![]() In the last months of his life we were correspondents, yes, but within the outpouring of grief and tenderness that sprang forth in the world and online after Mark’s sudden death, my mostly inconsequential interactions with Mark (or should I stick with Baumer, thus elucidating for the reader my distance from him? Or should I go with Mark, thus making clear, I fear, my connection-neediness, my desire to be on the inside of what I’m outside against, scratching at) seem decidedly inconsequential. The first reason such a disagreeableness envelopes me is because I didn’t know Mark Baumer not once did we meet. In all the necessary and subconsciously established ways, the ability to feel shame makes one feel like an adult. More importantly thank you for believing in me. ![]() Thanks for the polaroid and the tender buttons card also. If, as Beckett wondered, there was a nothingness there, it was one yet full of thingness, ample and worthy of attention. Veil torn, he found much to examine behind it. Beckett’s quote comes close to how art wrapped itself within Baumer. His writing endeavored to part invention from convention, to dismantle the customary in order to mindfuck the actual. In an early letter, Samuel Beckett wrote to a friend: “More and more my language appears to me like a veil which one has to tear apart in order to get to those things (or the nothingness) lying behind it.” Here, then, seems a fitting comment on Baumer’s existence through the prism of language-writing- black words on white paper-in both life and death. While alive, Baumer transcended life now dead, he transcends death. Then again, so seemed life when he was brightly lit inside it. Three years after Mark Baumer was fatally hit by a negligently driven SUV in January 2017, death is still unrepresentative of the writer and environmental activist. By Jeff Alessandrelli | Contributing Writer
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