The Mythmaker of Montgomery
It was after a day-trip to the Gorge as I was making my way back home, struggling to maintain the high octane speed at which native West Virginians learn to drive at thirteen years old. Illegible graves blurred outside my window between stagnant low clouds, just perched real still in the crannies between the hills. It was five-ish when I came to Montgomery and crossed the bridge into that shell of a city, to see if a particular pawn shop was open. It was closed, as it always is, and I began a dreary walk back to my car along Third Ave, past the shut-down furniture stores and dilapidated mansions.
The rain had stopped, but cloud-coverage still forbade anything resembling a sunset. Yet there one was. Across the tracks and against the row of white houses raised upon the berm was that unmistakable orange glow, early and unnatural.
I searched the ground and found a lock-box with a hole carved out, from which the piercing orange rays projected through the rain onto the opposing buildings. Atop that lock-box sat Jaja, perched outside a dilapidated bodega, in the final moments of us being strangers.
Me: Is that a projector?
Jaja: Yup.
Me: How does that work?
Jaja: Mirrors.
Me: Like, inside the box?
Jaja: [sigh] Yes.(to a man leaving the bodega): You got an extra cig?
Me: Here. (I produced one as an offering, and he hesitated, eying me before accepting.)
Jaja: Thanks. It’s lenses. There’s a flame on the inside, and then a bunch of tiny pieces of glass refracting it or whatever, and then the light projects outwards through that hole. And I added flowers.
Me: How often do you fire it up?
Jaja: Whenever I want to see a sunset and there isn’t one.. One time Amtrak tried to fine me because the light blinded one of their drivers.
Me: I’m Ryan by the way.
Jaja: Jaja.
Me: Jaja?... What do you do?
Jaja: Builder. (He gestured to a flat above the bodega) I work out of my shop here.
Me: I work at the radio station in Charleston, you should come on air and do an interview.
Jaja: Nah dude.
Me: Can I get your number if you change your mind?
Jaja: No.
Me: Nice to meet you, man.
My time in West Virginia has been defined by moments like these. Moments of inspired awe as I look closer and closer at a world not considered by the taste-makers of those coastal crown jewels. Moments where I realize that not all great artists are backed by machines of production and refinement, that it doesn’t take a national audience to verify something’s genius. I take baths in the Kool-Aid, I revel in the potential of creation sans capital, I remember the forgotten beauty of art-for-art’s-sake.
The last time I visited Montgomery was for work, my first murder and the only triple-murder I ever covered in my time as a news man. I stood in shame, camera on my shoulder, struggling to capture a pool of blood in the dim 3am light. Thirty officers from six different departments took notes and questioned witnesses. One confessed that “things like this are five times as common as they are reported.” I’ve since quit that job. I wonder if what I’m doing now is some pitiful attempt at retribution, as if this city asked for a goddamn’d savior.
Now, between crumbling brick, under faded marquees of Pizza Shops advertising the best Pepperoni Rolls, I find alley-ways strewn with fire escapes and clothes-lines. Apparitions of a wayward metropolis. Forget your New Yorks, your Chicagos, your growth and renewal. Give me a city that has locked in its answer, which has passed its peak and now tells a story with an ending.
In that rubble, I found Jaja.
There was something about him I couldn’t get out of my mind. He was the personification of the West Virginia I had come to find. I tried in vain to glean details about him online and around Charleston, ever-cautious about which flags I raised. I was all too aware of the history this place has with carpet-baggers.
I found him on Facebook, but what was there only deepened his enigma; he had no posted photos, only sketches of himself with cartoonish, monstrous proportions.. Flipping through his tagged photos, I found grainy images dating back thirty years of him with musicians; photos where he toyed with strange instruments which looked like none I had seen before. Some seemed ancient, some as if they were waiting to be invented.
I asked a co-worker at the radio station, someone with infinite knowledge of the art and artists of the River Valley, what she knew about Jaja. She raised her eyebrows. “He doesn’t do shows anymore, but yeah, he’s a local legend. He used to headline around town. I only saw him a couple of times— he hasn’t performed in years.”
When I asked another friend, he mentioned a name which had become sacred in this state, adding to the lore that Jaja had worked closely with Daniel Johnston when they were twenty. He mentioned an opera they wrote together and an entire series of illustrations they’d created to accompany it. Copies of the designs were briefly handed around town, but as far as he knew nothing came of it.
