I received an interesting email today that I thought should be shared in the light of the renewed culture wars over “Fire in My Belly,” by David Wojnarowicz. Not everyone believed cultural battles such as this one has ended. These are contested ideas, contested images, and there will be more of them.
Paul Brandeis Raushenbush for HuffPost: I remember the first time I read Wojnarowicz. I picked up a collection of writings on AIDS in a bookstore in New York City. The piece that spoke to me most was called “Spiral”, by David Wojnarowicz, which ends with these haunting words:
“I am standing among all of you waving my invisible arms and hands. I am shouting my invisible words. I am getting so weary. I am growing so tired. I am waving to you from here. I am crawling around looking for the aperture of complete and final emptiness. I am vibrating in isolation among you. I am screaming but it comes out like pieces of clear ice. I am signaling that the volume of all this is too high. I am waving. I am waving my hands. I am disappearing. I am disappearing but not fast enough.”
I memorized this poem as I felt I could learn from Wojnarowicz’s work as I sought to fuse art and religion — both equally important and necessary to me as I tried to make sense of a troubling world. At the time I was attending Judson Baptist Church in the village as a newly interested Christian, and in the following years I began a Masters of Divinity at Union Seminary with Wojnarowicz in my pocket.
I felt, and feel, indebted to Wojnarowicz. His writing challenged me with its mixture of anger and suffering; and his life inspired me as he created mysterious, defiant, beautiful and dangerous art as a response. Wojnarowicz became a symbol of what was important in art and religion. I wanted my work to contain the same immediacy, edge and truth as his. I wanted to name, and by naming somehow redeem, the reality of suffering in the world. If I could not do that, then my theology and faith were not worth having or sharing. In Wojnarowicz I found a radical and surprising voice of compassion in the sense of the word that means to “suffer with.” …
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mario ruiz
svp, media relations(Quote Via: www.huffingtonpost.com)