A slight, silent man in farm overalls hands you a duck. It is not a real duck. It is barely a duck at all, hovering between two and three dimensions. The brown beak is nubby, as if pushed in. Its blue construction-paper head is squished in as well. It has a singular eye, which makes sense because it is a one-sided duck. If you saw it from the other side, the non-duck side, you might think it was trash. Blue breast, red feet, blue tail, white body. A white wing with blue stripes is tied on with white string, looping around the feet. It’s not even glued together. The duck is entirely dappled with the wear of cardboard and the sog of paper. You find yourself saying out loud: Duck.

*

Sometimes, I have to root around in the bottom of my brain for the right words, like digging through a large purse for keys. I listen for the clink. Surely, my quick hand will knock the housekey to the car key and then I will be able to find the ring that holds them both. Yes, the purse is full of used tissues, gum wrappers, what passes for a wallet (it’s a yellow wristlet, holding even more trash and credit cards), yellow phone, crumbs, various receipts, but the keys are in there, give me a second, I will find them.

When that fails, I make a Facebook post. In 2021, I asked: “I am working out the tenants of an aesthetic. I'm not sure what to call it. I wanted ‘ragamuffin,’ but that's a type of reggae and sounds too friendly. ‘Wayward,’ is almost [right], but doesn't have a good ring to it. I mean dirt, rats, and frogs. I mean trains and prosaic thin places. I mean modified guitars. I mean trash and the opposite of shiny and new. I mean Waits and Sandy Dillon. I mean Basquiat and Castle and sometimes [Forrest] Bess. I mean crappy diners. I mean Bukowski but I'm sick of reading about bars (too obvious). I mean laundromats at 4 AM. I mean repurposed paper you found by the dumpster and are now drawing on it. I mean thick, waxy pictures of crowns. I mean tender roughnecks and wayward circuses. I mean coffee in chipped mugs. I mean that aesthetic no mother has ever thought to warn you about. I mean bad grammar, or, at least, awkward grammar. It's still forming in my mind, but do you know what the hell I mean?”

And there were lots of responses. Folks came through. Many commented something to the effect of “hobocore,” which, having never been unhoused, I said made me uncomfortable. It wasn’t quite fair to talk about a look of our unhoused neighbors or romanticizing a situation. The best answer, the answer I’m going with, the key, came from the great Dallas poet and artist Dan Collins: Scrud. He wrote: “Well it can't be too pretentious so I suggest something concise, direct, and soiled: Scrud.”

That’s it precisely. Scrud is the hate-child of American diners and train whistles. It is gestated inside of a possum for ten seconds or ten years, and then it hatched to the sound of a sad tuba.

The important thing about scrud is it’s tactile. Like all aesthetics, it works by family-resemblance. Not all scruddy things have big noses, red hair, brown eyes, and long legs, but most will have two or three of those traits. You can hear the ugliness of a scrud voice. You can touch the bumps in a scrud movie. Don’t lick a scrud poem; you’ll get a splinter in your tongue.

*

James Castle was born at the close of the 19th century in Garden Valley, Idaho. He lived on a farm with his family. He was born profoundly deaf. He did not learn to communicate with words or sign-language. He attended a school for the deaf, where the prevailing method was to teach deaf children how to vocalize and lip-read, as opposed to sign language. Castle never did master it. Because of his disability, he was excused from farm work and spent most of the day collecting found objects, such as string, cardboard, homework assignments, and repurposing them to make art. He made books, sketches, and sculptures. For his sketches, he used ink from the family wood-burning stove, mixed with his own spit.

Nicholas R. Bell in his book Untitled: The Art of James Castle lists the found ephemera Castle used: “ice cream cartons, homework, mail, and notes Castle’s tools and supplies were also improvised from his immediate surroundings. He scraped soot from a wood stove, stirred it around with his saliva and pushed the resulting ‘ink’ around the paper with sharpened sticks and wads of paper tissues. The sea of grays that can be coaxed from the pure carbon dominate Castle’s work and provide it with a grimy tactility that is one of the defining characteristics of his art.”

At first glance, most of Castle’s work appears to be charmingly crude. But upon further analysis, we can see a real mastery of line, perception, depth, and pattern.

Leslie Umberger in Untitled: “A closer look at individual works, in tandem with a more comprehensive view of his wider oeuvre, however, reveals that this artist’s ruminations were extraordinarily complex and layered. His imagery spans realism and abstractions and frequently foils one with the other. Castle’s coded formal vocabulary aptly situates him within the interstice of his existence: it seemed to say simultaneously, ‘I am like you, and I am not like you.’.”

Despite being him, an outsider to the art world, Castle’s work is still being shown in museums across the country and internationally, and his work is highly sought after.

Even if one does not admire his self-taught technique, the sheer volume of Castle’s work is impressive. Since he spent all day, every day, in service of his art, this makes sense, but even so, whole barns, whole attics, whole outbuildings, more art than a pick-up truck could carry is astonishing.

Castle bundled each and every scrap he had drawn on into ragged cocoons and tied them together with string. Because Castle never learned to speak or write, we do not know what he was thinking, but that act, over and over, feels to me like adoration.

In his introduction to Untitled, Alexander Nemerov begins by declaring: “Discovering James Castle’s art is like coming upon a cave full of wondrous and long-concealed pictures. It is also like uncovering a crime scene, finding clues that have been sealed away.” He counters himself: “But none of these discoveries is the most fundamental one about Castle’s art. Instead it is the feeling that his drawings, even when brought to light, remain hidden. Discovered, they feel undiscovered.”

*

Scrud music is not tied to a time or place. It’s an aesthetic, not a movement, much like goth. Yes, there were certain themes and variations and mutations pointing to specific artists, but overall goth is goth. The Cure is, of course, 80’s and 90’s goth, but that eyeliner and outlook is timeless. (Their 2024 album, Songs of the Lost World, for example, was straight bangers.) Scrud is found across various genres—from Mingus’s filthy, filthy jazz, to Waits’s growls. The family resemblance is texture, imperfection, and ugliness.

It's easier to nail down scrud with the aid of lyrics. Waits is a good example, with his vagabond self, and his circus from hell in my favorite of his albums The Black Rider. We also have a pervasive, perverse sense of humor: The donuts all had the names of prostitutes, which is tactile, specific, and slightly off-balance. But the difficulty with Waits is he is often considered pretentious, and while I disagree based solely on what my heart tells me, that somewhat muddies the water, as scrud is decidedly not pretentious. Yes, Waits has various personas he puts on, but they are never to be seen as sophisticated or better than or elevated. Waits just does Waits things and doesn’t really care if you like it or not.

Sandy Dillon is less well-known but a more marvelous example of scrud. She is a scruddy queen. Dillon—not Dylan, I don’t want to deal with his bitch-ass—sang, well, growled of electric chairs, murder, and witches. Most scruddily, she wove her guitar strings and hollow with shards of glass to get the sound just right.

Scrud is anti-smooth jazz. Scrud is the antithesis of The Eagles.