With little fuel, as my life settled into the mundane and West Virginia became less of an idea than the place where I bought groceries, the myth of Jaja petered out—until that day in the coffee shop when I saw that poster, the one with a simple drawing: cartoonishly large head, tiny mouth, bulging eyes, on the body of a possum. I leaned in and saw, in the smallest of fonts, a date and a location: July 11th; The Montgomery Shop. It was all I needed.
~
I peel out of the Kanawha Falls parking-lot and further down Route 60 until the precarious bridge to Montgomery comes into view through the rain. I park my car outside the same bodega where I once met Jaja, duck beneath the torrent, and enter a broken-and-repaired glass door propped open by a brick. I ascend a dark staircase towards ambient music from above, ethereal drum-patterns overlaid with a sporadic and disorienting piano, and as the staircase and my heart-beat crescendo in harmony I enter a bare-boned studio, transition into a fluorescent atmosphere full of people silently milling.
The flat is massive— walls reaching just short of the high ceilings and connected to the floor via wheels, so that the lay-out might be changed based on Jaja’s needs. The floor is hardwood, with rugs strewn about, occasionally overlapping, serving as ersatz tour-guides through the strange gallery.
People of all ilks— wealthy locals with glasses of red wine next to haggard drifters in stained jackets— populate the dizzying space. By the entrance is a large placard that reads “Nobodies.” At the entrance to each room is a large portrait. The first one I encounter is a life-sized photograph of a man in a rain jacket standing beneath an awning, cigar in mouth, eyes heavy with age and cast just below the camera’s lens as if he was studying the photographer’s necklace.
In the first room, I find a strange assortment of furniture. Glass cases filled with strange relics line the wall— a hat charred by fire, a wedding ring, a smoked and chewed cigar resembling the one from the photo. Besides these objects, small inscriptions:
Robert’s favorite and longest-lasting hat. He found it in his son’s bedroom after the kid left and it remained in a box for six years awaiting his return. One day Robert put it on and felt warmed by the fact that it fit perfectly, the first sign in years that somewhere out there was a remnant of his existence.
Another:
Robert’s wedding ring, removed three months before his divorce from Jolene and kept in a small chest in his bed-side lockbox. Notice a blood-stain on the left-edge, likely accrued from Robert’s work with toughened ropes on the barge-dock by the London Locks, three miles from Montgomery.
Another:
A smoked cigar, collected after being tossed into the street by Robert. On the night of this cigar Robert announced his retirement to his closest friend, Samuel Hayes, who he then only spoke to three more times in the seven years before his death. Samuel was critical of the way Robert tossed his cigar into the street and commented quietly that “you never think of others, do you?”
Beside a damaged couch in the center of the room a placard read:
The couch Robert sat on for thirteen years, which he threw out superstitiously when Pitt upset WVU in the Backyard Brawl, 2007.
The room is filled with a poor recording of someone butchering Chopin, and a note beside the speaker reads:
the second-to-last last time Robert played piano before his hands succumbed to arthritis, and playing became impossible. On the Tuesday before his death Robert tried the keys from the out-of-tune piano which lay dormant for years in his living room. He was unable to make any pleasant noise, and through tears decided that if he could no longer make music, he’d rather not live.
I read the small plaques, suffer the same three-minute recording four or five times before moving on to the next room, finding another portrait. Beside it stands the coworker who had told me of Jaja’s work with Daniel Johnston. I say hello. She notes the incredible brush-work, and I lean in to see that it isn’t a photograph at all, but a painting. “That’s incredible,” I whisper, and realize the portrait of Robert in the rain was in the same style. In a shiver it dawns on me. “They weren’t real people?”
She leaves me to roam the second gallery, entitled Marsha Gorecki. There are objects and placards, details of Marsha’s childhood in Roanoke, the swing where her sister fell to her death, the phonograph her grandmother used to wind for her, a paper airplane she made on the first date with a future husband. A small, shriveled thing, purple and brown, identified as the liver removed in a failed attempt to cure her cancer. My knees buckle when I read about a trip Marsha tried to make to visit her husband’s grave in Norfolk, the way a torrential rain forced her to check into a motel in Charlottesville without a heater, the place where she would catch the pneumonia which eventually weakened and killed her.
