own self-doubt, or were those one and the same? That self-doubt, started so long ago, hasn't changed much, has it? Your family's view of you travels with you wherever you go. How far would you have to go to be rid of it?	On Keats' gravestone: Here lies one whose name was writ in water. Do others wonder if what they've written will last? Or are they content to write, publish, and do it all again?	Could Professor K. have been deluded about your talent all those years ago, and might you have built your life on his mistake? What if he simply wanted to sleep with you, and it had nothing to do with your hidden greatness? Can you separate desire from discernment?
What lay ahead of you? There was no path to follow, just the open field of the page. Why were you surprised by the full-throated ease of what came out of you?	It didn't seem possible, did it, that you could be a writer, coming from a family of insurance salesmen, dentists, and pump inventors, who wanted no more for you than to marry a rich man? Marry, they said. Marry, they urged. Marry. But that was the last thing on your mind, wasn't it?	Is it possible to tell true talent from all the false pretenders? And if it does matter, how does it matter, and when will the true sorting take place?
Was opening your mother's suitcase your first act as a writer? Why did you have to know what was inside? And did you really think you could stuff what you found back in? Didn't you know your mother's suitcase was like Pandora's box?	Once opened, never closed. Why do you return—to open the suitcase over and over? Do some wounds refuse to be worked through once and for all? Why do you want to relive the tumble of little photographs documenting your mother's and sisters' happiness, spilling out on the cold cement floor, feel your heart rise up at the image before you?	Remember how you wondered what the sermon's message of the day would be? To yearn is to seek something missing. What were you missing? Are you missing it still?

In December 2018, I visited the Broad Museum in downtown Los Angeles where I saw the contemporary artist Jenny Holzer's installation Inflammatory Essays. Holzer is a conceptual artist interested in the delivery of words and ideas in public spaces. Inflammatory Essays consists of monumental columns of colored posters filled with text Holzer created from 1979-1982. The arrangement of the posters in the columns depends on the principle of repetition. I was blown away. Of all that I saw on that visit, Holzer's Essays did what art should do—it inspired me to create my own artwork.

*A side note. Another work of hers—Allentown Benches—made from selections from Truisms, is outside the courthouse in Allentown, the town where I was born.