The piano has been drinking again. The guitars have been modifying their own bodies, sharply, sharply.

*

We can read a kind of double-isolation into the life of James Castle from the onset: isolated by virtue of geography and isolated within that community by virtue of being without language. This seems like a fair reading—but who are we to say who is alone and who is not? Is a man surrounded by his careful work and his loving family alone?

*

Scrud is the Oscar the Grouch approach to art. This is not to suggest, well, grumpiness or unhappiness or a sort of misanthropic gaze. Quite the opposite. To be Oscar the Grouch is to be delighted. Yes, his social skills are lacking in the traditional sense. Yes, he lives in a trashcan, and his best friend is his pet worm. But he is quite content in his silver cocoon.

The ever-charming Alan Cumming has a sequence with Oscar in the 46th season of Sesame Street. Cumming, as Mucko Polo the Explorer, reminds us through song and dance that you can always find grouchiness, even in the nicest of places, through the power of looking.

You’ve got to look for the slime, you’ve got to look for the goo.

The sequence starts with Oscar complaining to Mucko that the only grouchy thing on Sesame Street is his trashcan. And given that this is the world of Elmo, Big Bird, kindness, and easy solutions, this seems plausible and fair. But luckily Mucko is here to remind us that there’s grouchiness everywhere, you’ve just got to explore.

There’s a whole grouchy world to discover. Full of yuckiness and muckiness galore.

This is not to say that scrud has to be gross. Grossness is helpful for texture, for dappled imperfection, but it is not quintessential. Gross can be a shortcut to interesting and bodily and smearing shit on anything is sure to give a texture and is sure to make anything less than pristine. But here’s the real ticket: you have to look. There’s a world that’s interesting right there, if you would only look into the cracks.

Touch every flower ‘till you find a thorn. Keep your ears open now for the foggiest horn. The song is an anthem, a rallying cry for looking, for discovery, for turning over rocks to look at the soft parts and bugs. Mucko is radiant, smiling, as happy as a pig in shit.

You’ve got to go find it now. It won’t come to you.

Even Elmo, a non-scruddy character giggles at the end. Oscar seems to perk up too.

What do you say, reader, do you want to go explore?

*

The artist hands you a drawing of a barn. It is made with soot and his spit. The drawing is on the inside of a splayed envelope. The slope of the envelope flap forms the top of the barn roof. The ink is scratched with a stick to resemble beams. The geometry is precise, self-assured. The wood of the barn becomes herringbone, draping and structure, The work is both solid—as a barn—and flimsy as an envelope. This man has given you so much.

*

Spit and string maps neatly onto whistle and fish, because, of course, you cannot whistle without spitting a bit, nor fish without string. John Prine is scrud. With his famous humor, concrete details, and modified found objects of anecdotes, Prine moves easily between cosmic and concrete, bringing one to the other.

I bring up Fish and Whistle because I am fond of that catchy tune, but also because it is doing Prine-scrud things. While even early Prine was doing more precise, pristine things musically than Waits at his most feral, Prine’s lyrics land him firmly in scrudsville. He starts off by singing of the carwash on the corner, the hole on the street, which is gooey indeed. Carwashes are, after all, liminal journeys, albeit short ones. But, moreover, Prine takes an anecdote and makes it real and funny and memorable: “They made me scrub a parking lot down on my hands and knees / Then I got fired for being scared of bees.” It’s absurd, but for some reason, we believe him.

Fish and Whistle is also about the cosmos, the big things in life, what it all means: “Father, forgive us for what we must do,” and “We’ll whistle and go fishing in heaven.”

This constant smashing of big things into little, grumpy things is classic Prine. Yes, he’s looking for the goo, the slime in half-baked personal stories, but he’s also saying, that’s just the way the world goes round. In fact, he says that in, That’s the Way That the World Goes ‘Round, a song later on the same album as Fish and Whistle, Bruised Orange. Here, his story is again somewhat humorous. Prine recounts sitting in the bathtub and being frozen when the radiator broke, believing he has met his maker, crying ice-cubes. But the sun came out and he was able to free himself. That’s just how it is.

Like Castle, Prine takes the prosaic and transforms it. His materials are not found envelopes and spit but feeling cold and stuck in the world, until you don’t anymore. His cosmic concerns are life, the universe, and everything—which may as well be a barn, a farm, an attic, if that were the size of the world.

Prine’s sense of humor is important to his scruddiness for two reasons. Firstly, scrud is, well, scruddy, that is, of the body, which is full of gas and very funny. Being naked is embarrassing, vulnerable, part of being at odds with the world. Secondly, humor is a way of not flinching. We can think of a washed-up comedian or irritating mid-level manager using humor to deflect, to not answer, to avoid, but might humor also be a way of not flinching? If a fist is coming at your face, you can’t tell a joke while you’re flinching. Prine’s hyperbolic stories and wordplay in the middle of his bleak outlook are a way the light gets in, and a way of looking into the void without so much as breaking a sweat. It ought, I think, be admired. Hello in there.

*

Castle spent his days in much the same way every day. He woke up early, as did the other members of his family. Being excused from farming chores, Castle spent the mornings scrounging, after greeting the animals. A good scrounge might involve looking through the fields for stones or bits of colored glass. Then he might go through the junk mail from when his parents operated a mail room out of their living room. Or he might find a vanilla ice-cream carton, the only flavor his mother brought. Castle also collected cardboard, soot from the stove, string, envelopes, various pieces of trash. When his nieces were older, he would collect their homework papers. Then, Castle would ensconce himself in his studio—first a shed, then a mobile home—and recall scenes from memory. John Beardsley writes that per Castle’s nephew: “He works very rapidly, with a controlled and direct type of action.” A landscape, recalled with perfect detail, might take an hour and a half. This, he did privately, electing to show select pieces to his family members from time to time.

*

For his monochrome drawings, for which Castle is most famous, Castle mixed soot from the family wood-burning stove with his saliva. He used hand-made tools, such as a sharpened stick, and drew interiors and exteriors or an amalgam of both. He drew figures as well. He showed a precise understanding of perspective, angles, and geometry.

Family members recall Castle as being jolly, good-natured, and overall pleasant. Jacqueline Crist in her forward to Memory Palace: “He laughed a lot and found joy in simple pastimes like reading newspaper comics. He seems to have possessed an internal clock that allowed him to never miss a TV comedy he loved. He sensed when his nieces and nephews were misbehaving, prompting him to make it known to his sister Peggy.”

John Beardsley corroborates this in Memory Palace: “The family’s lifestyle was decidedly rural but neither solitary nor isolated.”

It’s easy to picture Castle as a sad recluse, as if that were the mechanism whereby he made his scruddy art, but that seems incomplete and simply not true. Umberger wrote on critics’ attitude towards Castle’s disability: “[…] the enduring paradox of Castle the artist. How much or how little should Castle’s selfhood factor into an interpretation of the art?”

Castle may not have run in the same social circles as you reading this or a celebrity artist such as, say, Andy Warhol, but he wasn’t a sad figure of an outcast or a romantic figure of a lonely hermit either. He lived his life in relation to others, same as we all do.

