#david wajnarowicz

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The weight of the earth is about things in captivity: animals and people and all that surrounds us.

Weight of the Earth: The Tape Journals of David Wajnarowicz

[whydotheheathenrage]

World AIDS Day 1992

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David Wojnarowicz, Untitled (Falling Buffalo), 1988-1989.

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From an interview titled "IDOL WORSHIP: TALKING WITH DAVID WOJNAROWICZ," conducted in 1991 by Owen Keehnen. Read the rest here.

The anecdote about Macy's alligators seems to be pulled from the Thomas Pynchon novel V. 

David Wojnarowicz: I started running away from home periodically for different lengths of time and ended up living on the streets sometime in my mid-teens. I came close to dying there. I was a walking skeleton and had no access to any kind of healthcare. I remember, at 17, trying everything I could in terms of city agencies and not being able to obtain health anywhere. Eventually I got off the streets when some guy picked me up in Times Square who let me live with him for a month in this cheap apartment in that area. He was an ex-con man. He worked as a counselor with fake degrees at a halfway house for ex-cons. He got tired of me being around because I was always stealing animals from pet shops and I turned his place into a zoo - giant African frogs and lizards and turtles. It was something I just always did as a kid. I used to steal alligators out of Macy’s and let them go in Central Park Lake thinking they were going to eat ducks and survive. I didn’t realize issues like winter.

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BOOK EXCERPT #4

From the essay "POSTCARDS FROM AMERICA X Rays from Hell," in David Wajnarowicz, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration, 1991, which reads like a paranoid, dystopian fantasy - AMERICA as HELL - except every bit of it is Real and True:

   A boxed cassette of someone's interview with me in which I talk about diagnosis and how it simply underlined what I knew already existed anyway. Not just the disease but the sense of death in the American landscape. How when I was out west this summer standing in the mountains of a small city in New Mexico I got a sudden and intense feeling of rage looking at those postcard-perfect slopes and clouds. For all I knew I was the only person for miles and all alone and I didn't trust that fucking mountain's serenity. I meant it was just bullshit. I didn't buy the con of nature's beauty; all I could see was death. The rest of my life is being unwound and seen through a frame of death. And my anger is more about this culture's refusal to deal with mortality. My rage is really about the fact that WHEN I WAS TOLD THAT I'D CONTRACTED THIS VIRUS IT DIDN'T TAKE ME LONG TO REALIZE THAT I'D CONTRACTED A DISEASED SOCIETY AS WELL.