I move through the other rooms, finding bookmarks, lighters, mugs stained with lipstick and candles burnt to the nub. Each room brings to life a life never lived, establishing from ruins the forlorn remnants of nobodies, who lived and died through the blurry and mad stuff of existence. I laugh at jokes never told, muse over pages from journals filled with thoughts and grocery lists never fulfilled, never real except here, built by Jaja. In the final room a solitary figure in a black hood sits motionless on a hand-crafted stool, a figure I identify by its bulk and hands as Jaja himself. The photo-realistic portrait at the front of the room reads Jerome Adkins Junior. It shows Jaja in boxers, busy dressing a horizontal wound on the inside of his thigh in front of a mirror. I lean in and find in the reflection of the immaculately painted mirror a bloody pocket-knife, alongside discarded bandaging on the floor.
The room is sparsely decorated. There’s a woodworking clamp, described as his father’s favorite tool for beating him, the same one Jaja used to build his father’s coffin. A pink ribbon’s owner is identified as Sara Harding, the first woman to show Jerome how a life lived in solitude would drain all the creative energies which Jerome felt were essential to live. It went on:
Jerome mistreated Sara, and when he left for three weeks to visit Seattle he returned to find her belongings gone and a note on the hobby-horse he built for their first daughter before Sara’s miscarriage.
Beside this, the note:
Jerome— in a way you and I never truly got to know each other. I’m sure we will painfully find in the years left to live, years which will be spent as strangers, the things we could have loved most about the other, even as memories of the pain inflicted fade. I will soon remember you fondly.
—Sara
“Still want that interview?”
Jaja had not removed the hood over his head, but he now faces me. I take out my phone to find I am shaking, and begin to record. Sitting on a sofa a few feet to Jaja’s right, him facing forward as I lean the phone towards him. The transcript of our conversation, reproduced below:
Me: This is an incredible show.
Jaja: [silence]
Me: How long did it take to work on?
Jaja: [silence]
Me: Is it only showing this once?
Jaja: Yes.
Me: Did any of these people exist?
Jaja: Every object in here is real. They are the stuff of real lives, have been manufactured for Purposes and have gone on to involve themselves in existence. The stories told are all real, about somebody, somewhere.
Me: Am I wrong to think of the show as an ode to myth-building? As in, you have created a world inside here, and we are meant to imbue it with life, to “incarnate” it, and that these people become real as we carry them into the world?
Jaja: If that is what you’ll do with it, though I don’t recommend it. These people have weight to them, and if you choose to bear that weight outside of the studio it might bury you. Would you take the time to learn all these things, and if you did, would you be able to understand them on such an intimate level as you might’ve felt them tonight? Without feeling the roughness of their towels, without seeing their handwriting, their signature? Without flipping through their mail or hearing the sound of their door-bell? And if you could understand these things, how closely to your heart could you bear to keep them?
Me: I’m curious about the way you work. Was each object here curated for the exhibit, or is all of this actually evidence of only one life, of yours?
Jaja: There’s no such thing as individuality, I think. Whether a piece you find tonight was inhabited by me or another, it is the residue of a community, and will disintegrate likewise, will revert to the same material with enough time. If each particle herein were traced to a specific path they would all, when viewed far enough away, resemble the same narrative. Creation, employment, destruction, and so on. I have no claim on any piece of matter, including the ones which make up myself right now.
Me: It seems like the show involved a massive amount of work for relatively little pay-off. Do you have a job?
Jaja: [silence]
Me: Do you consider promoting yourself more, or charging admission?
Jaja: To what end?
Me: For your work. I mean, otherwise, what is the point?
Jaja: The ability to acquire trillions of strings and weave them into something meaningful— a rope which might be pulled, identity— is the greatest thing which occurs in the cosmos. It is the only thing that is timeless, performed by all matter forever. It occurs on a level far beneath and above us, and we are lucky to participate in that game.
Me: Myth-making.
Jaja: [silence]
I realize that he is done with me. As I walk away, I find the crowd has dwindled down to a few stragglers, people looking like they’re out for a fix or a place to crash. I walk through the studio in reverse, lives blurring past me with dizzying meaning, and exit into the silent Montgomery night, away from the strange glow of the enigmatic man. I have a feeling that I’ll never see him again. A feeling, I have no doubt, curated and disseminated in secret by Jaja himself like propaganda, or like words between elderly lovers.
It strikes me that men like this— mythmakers, mystics, frauds, perhaps— generally operate out of an exhaustion with the lay of the world as they’ve found it. Any youthful energy in Jaja is gone, by the time he has learnt repeatedly the myriad methods of disappointment. The flock of mankind will fuck you over, spoiling your dreams of saving the world.