*

The silent man in overalls hands you another drawing, spit and soot again, but this time of a tree. The paper is brown and vertical, perhaps from a paper bag. The tree in the foreground is clearly a redwood, the vertical stripes represented by darker soot, so that the overall effect is stripey. The redwood tree is massive, and you know this because it takes up the length of the page, and you don’t see any of its branches yet. It’s all trunk. Moreover, through that trunk a squared-off tunnel, and in that tunnel is an outline of a car, perhaps a Beetle, indicated by its roundness of the front bumper. On either side of the redwood are more trees. They are further away, because while they too take up the length of the paper, you can see their branches. The background trees form a kind of crosshatch, checkerboard with each other, with even smaller trees between them, in scribbles. The checkerboard is both geometric with its predictable rhythm and organic with its scratchy marks—the way trees look when you look at a forest. The trees on the left of the redwood have more lower branches visible than the ones on the right, indicating they are perhaps further away from you.

The car is presently in the tunnel, but it is on a road and driving towards you.

This man has never seen this tree, except on postcards or tourist advertisements for the Redwood National Forest, way on the other side of the universe, in California.

*

It is easy, I think, to read Castle’s work as hyper-local. He drew the same few rooms over and over. The same bluff. The same tree. But there is a way in which you can read the universal into his work. Like all scrud, he is seeing a universe in a grain of sand. Of course, having never written nor spoken about his own art, there is not a way to confirm this, but it is an acceptable interpretation in art circles.

In the Introduction to Untitled: The Art of James Castle, Alexander Nemerov asserts, “Castle stored up his drawings against earthly and cosmic catastrophes. […] That cosmic event was his and (maybe the same things for him) the end of the world.” There is a shoring up to Castle’s work. He worked from memory. He also bundled and preserved his work, all thousands and thousands of pieces, boarded them up in the barn against the end, his end, the rats, the ruin.

*

I was trying to think of a scrud television show, and I ran into some difficulty. Shows have a look and a feel, certainly, but it can be tricky to maintain an aesthetic for the duration. Television shows cover a multitude of concerns, given that they are, by nature, expansive. Twin Peaks has a look. Even X-Files have a look. I am fond of both, so the impulse was to include them in this essay. But they don’t quite work. Twin Peaks has the family large nose and X-Files has the family aptitude for math, but they’re more cousins than nuclear. The textures aren’t quite right.

But, luckily for us, there is a very scruddy show. It aired on HBO, which is the antithesis of a scruddy channel. It was literary enough to be considered “premium tv,” and odd enough to be scrud. It was sincere, dirty, funny, and, at times, unhinged. It was a spit-and-whistle kind of show.

I am referring, of course, to How To with John Wilson. How To is a documentary that ostensibly explored a defining topic and taught you how to do something—which was always sort of a ruse. How to throw out batteries. How to be spontaneous. How to be fair. Wilson, who served as the narrator and camera man, would ask the question and follow rabbit-trails until he came to a sort of answer.

He films in an honest and expansive style. He shows various scenes from around New York City, mostly street scenes, of people walking, talking, shouting, shopping, bustling, driving, eating, scratching, running, twitching. There’s a lot of footage of dogs peeing on trees.

He looks for the slime. He looks for the goo. In his curiosity and his journeys and going where his questions take him, Wilson knows the goo won’t come to him.

But his show is not simply gross-out. It is not at all like an explicit YouTube channel or something lurid. Wilson is always respectful of the colorful people he interviews. Moreover, he brings a sense of genuine curiosity and wonder to every person he meets. He says “Wow” multiple times an episode, and hearing him say that will heal you. He’s funny, weird, self-conscious, and wry. He enjoys meeting people and listening to them.

Most often, where he lands after his odd tangents, is a place of empathy. You might think it off-putting to collect vacuum cleaners and go to conferences for said collectors of vacuum cleaners, but maybe the collectors are trying to heal their pasts. You might laugh at the superfans of James Cameron’s Avatar, but they found genuine connection and community.

Wilson narrates from behind the camera throughout the episodes, often to great comedic effect. In his narration, he uses second person as if you are him. You take your camera and decide to go to the umpire convention. You feel a little tired and hungry, so you decide to find a hot dog and eat it. On the one hand, it is patently untrue: you did not do any of those things just now, you are watching television. But on the other hand, it’s the truest thing there is.

*

A corollary to scrud seems to be enumeration. Castle had a barnful worth of art. It’s all he did, for forty years. John Prine wrote 164 songs. John Wilson has thousands and thousands of hours of street footage. The world is full of yuckiness and muckiness galore. There is a kind of sacred devotion patent in enumeration. Curator Jacqueline Crist wrote in the introduction to Memory Palace that Castle “never paused his practice and maintained the same routine of energetic exploration and voracious collection of materials throughout his life.”

Of course, quantity is not the same as quality—but how beautiful, to have made so much.

*

Kay Ryan has a wonderful quote about the scruddiness of poetry. Which is odd because she is decidedly not a scrud poet—with her crisp metaphors, pristine lines, polished rocks of poems like those you could fill a small velvet bag with at a visitor’s center for a national park. And like those rocks, I want to put them in my mouth. I admire and enjoy Ryan enormously—which is why I was reading her book—but she is not scrud.

From her essay Specks: “When writing a poem the hot wire of thought welds together strange chunks of this and that.” She continues: “It can’t completely combine the disparate elements and make a new element of them, but it can loosen the edges of mutually disinterested materials enough to bond them so that a serial lumpy going-on is achieved, crude emergency bridges made, say, of brush and doors, just barely strong enough to get the thought across before the furious townspeople show up.”

James Castle’s artworks, if nothing else, are lumpy going-ons. A lot of Beat poetry is too. Beat poetry and scrud have much in common, but Beat poetry is a movement and scrud is an aesthetic, which are distinct. I think that’s why I took a jab at Dylan earlier and called him a bitch ass, in addition to feeling peevish that day. Dylan is of a movement; scrud is an aesthetic. Anyways—emergency bridge—Allen Ginsberg had a lovely notion about line as breath, and I think that’s very scrud-core. Indeed, his lines are breath—strophes and antistrophes with their warp and weft. You could learn to play the bagpipes reading his poetry out loud.

Scrud is many things, but it always comes down to a kind of embodiment, a whistle and spit. Ginsberg’s shaved apartments, sandwiches, sunflowers, cunty wheelbarrows all have a place in scrudsville.

*

James Castle shares a vocabulary and aesthetic concerns with many other artists, but—given the delightful secrets and cocooning of his bundles—I would like to take a quick detour and discuss Judith Scott. Her works are also untitled and come as heavy secrets.

Her main material is also string, more specifically fiber. All sorts of yarn wrap themselves up into sculptures, often enveloping found objects, such as vacuum tubes, plastic rings, chairs, dishes, and cardboard. Her sculptures are colorful, often the yarns are vibrant reds and blues and whites. They are playful but also have a heaviness to them, like gargantuan whales. They say: You can open me, you cannot open me.

