An Open Letter to Josh Thrower
Eagle Scout Project, North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, North Carolina. Visited May 20, 2022.
Josh, I’m tired. I woke early in the morning, drove from Richmond to Raleigh, traversed the length and breadth of these museum grounds. First, I turned a corner and saw “Large Spindle Piece” and “No Fuss.” I learned from a sign that THIS SITE WAS DEGRADED AND DEPLETED BY ITS USE AS A PRISON FARM. I made my way into the woods and passed a dog trainer standing before a group of owners, explaining how to hold a leash. I walked to the end of the Red Bridge and had a revelation. I stood inside the Cloud Hut. When it all caught up to me, when my feet demanded respite and my imagination urged me to write, I encountered your bench and sat.
EAGLE SCOUT PROJECT
JOSH THROWER
TROOP 357
JANUARY 2021
DEDICATED TO NC MUSEUM OF ART
It is a tremendous bench, sir. Solid. Supportive. Auspiciously placed. Based on the plaque tacked to the artifact you created, you seem like a person pretty put together.
Not that I’m qualified to evaluate your handiwork. Not that my praise or criticism should matter anyway. We don’t know each other. This is a made-up situation, a creation of my own, but I like to speak conversationally with a bit of pretention. I like the strangeness of addressing a stranger as if I have wisdom to share, as if by virtue of being your elder, it’s your duty to heed my words.
To address you this way is funny to me, Josh, because your elders are idiots and have little to offer. The duty I mentioned is a dying ember, a value some future generation may recover, but not before it’s stone-cold-dead and discarded. You and yours will need to create your own way. Unfortunately, the dumb-dumbs who think they know better still wield most of the power.
I don’t know where you get your news, Josh, but you might have heard that COVID cases are rising in just about every state. At the same time, commercial office space vacancies are rising in Durham and Raleigh. It makes sense. People haven’t yet been told to return to the office. But mark my words – they will be.
Those vacancies should remain high, Josh. There should never be a great “return to the office” unless it’s voluntary. Employers have no moral right to demand anything from their employees. They have the right to negotiate. A CEO who wants employees back in the office should pay for the privilege.
But that’s not how employers tend to think, Josh. The word negotiate is taboo. They prefer threats and coercion. Nay, they depend on threats and coercion. Because most executives lack meaningful rhetorical skills and the ability to think critically (which are often the same thing), they rely on a delusional sense of superiority.
(You’ll have to trust me on this. I’ve been self-employed a long time now. It is mind-blowing to discover how few people in leadership positions know how to negotiate, how many adults have never heard the words “no.” Then again, most of them have never had to negotiate. They give commands; they are obeyed. The threat of force is their negotiating position.)
One aspect of their delusion is believing they know what’s good for you. So, you’re handed a choice – do as they say or be “terminated.” Comply or lose your job, which means losing your livelihood, your access to health care, not to mention your status, reputation, identity. It’s a choice that’s not a choice.
I mean, we are talking about values, Josh. I think the values that most employers hold dear are fucked up.
Real quick, I apologize if this becomes a long sermon. I feel comfortable on your bench, and because you gave this gift, I want to return the favor. It seems that we have a common hobby, the desire to make something from the raw materials at hand. I imagine you selecting and arranging these wood pieces into the bench it has become. Did you work from a design of your own, or copy from a template? Either way, your hands put this bench together. I can’t say enough about the significance of that experience. Even if the bench were to disappear forever (I imagine that it spontaneously combusts, although it’s more likely just to deteriorate over a long period of time), you made it. It demanded your attention; it required your hands.
Not that I’m advocating for some Platonic bench. I’ve been steeped unconsciously in Platonism my whole life, so it’s hard to separate what I think I believe from what I want to believe. Transcendence simply does not make sense to me; yet I still craft my own work as if there’s an ideal meaning. I cycle through meanings with an almost unconscious acceptance that it’s representative of some absolute. But I simply do not believe this. And I can’t tell you exactly what accounts for the contradictions. I’m still working through them. I suspect my writing will change as I discover some personal insights. Much like, if you were to make another bench, it would reflect the lessons you’ve learned from making this one.
Our projects are not quite the same, however. Yours immediately and obviously useful and mine has a different kind of utility. You can’t sit on a poem or a story. You can’t hold it, except insofar as it has a material form (a book, on a phone, etc.) But it has a use, and the use is something akin to Kenneth Burke’s “equipment for living.” My art is an argument, as I imagine many artists consider their work. And as an argument, its success or failure depends on the situation. Your craft is woodwork. Mine is rhetoric.
Josh, think about all the ways people talk to one another, the statements they make, the games they play, the scripts they repeat. For example, the most powerful individuals on the planet blithely boast of the possibility, capacity, and propensity for nuclear annihilation. How can you expect the same people to address any serious issue rationally?
You might think I’m overreacting, but just today, I read a news article titled “ATOMS AND ASHES,” A FRIGHTENING TOUR OF SIX NUCLEAR ACCIDENTS. The threat of annihilation is real. The rhetoric around “defense” has outlasted the situations for which it was meant. Does it make any sense to justify the existence of weapons that could end humanity?
Ah, how did we get here? When I began this letter intending to give you a compliment. I wanted to share with you the details of my pleasant day and how it was made better by your bench. I spend most of my time in my apartment hunched over a computer or at a coffee shop hunched over a computer or at a bar hunched over a computer. Today I went outside. I breathed fresh air. I felt the sunshine warm my face. I communed with world-class art. I found your bench. I sat, and I communed with my imagination, and with you.
Thank you for the bench. In return, I offer these three poems, written in the manner of Basho, that is, in the moment:
Sunbeams peppered dirt dirty leaves wood bench relief
Relief: bench weary copse trees corpse rest
A wood bench, bones of trees, set in a copse, forest path, commune