Artists like Jaja construct houses of myth around them, out-chess anyone who enters in search of an equal, a partner. They toss brilliant ideas, inspired inventions, purifying poetry and Oscar-worthy scripts into waste baskets because they don’t pass some ethical Strauss-test. They dream within those 5th through 12th dimensions, the ones curled up within our world so tightly we pass through them without realizing we’ve left our plane and returned countless times over.
They are desperate, heroic figures.
And they’d like to be left alone.
The rain had stopped, but cloud-coverage still forbade anything resembling a sunset. Yet there one was. Across the tracks and against the row of white houses raised upon the berm was that unmistakable orange glow, early and unnatural.
I searched the ground and found a lock-box with a hole carved out, from which the piercing orange rays projected through the rain onto the opposing buildings. Atop that lock-box sat Jaja, perched outside a dilapidated bodega, in the final moments of us being strangers.
Me: Is that a projector?
Jaja: Yup.
Me: How does that work?
Jaja: Mirrors.
Me: Like, inside the box?
Jaja: [sigh] Yes.(to a man leaving the bodega): You got an extra cig?
Me: Here. (I produced one as an offering, and he hesitated, eying me before accepting.)
Jaja: Thanks. It’s lenses. There’s a flame on the inside, and then a bunch of tiny pieces of glass refracting it or whatever, and then the light projects outwards through that hole. And I added flowers.
Me: How often do you fire it up?
Jaja: Whenever I want to see a sunset and there isn’t one.. One time Amtrak tried to fine me because the light blinded one of their drivers.
Me: I’m Ryan by the way.
Jaja: Jaja.
Me: Jaja?... What do you do?
Jaja: Builder. (He gestured to a flat above the bodega) I work out of my shop here.
Me: I work at the radio station in Charleston, you should come on air and do an interview.
Jaja: Nah dude.
Me: Can I get your number if you change your mind?
Jaja: No.
Me: Nice to meet you, man.
My time in West Virginia has been defined by moments like these. Moments of inspired awe as I look closer and closer at a world not considered by the taste-makers of those coastal crown jewels. Moments where I realize that not all great artists are backed by machines of production and refinement, that it doesn’t take a national audience to verify something’s genius. I take baths in the Kool-Aid, I revel in the potential of creation sans capital, I remember the forgotten beauty of art-for-art’s-sake.
The last time I visited Montgomery was for work, my first murder and the only triple-murder I ever covered in my time as a news man. I stood in shame, camera on my shoulder, struggling to capture a pool of blood in the dim 3am light. Thirty officers from six different departments took notes and questioned witnesses. One confessed that “things like this are five times as common as they are reported.” I’ve since quit that job. I wonder if what I’m doing now is some pitiful attempt at retribution, as if this city asked for a goddamn’d savior.
Now, between crumbling brick, under faded marquees of Pizza Shops advertising the best Pepperoni Rolls, I find alley-ways strewn with fire escapes and clothes-lines. Apparitions of a wayward metropolis. Forget your New Yorks, your Chicagos, your growth and renewal. Give me a city that has locked in its answer, which has passed its peak and now tells a story with an ending.
In that rubble, I found Jaja.
There was something about him I couldn’t get out of my mind. He was the personification of the West Virginia I had come to find. I tried in vain to glean details about him online and around Charleston, ever-cautious about which flags I raised. I was all too aware of the history this place has with carpet-baggers.
I found him on Facebook, but what was there only deepened his enigma; he had no posted photos, only sketches of himself with cartoonish, monstrous proportions.. Flipping through his tagged photos, I found grainy images dating back thirty years of him with musicians; photos where he toyed with strange instruments which looked like none I had seen before. Some seemed ancient, some as if they were waiting to be invented.
I asked a co-worker at the radio station, someone with infinite knowledge of the art and artists of the River Valley, what she knew about Jaja. She raised her eyebrows. “He doesn’t do shows anymore, but yeah, he’s a local legend. He used to headline around town. I only saw him a couple of times— he hasn’t performed in years.”
When I asked another friend, he mentioned a name which had become sacred in this state, adding to the lore that Jaja had worked closely with Daniel Johnston when they were twenty. He mentioned an opera they wrote together and an entire series of illustrations they’d created to accompany it. Copies of the designs were briefly handed around town, but as far as he knew nothing came of it.
With little fuel, as my life settled into the mundane and West Virginia became less of an idea than the place where I bought groceries, the myth of Jaja petered out—until that day in the coffee shop when I saw that poster, the one with a simple drawing: cartoonishly large head, tiny mouth, bulging eyes, on the body of a possum. I leaned in and saw, in the smallest of fonts, a date and a location: July 11th; The Montgomery Shop. It was all I needed.
