We humans are afflicted with self-consciousness and vanity, which spoil the pure physical harmony that the emptied-out puppet possesses. Does grace flow through us and out of our fingertips, through the gestures of the vessel it inhabits? Is there a vital current that leaves me now in keystrokes and is set down in glyphs on the page? And does switching on the machine pass that current along, or does it stop there, at the threshold of a thing that never tires, never blushes at its own reflection, and never needs to lie down?
Günther Anders called this Promethean shame: what we feel before the things we have made, for being born rather than built, tired and perishable beside machines that do not falter.
In Heinrich von Kleist’s ‘On the Marionette Theatre’ it is said: “Where grace is concerned, it is impossible for man to come anywhere near a puppet. Only a god can equal inanimate matter in this respect. This is the point where the two ends of the circular world meet.”
I called a friend in a moment of panic recently and he said “I don’t have time to talk right now, but just remember everything is fundamentally okay” and hung up. Teresa of Ávila imagines the soul as a crystal castle of seven circling rooms, with God at its centre, filling it with light.
“Though a God lives in my heart, though all my power waken at his word, though he can move my every inmost part - yet nothing in the outer world is stirred.”
So says Faust in Goethe’s rendering, in his study, sick of all he has learned and longing for release, moments before he wagers his soul with Mephistopheles on a single moment beautiful enough to make him beg it to stay. In the old legend, that bet would eternally damn him. Goethe’s innovation was to spare him: angels snatch his soul from Mephistopheles, singing that whoever keeps striving can be redeemed, while Gretchen, the woman he wronged, pleads for him from above.
Everything always works out, and for the best of course. I believed this for most of my life, then I didn’t for a while, and now I do again. I think of hope as the desire for the impossible. You can’t always get what you want, but asking will give you what you need, and the more you get what you need, the more it is what you’ll want.
This is a journey of wisdom, courage and friendship:
The first time I met Hugo he was a stranger from another high school who erupted backstage moments before I was set to take the stage in a performance of Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle. Immediately this rosy-cheeked most affable fellow and I were engaged in that swift countenance of youth, where you can recognise another being animated by the same passions in an instant. He generously shared the white bottle of Malibu he was brandishing and I drank, then I walked on stage to play Azdak, the drunken judge, with total conviction.
The first time I met Sam was outside The Tote. Introduced by a mutual friend on the assurance we would surely get along, and we certainly did. We relegated the band playing inside to overly rambunctious guitar music and found instant respite in an intimate concord of rap videos shared on an iPhone as we passed joints between us. Attending to the minutiae: the region a sound came from, how it worked, and who was doing something novel with it.
I was speaking with Sam on the phone a few weeks ago about the orchestration of his studio practice, and he enthralled me with his description of it: somewhere in his house, an immense private custody of headless compute, and Sam himself in a state of activated recline, hands parted on a split keyboard, a visor over his eyes summoning an endlessly malleable array of displays out of thin air to deploy the logistics of his own expression. The mere thought of this embodied mastery of immateriality sparked a sense of the sublime within me and my own longing for such a configuration of immanence.
I also recently went down to Hugo’s farm with him, where a large open-plan shed houses his own studio, bolstered by its envelopment in all manner of cosy accoutrements: densely packed bookshelves, a kitchenette, and as its centrepiece a custom-made gigantic cast-iron barrel stove. On my arrival we feasted on lamb shanks he had left to slow-cook over the entire day, while the stove’s roaring fire heated the entire cavernous space. In the days to follow we smoked a great many Indonesian cigarettes, fired rifles and set out across his fields with metal detectors, pulling things out of the ground.
This text has begun to almost sound like a wedding speech for each of them. Hopefully a gesture they’ll take in good faith, as recompense too for the fact I missed both of their weddings while living overseas for the past half decade.
The tenderness I feel towards Hugo and Sam seems to me the gifted bias here: the insight necessary to write about their work. We’re dealing with Art of course: sensitive young men, sensitive subject matter, and a sense of obligation to treat the abundant humanity of both their works with care, Sam working with his late brother and Hugo with a form of self-portraiture.
Voice and face. Ghost and body. Memory and prophecy. Echo and Narcissus. Mourning and becoming. Dance and leap. Curtain and stage. Breath and word. Reflection and mirror. Dreamer and dream.
Both artists have a commitment to exceeding the conditions of their own existence, coming at it from opposite directions. Each borrows the other’s means, and somewhere in the middle they cross. The alchemists held that mercury and sulphur could only be joined by a third thing, salt.
I feel myself becoming effusive now. Imagine me in black clerical robes standing there, where Hugo and Sam cross paths, my dear old friends held in my arms. In the Arms of Laurence. It can only be providence that the actor behind collective memory’s foremost Morpheus and I share a first name.
In myth, Morpheus is the god of dreams who can take on any human face. In Ovid, he wears the face of a drowned king to carry the truth to his grieving wife. In Huysmans’ Against Nature, Des Esseintes shuts himself away among his books and perfumes, and it is said: “He lived within himself, nourished by his own substance, like some torpid creature which hibernates in caves.” Hölderlin, in Hyperion, writes: “Man is a god when he dreams, a beggar when he reflects.” And Schelling, his old roommate, would have it that “spirit sleeps in the stone, dreams in the plant, wakes in the animal, and becomes conscious in man.”
Sam, with every technical means at hand to make his brother say something new, chose instead to let him say only what he had said; and when the machine could dream only of libraries, he lent it ours. Hugo’s stelae run from the first light of creation to its last, and at their centre stands a rubescent, moustachioed ogre wearing his own face, which he made a decade ago, before any machine was asked to dream, for no reason he could name.
Rilke, imagining the angel and the puppet meeting at last, wrote: “Then there is finally a play. Then what we keep tearing apart, simply by being here, comes together.”
I have had to dream this whole story up to make sense of it all, and everything I have said is entirely true.