The Brooklyn Museum’s untitled piece is an off-balance oval, with strings, yarns, and tubing. The way it is propped on its side resembles an egg, but it’s quite a bit more lumpy than an egg. Despite the plastic, it seems to have a kind of organicness to it. As if it sprung fully formed, gestalt, but also made lovingly by hand, warp and weft. Her work, then, is a study in contradiction.

Like Castle, Judith Scott was also self-taught and considered an outsider artist. I knew she had Down’s Syndrome but did not know she also went deaf very young and never learned how to speak. The New Yorker article on the Brooklyn Museum exhibition concludes that “the mystery is the meaning.” There’s a kind of good poetry to that.

*

Mary Ruefle wrote in her essay Secrets: “The words secret and sacred are siblings.” The mystery is the meaning. While there is an openness, a frankness to scrud, there is a transformative goings-on in looking for goo. The goop of scrud, the yuckiness and muckiness of the world, is transformed into something humorous or cosmic in the case of Prine. Wilson alchemizes it into humor and empathy. Castle? Scott? They were doing something secret and sacred that they categorially could not describe with words.

Secret and sacred become most sibling-like relative to the way James Castle stored his artwork, which was art in itself. He made bundles. In the first page of Memory Palace: James Castle—the defining biography on Castle—there is a picture of one such bundle. The various ribald papers are stacked up and tied together with string.

Jacqueline Crist, the primary James Castle archivist, was lucky enough to unbundle, with permission from Castle’s relatives. She writes in the introduction of Memory Palace: “Taking apart a secret with your hands can feel holy or like a violation. I do not want it to be the latter, so I am choosing to believe it was the former.”

Crist further describes the experience as: “I will always remember every detail of unwrapping one of Castle’s small bundles in the mid-1990’s. Castle’s niece Gerry gave me the opportunity to open a bundle that had remained unopened since the moment Castle has secured its multiple layers of gunny-and-flour-sack materials in twine. At the center of this bundle I found a collection of five small doll-like cardboard figures, much like the paper dolls I knew as a young girl. Each figure was laid upon a cardboard ‘mattress’ and wrapped within multiple layers of brown paper as if they had been tucked into bed. When I finished unwrapping the bundle, Gerry and I sat for what seemed like a long time, taking in the contents revealed within. I realize that the unique experience of opening the bundle, layer by layer, cannot be replicated.”

Scott’s works are not meant to be opened, but we are invited to take it apart imaginatively, and revel in the sacred something in the center.

*

The cheerful man in overalls hands you another spit-and-soot drawing. It’s of a bedroom. The left shows a small chest of drawers flush with the back of a metal-frame bed. You know it’s the back of the bed because the metal frame here is smaller than the matching end, indicating a foot of the bed, as opposed to the head, because the head is further away and still larger. You know it was not by accident, as the man has mastered perception and vanishing point—the wooden floorboards and ceiling beams are all lined, and the lines are going the right way, lines converging in the back of the room, the point at which we do not exist anymore. The headboard partially blocks a doorway on the left, and it is not a trick of distance, as if to say—There’s all this, but you can’t enter.

The door is left ajar. In the distance, two trees.

*

It is easy to lump in—since we’re dealing with lumps anyways—scrud with outsider art. Scott and Castle were self-taught. But for one thing, it is a bit vague to call a particular aesthetic outsider, although there are often family resemblances. Naïve art has to do with the artist and their place in society. Scrud is an aesthetic that can appear in all kinds of scenarios.

Allen Ginsberg, Lord Beat himself, died an old man of letters.

Plenty of poets are masters of the goop and grime. John Dorsey comes to mind. But the scrud kween, Diane Suess, won a Pulitzer. My understanding from mutual acquaintances and as described in a book review by poet Jessica Walsh is that Suess still feels somewhat of an outsider. Her feelings are valid, and I don’t have the right to contradict them. However, when someone wins a motherfucking Pulitzer, I think it’s fair to say they are accepted by the literati, or, at least, that they can be assured of their place in the modern literary canon, which isn’t quite the same thing, now that I think about it.

Scrud ultimately has very little to do with how outside someone is and everything to do with what they’re looking for and what their concerns are. Scrudsters, as we very well know by now, look for shit and piss and hot wires and found materials and alchemize it.

In Frank: Sonnets, Kween Diane does just that. I’m pretty sure it would be illegal, or, at least inadvisable, to just quote the whole damn book and be done with it, but that is what I want to do. Quote it, write the words And there you have it and call it a day on this part of the essay. Maybe I’d go get myself a sandwich. I think I still have chips in the pantry. No wait, I finished them.

Emergency bridge—let’s take a look at her sonnet that begins I drove all the way to Cape Disappointment. Like all the sonnets in Frank, it’s confessional, unrhymed, fourteen lines, and works by a weird, pissy magic. In this poem, by line three, the speaker is already trying to pee and laments that her bladder never seems to fully empty. Instead of sightseeing, she stays in her rental car—of course it’s a rental—and naps. She contemplates “that long drop from the lighthouse / to the sea.” There’s a push and pull with the enjambment, an untidy catching of breath. The speaker concludes with a question: “Thought about going into the Ocean /
Medical Center for a check-up but how do I explain / this restless search for beauty or relief?” The break after Ocean is an almost Prinian wordplay, if Prine could do wordplay between lines of song. It’s a dark reversal of expectations. And then in the final two lines the pee stuff has emotional resonance—she wants relief, a complete letting go of what she was holding, like breath.

Because scrud is never just gross for gross sake. A little joke, yes, but taking on the cosmic, the universal, all hotwired together.

*

James Castle may have very well labored in obscurity all his life in his farmhouse in Idaho. But, as luck would have it, he did not. His nephew, Bob Beach, showed his uncle’s drawings to his art instructor at Museum Art School in Portland, Oregon. Castle had gallery shows throughout the Northwest, beginning in the 1950’s. He had two solo shows in 1963 and 1976. His work still gets solo shows. According to the James Castle Collections and Archive website, Castle has had group and solo shows every year, from Philadelphia to Santa Barbara to Reykjavik, Iceland.

What’s curious about Castle is he is still drawing crowds to the museums, the way, say, Van Gogh or Renoir might. But a key difference is if you say Renoir or Van Gogh to a room full of people, they know who you mean. They might even say Impressionism or, if you’re lucky, Water lilies and the guy with the deal with the ear. Say James Castle to a group of people, even that same group of people, and I guarantee the reaction will be Who?

Bl. John Dorsey pointed out to me that well, someone must know who he is, even fifty years after his death, which is all anybody can help for. I explained, “No, no, that’s my point, nobody does, though. James Castle, who?” And Dorsey said, “But someone is still putting him in museums.” Touché.