~
I peel out of the Kanawha Falls parking-lot and further down Route 60 until the precarious bridge to Montgomery comes into view through the rain. I park my car outside the same bodega where I once met Jaja, duck beneath the torrent, and enter a broken-and-repaired glass door propped open by a brick. I ascend a dark staircase towards ambient music from above, ethereal drum-patterns overlaid with a sporadic and disorienting piano, and as the staircase and my heart-beat crescendo in harmony I enter a bare-boned studio, transition into a fluorescent atmosphere full of people silently milling.
The flat is massive— walls reaching just short of the high ceilings and connected to the floor via wheels, so that the lay-out might be changed based on Jaja’s needs. The floor is hardwood, with rugs strewn about, occasionally overlapping, serving as ersatz tour-guides through the strange gallery.
People of all ilks— wealthy locals with glasses of red wine next to haggard drifters in stained jackets— populate the dizzying space. By the entrance is a large placard that reads “Nobodies.” At the entrance to each room is a large portrait. The first one I encounter is a life-sized photograph of a man in a rain jacket standing beneath an awning, cigar in mouth, eyes heavy with age and cast just below the camera’s lens as if he was studying the photographer’s necklace.
In the first room, I find a strange assortment of furniture. Glass cases filled with strange relics line the wall— a hat charred by fire, a wedding ring, a smoked and chewed cigar resembling the one from the photo. Besides these objects, small inscriptions:
Robert’s favorite and longest-lasting hat. He found it in his son’s bedroom after the kid left and it remained in a box for six years awaiting his return. One day Robert put it on and felt warmed by the fact that it fit perfectly, the first sign in years that somewhere out there was a remnant of his existence.
Another:
Robert’s wedding ring, removed three months before his divorce from Jolene and kept in a small chest in his bed-side lockbox. Notice a blood-stain on the left-edge, likely accrued from Robert’s work with toughened ropes on the barge-dock by the London Locks, three miles from Montgomery.
Another:
A smoked cigar, collected after being tossed into the street by Robert. On the night of this cigar Robert announced his retirement to his closest friend, Samuel Hayes, who he then only spoke to three more times in the seven years before his death. Samuel was critical of the way Robert tossed his cigar into the street and commented quietly that “you never think of others, do you?”
Beside a damaged couch in the center of the room a placard read:
The couch Robert sat on for thirteen years, which he threw out superstitiously when Pitt upset WVU in the Backyard Brawl, 2007.
The room is filled with a poor recording of someone butchering Chopin, and a note beside the speaker reads:
the second-to-last last time Robert played piano before his hands succumbed to arthritis, and playing became impossible. On the Tuesday before his death Robert tried the keys from the out-of-tune piano which lay dormant for years in his living room. He was unable to make any pleasant noise, and through tears decided that if he could no longer make music, he’d rather not live.
I read the small plaques, suffer the same three-minute recording four or five times before moving on to the next room, finding another portrait. Beside it stands the coworker who had told me of Jaja’s work with Daniel Johnston. I say hello. She notes the incredible brush-work, and I lean in to see that it isn’t a photograph at all, but a painting. “That’s incredible,” I whisper, and realize the portrait of Robert in the rain was in the same style. In a shiver it dawns on me. “They weren’t real people?”
She leaves me to roam the second gallery, entitled Marsha Gorecki. There are objects and placards, details of Marsha’s childhood in Roanoke, the swing where her sister fell to her death, the phonograph her grandmother used to wind for her, a paper airplane she made on the first date with a future husband. A small, shriveled thing, purple and brown, identified as the liver removed in a failed attempt to cure her cancer. My knees buckle when I read about a trip Marsha tried to make to visit her husband’s grave in Norfolk, the way a torrential rain forced her to check into a motel in Charlottesville without a heater, the place where she would catch the pneumonia which eventually weakened and killed her.
I move through the other rooms, finding bookmarks, lighters, mugs stained with lipstick and candles burnt to the nub. Each room brings to life a life never lived, establishing from ruins the forlorn remnants of nobodies, who lived and died through the blurry and mad stuff of existence. I laugh at jokes never told, muse over pages from journals filled with thoughts and grocery lists never fulfilled, never real except here, built by Jaja. In the final room a solitary figure in a black hood sits motionless on a hand-crafted stool, a figure I identify by its bulk and hands as Jaja himself. The photo-realistic portrait at the front of the room reads Jerome Adkins Junior. It shows Jaja in boxers, busy dressing a horizontal wound on the inside of his thigh in front of a mirror. I lean in and find in the reflection of the immaculately painted mirror a bloody pocket-knife, alongside discarded bandaging on the floor.
