I purchased Indiana’s Fire Season, selected essays 1984-2021, a couple months into living solely on the kindness of friends. I put everything I dearly owned into storage. I left nightstand and dresser on street corner of affluent neighborhood hoping they might find a more suitable home. I crashed on sleeper sofas and talked to inverted roses (chain-smoking strangers) with cretinous drawls off Avenue A. Between spits they told me to memorize glow more than color. They had whiplash hair, their sorrow dried platinum blonde or jet black blue. The bruises beneath their checkered heels were inexhaustible and you never truly knew a word until they sounded it out. I grew my fingernails out to become a chimerical creature, hoping for two extra teeth behind the ear. I listened to Otis Redding’s “I’ve Got Dreams To Remember” and my eyes, increasingly oeil-de-boeufs, became light sensitive to every Indiana dictum. “William Burroughs once told me, ‘People like us are lucky because every shitty thing that happens to us is just more material,’” he writes. “I want to remember the many people I love who are gone and remind myself how much I love the ones who are still here. I’ll let you in on a little secret: if you live long enough, you even get fond of people you thought you hated.” The sixteen-year-old Granite state runaway, uniquely affectionate and caustic, would publish his first collection of fiction in his late thirties, after decades and some change spent in San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York City paying the rent in art editorials and theatre gigs. He does not dole out uneven considerations, and in preface to his anthologized art writings laments, “the technological acceleration of our lives, especially in the way information travels, and the way published material is received... foremost the monetisation and algorhythmisation of human activity...
Looking back, I think the ideal audience for the (Village Voice) column consisted of people who made art, or liked art, but were also interested in the world and what was happening to it.” Indiana punctuated absurdity with an affecting humor, never allowing his readers to compartmentalize what was rightfully cause for alarm and political resistance; the AIDs epidemic, Reaganism, Roy Cohn, a Supreme Court headed by William Rehnquist, and grifters navigating the horrors misplaced ambitions invoke are just a few of the topics he draws from in his articles and crime trilogy novels. His characters remark ‘fait accompli’ with a crowbar tucked neatly in the back seat. They pity the man who ends up a fool sacrificing so wholly for the societal accolades of distended birthings. They recognize that this might be their fate one day soon, or that it has been and might continue to be if upper body strength atrophies under resignation. Integrity begins after symptoms of the all-night vigil begin to subside, and Indiana seems to rest in the armchair of smoke-filled room, of human psyche, explaining you are not marooned if you come to. What he possibly cannot forgive is the truism that some are serenely self-concerned, and his life’s work becomes a critique of normalizing insensate values, what willfully lives outside empathy and the common good. Seven months prior to Indiana’s death he writes, “The more we become what we intended to be, the less real the earlier versions of ourselves appear to us, and yet there we were, who we were, forever for all time a monad on its travels. Through the dark times, the insoluble passage. An era can be just what it looks like, finally, with everybody’s footnotes crammed into the bottom of the frame...every minute that you didn’t die is time and a half, so to speak. You even have time to learn to bake bread or repair a motorcycle. After time runs out you will persist in someone’s memory somewhere, the way alcoholics say, ‘It’s five o’clock somewhere.’” I rummage for my copy of Fire Season after news of his passing. It is filled with notes written on the back of receipt paper, from the juncture of my life where Indiana and conversation with strangers meant the most. They create a portrait of binaries: success versus failure, understanding versus confusion, action versus inaction. Typing them out they are transmuted to a rough outline, to what Indiana called “depicting how things fall apart and reconstitute themselves in the face of disappointment.” He is the writer, the friend, to call on when nothing proves linear, when the road is forked suspenseful; dare I say these nothings, these sharp prongs that feel unyielding longer than one would care to admit, ultimately illuminate a legibility for love unto self and others.
-Katie Calderon