*

John Prine has proven to be paradigmatic of scrud, with his anecdotes, wry humor, and cosmic concerns, his hotwiring of this and that until we get well over a hundred songs. The focus has been lyrically as opposed to musically as I couldn’t carry a tune if it had handles. I have long held that music theory is exactly that—theoretical. Much like theoretical physics as a field of study or theoretical particles, we have no way of proving things like treble, bass, time signatures and keys exist. It’s quite useless for me to discuss things like what chords are scruddy, scrud countermelodies, scrud time signatures. What are countermelodies? Who knows! Anything is possible when you are making it up.

And yet, some things have a scruddy sound. Prine’s voice falls into this category, with its sincerity, little bit of gravel, and unpolished edge, especially as Prine aged. As for the instrumentation, it may very well be tight playing—again, what do I know?—but it is not too tight, not too precise.

Zappa’s music—while unique, humorous, and zany—cannot be scrud because Zappa demanded a tight sound and stellar musicianship.

As mentioned earlier, Sandy Dillon’s album Electric Chair is peak scrud. Not only does she sound like a witch being tormented, there’s a sort of demented circus thing going on. Waits’s sound is in a similar vein, especially in his album The Black Rider. Lots of scrud music is literally about hell and sounds like hell, brought to you by the mouse orchestra.

The chunkiness, the wackiness, the not-rightness of the sound of scrud music often gives way to startling beauty. Beauty or relief. We have to get behind the mule to come up to the house—not just musically but sonically as well. We have to struggle to hum with Dillon’s jazz-punk-funk-what-the-fuck to really sing. It’s music you wouldn’t want your mother to hear but helps you think about her fondly anyways.

*

A recurring theme in John Beardsley’s book on James Castle Memory Palace, is, as you might imagine, a Memory Palace. A Memory Palace is a concept used by ancient Romans to recall texts, events, or stories. A person wishing to store information in their memory visualizes a house. They imagine themselves walking through it and “placing” part of the information in this room and part of the information in that room, such that when they wish to recall the full body of text, all they had to do was “stroll” through their Memory Palace.

According to Beardsley, a memory palace is an apt metaphor for Castle in two ways. The first has to do with his extraordinary powers of recollection. Castle painted in his studio, recalling with perfect detail the line of a bluff in Idaho, the slant of a stairway from his boyhood stint at the School for the Deaf, the shadows in his living room. While it is doubtful that Castle used a memory palace technique per se, it is fair to say he had extraordinary powers of recollection. The other reason is not only did Castle make use of a memory palace, he, in a sense, made one with his squirrel-away bundles. Over fifty years or so, the family farm was packed to the gills—if squirrels put bundles inside fish. Inside walls, under floorboards, Castle’s memories in fact formed a palace, in a literal way.

Beardsley: “Castle developed a practice of bundling some of his works in cloth or cardboard secured with twine or rag ribbons; dozen of these bundles survive. […] This can be seen as a physical analogue to the memory palace. In a sense, Castle was creating both a physical and a mental archive of his work in architectural space. I am also convinced that Castle’s capacity of retaining long and short term memories and the attention required to capture them have a direct bearing on the quality of his art. The artworks he produced as an expression of his life experiences whether based on remembrance or direct observation, are considerably more coherent and convincing than the images that derive from print sources.” (Castle also copied advertisements and other ephemera as part of his practice. They are lumpy going-ons that aren’t as much fun to look at, but do demonstrate mastery of line, perspective, and shading.)

That’s the alchemy of scrud. A memory becomes art becomes a fortress against the cosmic end. Not every scruddy saint has these powers of recollection. Not every scruddy stain of a poet stored songs inside cocoons. But with Prine’s anecdotes, Waits’s growls, Scott’s burying so deep, a conjuring forth of life, of beauty, occurs.

*

Scrud is an aesthetic which may or may not go in and out of fashion, but it’s been there and will be. It seems likely that reciters of epic poems used a Memory Palace to say the right parts in the right order. Using a Memory Palace isn’t scruddy, but—emergency bridge—it does tie in nicely to another scrud artist, namely, Homer. He was not, of course, the original composer of The Iliad and The Odessey, having learned the oral tradition passed down for eons. But his details, those are pure scrud. The Iliad is disgusting. It’s too much, too rich, too full of meanings to suss out, to do a deep dive in in the context of a work about aesthetics, not ancient poetry, but let’s just take a look at the first few lines.

μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος
οὐλομένην, ἣ μυρί᾽ Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε᾽ ἔθηκε,
πολλὰς δ᾽ ἰφθίμους ψυχὰς Ἄϊδι προΐαψεν
ἡρώων, αὐτοὺς δὲ ἑλώρια τεῦχε κύνεσσιν
5οἰωνοῖσί τε πᾶσι, Διὸς δ᾽ ἐτελείετο βουλή,
ἐξ οὗ δὴ τὰ πρῶτα διαστήτην ἐρίσαντε

Ἀτρεΐδης τε ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν καὶ δῖος Ἀχιλλεύς.

That should clear things right up.

*

The silent man hands you a small piece of paper. It is a group of people in a room. The floor is shockingly pink and grainy. A deep pink, as if from the sea not sky. In the background is a fireplace, the mantel piece that same pink. Seven figures face forward in the picture, three across at the front, one behind the second and third figure. The other three figures are lined up on the right wall, towards the fireplace. The picture shows good depth, as you’ve come to expect, with some figures closer and further, three in a line on the y plane, the other four in a line on the x plane, with one behind, showing z. And yet, the figures themselves are oddly flat, rudimentary faces like a child would draw. Well, no, like someone imitating a child’s drawing, as the faces are too elementary for children: two circles for eyes, one line for mouth, no noses. The lines are straight across, but the slight shake to the line indicates perhaps a smile in the far-left figure. The far-right figure has an exceptional head: it’s a horizontal rectangle with a series of concentric circles for a face. The figures are in fantastical clothing: stripes, plaids, military-style jackets. The middle figure, blue, appears to be in a sort of kimono. No one knows what the colors are made from.

*

The third episode of How To with John Wilson is entitled How to Improve Your Memory. I had to rewatch it to write this section, because apparently, it didn’t work. As with all How To episodes, Wilson opens with Hello, New York in a nasally voice, with well-placed uh’s and um’s as that beautiful b footage rolls.

Wilson begins with a monologue about how his memory is bad and he wants to remember all of life’s, uh, special moments, over shots of families and couples taking selfies while eating bites of a classic New York soft pretzel. The camera cuts to someone doing a twisty yoga pose as a visual gag. Next, Wilson mentions that he keeps a diary that lists everything he did that day—such as get a haircut or eat a salad. The diaries are hand-drawn grids, which coincidentally resemble Castle’s hand-drawn fantastical calendars of 33 and 35 day months. Wilson’s grids are no doubt correct, however, given his commitment to veracity. Wilson voices-over his fear is everything becoming a blur. A man in a peacoat twirls around hopeless and lost in front of a subway entrance. Another visual gag. Wilson does not like change. He is upset that his favorite hole-in- the-wall, Mars Bar, is now TDI bank, although it still has some of the same regulars, which is a joke the other John, Prine, would appreciate.