The room is sparsely decorated. There’s a woodworking clamp, described as his father’s favorite tool for beating him, the same one Jaja used to build his father’s coffin. A pink ribbon’s owner is identified as Sara Harding, the first woman to show Jerome how a life lived in solitude would drain all the creative energies which Jerome felt were essential to live. It went on:
Jerome mistreated Sara, and when he left for three weeks to visit Seattle he returned to find her belongings gone and a note on the hobby-horse he built for their first daughter before Sara’s miscarriage.
Beside this, the note:
Jerome— in a way you and I never truly got to know each other. I’m sure we will painfully find in the years left to live, years which will be spent as strangers, the things we could have loved most about the other, even as memories of the pain inflicted fade. I will soon remember you fondly.
—Sara
“Still want that interview?”
Jaja had not removed the hood over his head, but he now faces me. I take out my phone to find I am shaking, and begin to record. Sitting on a sofa a few feet to Jaja’s right, him facing forward as I lean the phone towards him. The transcript of our conversation, reproduced below:
Me: This is an incredible show.
Jaja: [silence]
Me: How long did it take to work on?
Jaja: [silence]
Me: Is it only showing this once?
Jaja: Yes.
Me: Did any of these people exist?
Jaja: Every object in here is real. They are the stuff of real lives, have been manufactured for Purposes and have gone on to involve themselves in existence. The stories told are all real, about somebody, somewhere.
Me: Am I wrong to think of the show as an ode to myth-building? As in, you have created a world inside here, and we are meant to imbue it with life, to “incarnate” it, and that these people become real as we carry them into the world?
Jaja: If that is what you’ll do with it, though I don’t recommend it. These people have weight to them, and if you choose to bear that weight outside of the studio it might bury you. Would you take the time to learn all these things, and if you did, would you be able to understand them on such an intimate level as you might’ve felt them tonight? Without feeling the roughness of their towels, without seeing their handwriting, their signature? Without flipping through their mail or hearing the sound of their door-bell? And if you could understand these things, how closely to your heart could you bear to keep them?
Me: I’m curious about the way you work. Was each object here curated for the exhibit, or is all of this actually evidence of only one life, of yours?
Jaja: There’s no such thing as individuality, I think. Whether a piece you find tonight was inhabited by me or another, it is the residue of a community, and will disintegrate likewise, will revert to the same material with enough time. If each particle herein were traced to a specific path they would all, when viewed far enough away, resemble the same narrative. Creation, employment, destruction, and so on. I have no claim on any piece of matter, including the ones which make up myself right now.
Me: It seems like the show involved a massive amount of work for relatively little pay-off. Do you have a job?
Jaja: [silence]
Me: Do you consider promoting yourself more, or charging admission?
Jaja: To what end?
Me: For your work. I mean, otherwise, what is the point?
Jaja: The ability to acquire trillions of strings and weave them into something meaningful— a rope which might be pulled, identity— is the greatest thing which occurs in the cosmos. It is the only thing that is timeless, performed by all matter forever. It occurs on a level far beneath and above us, and we are lucky to participate in that game.
Me: Myth-making.
Jaja: [silence]
I realize that he is done with me. As I walk away, I find the crowd has dwindled down to a few stragglers, people looking like they’re out for a fix or a place to crash. I walk through the studio in reverse, lives blurring past me with dizzying meaning, and exit into the silent Montgomery night, away from the strange glow of the enigmatic man. I have a feeling that I’ll never see him again. A feeling, I have no doubt, curated and disseminated in secret by Jaja himself like propaganda, or like words between elderly lovers.
It strikes me that men like this— mythmakers, mystics, frauds, perhaps— generally operate out of an exhaustion with the lay of the world as they’ve found it. Any youthful energy in Jaja is gone, by the time he has learnt repeatedly the myriad methods of disappointment. The flock of mankind will fuck you over, spoiling your dreams of saving the world.
Artists like Jaja construct houses of myth around them, out-chess anyone who enters in search of an equal, a partner. They toss brilliant ideas, inspired inventions, purifying poetry and Oscar-worthy scripts into waste baskets because they don’t pass some ethical Strauss-test. They dream within those 5th through 12th dimensions, the ones curled up within our world so tightly we pass through them without realizing we’ve left our plane and returned countless times over.
They are desperate, heroic figures.
And they’d like to be left alone.