Wilson then goes to the apartment of a woman who has won memory competitions to interview her. The woman can’t remember which medal is from what event she has won so many of them. She explains that she uses the Memory Palace technique. Say you want to remember the periodic table of elements in order. You might picture your bed is made out of water and next to it is your nightstand made out of balloons to help you remember helium is next.

John Wilson decides that he will try this technique to try and remember his grocery list when he goes to the store. He uses his subway route as the palace. He saw a tree, which will help him remember to buy broccoli. He saw a dog defecating, which will help him remember Nutella. He does okay at the store but can’t find a specific candy bar you forgot the name of. He asks someone he assumed works there, but it turns out the man only makes the software that inventories grocery stores and can’t really help him.

Here is where things take a turn. The software inventor is hugely into the Mandala effect—group consciousness remembering things differently as evidence of parallel worlds. Did Coca-Cola always have a dash? Is it Febreeze or Febreze? Why does the internet show pictures of a bunch of people in the car with JFK when he was assassinated when we remember there just being him, Jackie, and the driver? What about Stouffer’s stove top stuffing? There’s a conference coming up soon if you’re interested.

Wilson is polite and engaging but hardly enthused or persuaded. Until he leaves and notices Oscar the Grouch-style trashcans—were they always there? Turns out Wilson had wandered on to a movie set by mistake, specifically Spielberg’s West Side Story, designed to make Queens look like Brooklyn in the 40’s, or perhaps it was the other way around, you forget which.

During the Macey’s Thanksgiving parade, the Ronald McDonald balloon deflates into an Eldridge flaccidity, and Wilson knows this because he was there. But on television, the broadcast just used footage from previous years’ parades. There now exists, in our collective consciousness, two versions of that same event. Who is remembering it the right way? Wilson decides to go to the Mandela conference. It’s held in Ketchum Idaho or Ohio at a Best Western, er, plus. The host is a confident man, intent on sharing his truth. Berenstein Bears, Berenstain Bears. Mandela died in prison. All of this is evidence of multiple timelines, our memories reaching back to a time before the timelines split. One woman, during a Q and A, says, like, I don’t understand the internet. The host explains it is crystals.

After the talk is over, the host shows Wilson his room, hilariously at the other Best Western in town. He mentions that he’s a bachelor and Wilson says he is too. There’s a beat that feels like it could fill a canyon. And the host says “It’s the only way to be, man. You save a lot of money that way.”

Here is where you realize something odd about the episode. How To is known for being in second person. It’s its signature. It’s part of its scruddy charm. Wikipedia validates that indeed How To is narrated in second person. But John Wilson clearly said, “I decided to go back to my room to do some reading”. First person. Had the episode been in first? Is it because it’s an early episode and later Wilson shifted? What is happening, you wonder out loud?

The people at the conference are validating, even uplifting. The worse your memory is, the better you feel, the more you are accepted, because you’re providing irrefutable proof of the multiverse. Wilson decides to reread his meticulous record keeping in his old diaries and doesn’t like the way it makes him feel. Perhaps, he concludes, it is unnatural to want to preserve something so exactly. After all, the past only exists in our heads. If you have a bad day, you can remember it better tomorrow. The episode closes with Wilson putting stickers on products in the grocery store: Febreze becomes Febreeze, the sun in Raisin Bran wears sunglasses, and everything is right again.

A lot happens in 25 minutes. We have shit and piss. We have visual gags and idiosyncratic turns of phrase. We have the texture of scrud. We have bodies. The whole project is a bit rickety, a bit haphazard. It’s just one man carrying around a camera. And yet—curiosity, wonder, melancholy. The whole thing could be a Prine song done in film instead of song. John chooses to alchemize, instead of merely record, like making a joke about being fired for being afraid of bees. Like drawing your farm in Idaho, building by building, on the back of ice cream cartons.

*

Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus’ son Achilleus
and its devastation, which put pains thousandfold upon the Achaians,
hurled in their multitudes to the house of Hades strong souls
of heroes, but gave their bodies to be the delicate feasting
of dogs, of all birds, and the will of Zeus was accomplished
since that time when first there stood in division of conflict
Atreus’ son the lord of men and brilliant Achilleus.

It's the delicate feasting of dogs that cinches it—we’re in scrudsville. We’re getting disgusting and ironic already. And we have, of course, opened with the Big Stuff, the muse, the heavens, the Gods. Greek myths take after Prine in that way; that’s just the way the world goes round.

*

All scrud is collage, and most collage is scrud—except. I suppose the very clean, digital work. To make a collage, you really have to look for the slime. What is serviceable? What is useful? Can we find a thorn on this flower?

Collage art is also a good deal to do with what we do with our memories. Objects can become talisman, small personal museums. A letter is a memory, but pasted onto a canvas it becomes art.

There are almost too many collage artists to choose from. But I would like to zoom in a little on Jean-Michel Basquiat. He used a lot of found material from his home in New York City—pieces of wood, metal, signs, all squirmed their way into his paintings. His paintings are urban, because scrud can have urban as well as rural strains. A compelling aspect of Basquiat’s work is that he used his own artwork to make his collages. Found object into artwork into found object into artwork again.

Grillo, which is the cover of the Taschen biography, foregrounds a graffiti figure in a “primitive” style. The head is skull-like in three-quarters view, turned to the viewer’s left. The face and body are black. The right—our left—eye is orange and the other yellow, both oblong ellipticals. The red mouth is open with white teeth. There is no nose. The body is composed of black blocks for legs, a blue block for the torso with yellow and red lines resembling lungs and intestines. Two swoops for arms held upwards with orange blobs for hands. On a red square is a signature Basquiat yellow crown, hovering over the figure’s head. The background appears to be torn brownish-yellow paper with other, complete artworks on them, such as chemical symbols, rain drops, mysterious diagrams, asemic poetry, black stick-figures with arms up into color-reversed piano keys.

The piece is loose, vibrant, alive, impossible to ignore. Like all of Basquiat’s work, there appears to be political undercurrents about equality, justice, even violence. It’s not pretty. In fact, you could justifiably call this and most of Basquiat’s work ugly. Where Prine tells jokes, Basquiat tells of graffiti tragedy. Much like you can’t flinch while telling a joke, you can’t flinch while defacing a building. (Basquiat got his start as a graffiti artist who went by the name “Samo.”)

Like Waits, there is something very American about Basquiat. There is an aspect of “melting pot” to the work here, something with ingenuity and gravel. Much like you wouldn’t want to lick a Suess or Dorsey poem, you shouldn’t lick this either.

If I were at a museum and saw a Basquiat picture breathing, I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised.

*

Collage is often associated with Picasso or later, more strongly, with the Surrealists. But like scrud, it is not in fact tied to a particular time. Charles Dellschau, for example, made wonderful collages at the turn of the 19th century. Like Castle, Wilson, Basquiat, and Prine, enumeration was an important part of his work. He made over 2,500 illustrations, bound in 12 books, over 20 years. His drawings had a crude charm to them, often with slightly off perspective, sort of scribbly coloring. Within those illustrations, Dellschau often pasted newspaper articles and pictures cut from newspaper.

Each picture has to do with flight.

*

I took a class taught by the great multi-media collage artist Lorette C. Luzajic. We were instructed to make collage papers—scribbles on paper to rip up and use in our collages later. When it was time to show the class, she said she wasn’t quite sure what she was looking at for mine. I explained that somehow I had forgotten to bring paper, so I used a napkin instead. I scribbled over it with my pink and yellow oil pastels until the top layers peeled off like a sunburn. I was embarrassed. Who forgets to bring paper to a collage class? But Luzajic said: “That’s it exactly. “I forgot to bring paper, so I used a napkin instead.’”

*

The silent man hands you another soot and spit drawing, this time on cardboard. It’s an exterior of a farm. Two herringbone structures are connected by what appears to be a portico or horizonal ladder. The barn on the left has a triangular room with a window. In the window is a sort of pointed figure, like someone making a diamond with their two thumbs and pointer fingers touching. On the right is a barn with a rounded room, two windows, ovals in both windows. Under the connecting structure—the horizontal ladder—is what appears to be a puddle in the shape of a mitten. It is marked with rows of x’s, neatly filling its irregular shape. To the left, a ways in front of the triangular-roofed barn is a maroon scribble, appearing to be made out of crayon. The sky and ground are the same color, but you know where one ends and the other begins. You feel melancholy. You feel wistful. You know the man saw these barns, but he didn’t—the figures were from his imagination. He did it because it felt right to him.

What other scenes has he changed from his childhood, from his life? The one where they tried to teach him how to speak? The one where everyone loved his artwork at the gallery, and he drew his own exhibition after, from memory? His pictures in that picture were blank, shapes where his stories had been.

*

So far, we have been on a journey. We looked at James Castle, John Prine, John Wilson, Bob Dylan by way of exclusion, Sandy Dillon by way of inclusion, Judith Scott, Tom Waits, Diane Suess, and some more supporting characters along the way. That is all very well and good. It’s been more or less an examples essay as a way of listing family traits such that we might give that family a name: scrud. It is always helpful to name things. After all, writing—about anything at all—is fucking embarrassing, to quote the best poet of our times, Barton Smock, and it is useful to name things. But still—it might be all sound and fury signifying nothing.

For instance, I might take great pains to describe a peculiar type of breaking wind, its olfactory qualities, sonic dispositions, and the food that might give occasion to it. I might cite its historic import. I may even give it a fun, fitting name—the Fricative Fury, say. You might, after having read such an essay, be able to accurately describe and identify Fricative Furies when they occur in the wild. Good for you—but what does that matter?

All of which to say is, huzzah—we know what scrud traits are, who all are in the great scrud family, but what does that give us? What is the use? Bombs are falling. People are dying. The earth is melting. Whales are falling to the ocean floor. And I want to talk about spit and string and then go whistle and fish.

What I found, exploring with Mucko the Explorer, is scrud is an assay against AI and Authoritarianism—which, hideously, have become the same thing. Here, I mean “assay” in the archaic sense: an attempt. “Assay” sounded so much braver than “attempt,” and less futile. There are the things we must assay against.

I hope I don’t have to tell you why authoritarianism is bad. I hope I don’t have to tell you why AI is bad. It is not because AI is new or on a computer (I typed this on a computer, thank god for spellcheck) or a tool. The poet and photographer B.A. Van Sise famously said of AI:

Let’s stop aggrandizing it by calling it ‘artificial intelligence,’ and begin calling it what it really is: plagiarism software.

There is no artificial intelligence. It’s not creating anything, just copying existing work by existing artists and changing it enough to skirt copyright laws: there’s a reason why everything is all ‘in the style of Wes Anderson’ or ‘in the style of Ernest Hemingway,’ So don’t say ‘an artist generated these images using artificial intelligence’ but rather ‘someone made this using plagiarism software.”

[…]By allowing the companies making the plagiarism software to call it ‘artificial intelligence’ or ‘text algorithms,’ you’re giving them newspeak to hide what they’re making and what their users are doing: it’s just plagiarism. Nothing else.

No quarter. What can we do against the theft of art, the theft of our light? I think we can spit on it. Get those good enzymes flowing. Make something visceral. Give something a good texture using spit or something else—after all, a telltale sign of AI “art” has a startling lack of texture.

James Castle has taught us the wonder and joy of spit. There is a wonderous exchange of physicality that comes with scrud art and spitting. Beardsley describes Castle’s fish-and-whistle technique with reverence, almost awe: “Castle’s use of his own saliva for the liquid agent might […] seem odd, but it was an inventive way to achieve a desired quality with materials at hand. Saliva is a complex, viscoelastic fluid composed of long chains of molecules called polymers. Although it consists of mostly water, it also includes mucus, enzymes, and electrolytes. As any child can demonstrate, a dab of saliva stretched between the fingers forms a bead or strand before breaking apart, and it returns to its original when the stress is removed. Water, though also viscous, does not ‘stretch’ as it does not contain these dissolved polymers. Soot dissolved in saliva can thus be expected to demonstrate more complex viscoelastic properties than soot dissolved in water, with superior dispersal of the soot particulates. This might account for the remarkable range of effects Castle achieved with this medium – from opaque blacks to thin washes spread with wads of paper, cotton, or cloth; from fine lines to heavy stripes and herringbone patterns applied with his pointed sticks. The mucus and other organic compounds also seem to have improved the adhesive quality of his inks, which may explain the generally good state of preservation of Castle’s drawings.”

In addition to being spit-less, AI is art without a story, without memory. Whatever we can say about Castle’s art, it is not that—even though he is without language. In some ways, his art is the anti-LLM. Beardsley again: “If we can’t resolve the relationship between Castle’s art and his deafness, how might we think about Castle instead? I have already said that I consider Castle’s memory more crucial to his life as an artist than his deafness: I am convinced that memory is the key to his accomplishments and that it may or may not be the consequence of his physical differences. What’s more, having a good memory is more the guarantee of artistic accomplishment than being deaf is the guarantee of heightened visual skills. The crucial point is what Castle did with his memories; he used them to create an extended visual narrative of life. We all tell stories to keep them alive; the way we remember is through repetition—revisiting the narratives, adding and subtracting details, changing the emphasis. Castle kept his stories vivid for himself, his family, and his larger audience through several elaborate visual languages and an inventory of images he could manipulate again and again in surprisingly disparate and inventive ways.”

Like spit, it is a bit sticky to argue ethics from aesthetics, to posit that this aesthetic choice has ethical ramifications and matters on the level of the soul. I have not read The Goldfinch, as I was intimidated by its girth. I have, however, seen a few Wes Anderson movies. And yes, AI should not have plagiarized him, but his films are all moral black holes wrapped in twee(d). They’re awful.

And yet—an assay can be found here, in the gross and the grime. An assay against art made without memory, without body, without soul. Or not art, plagiarism made without texture, without looking, without humor. A plagiarism machine generates without concern for the cosmic, without concern for death. Making collage is a kind of hope, finding trash and making something new through looking. Having a machine make mash-ups via prompts is the opposite of that. A James Castle exterior is no hallucination but deliberate alchemy, as Beardsley points out: “He is creating scenes that are clearly half-real and half-fictive.” If you want to make art that only humans can, consider rubbing some dirt on it, fraying the edges, adding in a weird joke. You too can whistle and fish, you can explore with Mucko anytime you want. Even if the world ends, there will always be trash.

*

Hot dog bun.

My sister’s a nun.

*

I read a Wikipedia article called The Purpose of a System is What It Does. Don’t ask me what that means. But the same can be said of scrud. The purpose of art that is like Waits or Basquiat is what it does. The purpose is to make by finding and to make you look too. AI could never.

Scrud. It is helpful to name things, even if James Castle could not.

*

James Castle is dead. It is 1977, and James Castle can no longer hand you pieces of his art, his world remembered and reimagined, rendered in spit and string. He left you two pictures on his bedside table. The first shows a stick figure with circles for hands laid flat in a bed with the blanket up to the figure’s chin. The figure’s face is not much more than a line-drawing: two lines for brows, bigger lines for eyes, dash of a mouth, no nose. The bed is in front of a window, with the curtains to the right. On the left wall (the picture is of a corner) is a TV attached to the ceiling. The window shows a horizon and a flat plane. It is made out of soot and spit. The figure appears to be Castle, in a rare self-portrait. He drew himself not from memory but as an observer might. Third person. The next picture is of the same figure and interior scene, but smeared out, as if by figure tips. Castle drew, at last, his own death. You realize now you’ve seen ducks wrong, your whole life. Castle dissolved himself, not as immolation, but as if to say Come on home.

*

CODA

I have been scruddy in my writing of this assay. Fifteen minutes here, twenty a few days later. I collected what crooked pieces of time I could to make this. As such, this took a very long time to write. My plan, as always, was to send it to the great poet Ian Richards once I was reasonably satisfied. But by the time I had reached the conclusion, wind and waves had taken him.

So, a dedication: To Ian, who was lost to the sea.

I had fretted a bit that I had not thought to write Ian a poem while he was alive. No amount of scrud memory could transform this lack. But it turns out I did write him a poem, almost ten years ago, scruddy, rendered even more so by the passage of time. I can’t say I love this poem, but I am, nonetheless, glad it exists in this timeline. You can remember it better tomorrow.

Dead Dog Music

Your music sounds like roadkill,

I told you when we first met.

Perhaps you didn't hear me or were a little offended,

because you got quiet.

But I figured this was an okay thing to say

because you had asked me, quite blankly,

if I had ever installed dry wall and if

I had enjoyed inhaling and then coughing up the particles.

I told you No, with all the dignity I could muster,

but was thinking Dear god, that sounds amazing

and I want to.

What I meant, though, was

it's the music of the real, and

that can be jarring sometimes

and cause for pause—like seeing matted fur

outside your car window.

Roadkill isn't like other rubbish; you can't

just pick it up and throw it away

or use a bottle when your ashtray gets full.

There is a particular resilience to roadkill,

even after the damage has been done.

I don't know what the roadkill is like

over in New York where you are

learning to dance quietly

like the end of a fishing pole,

where you are learning about how small

a house can be, and how to leave the few

safe places you have known.

Perhaps there's more squirrels,

less dogs, more birds, or some big elk.

But I think if you make music like

the flash of fur and red through a window

then the cruelty of heavy things

won't ever make you frail.

And here is a poem I wrote once he was gone. This one is less scrud, but still a little bit. I made a broken sonnet using what I had. He has become, in a sense, my memory palace. Everything I want to remember about that particular time of my life is bound up in that person, and now he’s gone. I have to learn to be okay with some parts of him changing, as my memories shift and blur. Perhaps, it is unnatural to want to preserve something so exactly; time will alchemize all things. I bundle up what I can.

Sonnet for you to live inside in case you change your mind

about being dead, I mean. And why shouldn’t you get to change
your mind? It would be like cutting your hair with a knife
or growing it long again. Mine took six years after my wedding,
since last I saw you. You walked me from one side of my house to the other. A liminal
journey made literal—over the threshold. You sea-changed alone. Ian, dear friend,
this house is for you to live in, because alive is always what you wanted.
Fourteen rooms should be big enough, the size of a prayer. A kitchen full of bright
(when we met, I couldn’t eat), a conservatory, a bar, a study, a porch for smoking
(I quit), a bedroom, a huge tub, two couches we can nest together (once we spent
a whole afternoon that way), a library, guest room, attic, a garage. Big foyer where
all your friends are, waiting. One day, you’ll walk through that door. (This house is the size of our hearts.) We’ll say: Wasn’t it funny, that hour we all thought you were dead? That day? That week? That month? That rest of our lives—?

*

We’ll whistle and go fishing in heaven.

Notes

Castle pieces described in the italicized interstitials are derived from:

Untitled (Dark Blue Duck with Red Feet), n.d. Found paper, string, and color of unknown origin. 4 × 5 1/4 × 1/4 in. As found on Artsy.net

Untitled (house, pattern), 1941 or later. Found paper, soot. 6 x 5 ½ in. As found on the jacket cover of Memory Palace.

Untiled (drive-through tree), n.d. Found paper, soot. 9 ½ x 5 ¾ in. As found in Memory Palace.

Untitled, n.d. Found paper and soot. 8 ½ x 11 in. As found in Untitled: The Art of James Castle.

Untitled, n.d. Found paper, soot, and color of unknown origin. 4 ¾ x 7 ¾ in. As found in Untitled: The Art of James Castle.

Untitled, n.d. Found paper, soot, and color of unknown origin. 9 ¾ x 6 in. As found in Untitled: The Art of James Castle.

Untitled, n.d. Found paper and soot. 8 ½ x 11 ¼ in. and Untitled, n.d. Found paper and soot. 9 x 10 in. As found in Untitled: The Art of James Castle.

Biographical information on Castle is found on the James Castle Archive and Collection online, in John Beardsley’s book James Castle: Memory Palace (Yale University Press, 2021), and in Nicholas R. Bell and Leslie Umberger’s book Untitled: The Art of James Castle (Giles, 2014).

Other citations:

Arioli, Nadia. “Dead Dog Music.” A Zoo. Finishing Line Press, 2017.

“Mucko Polo, Grouch Explorer.” Sesame Street, season 46, episode 2, 16 Jan. 2016. HBO Max.

Basquiat, Jean-Michel. Grillo, 1984. Oil, acrylic, photocopy, oilstick, and nails on wood. 96 x 21 ½ x 18 ½ in. As found in the Taschen biography.

Beardsley, John. James Castle: Memory Palace. Yale University Press, 2021.

Bell, Nicholas R. and Umberger, Leslie. Untitled: The Art of James Castle. Giles, 2014.

Collins, Dan. Nadia Arioli’s private Facebook post. 23 May 2021.

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