Maile Colbert/Letter to the Editor

Maile Colbert

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Letter to the Editor

on the Morning After The Execution

I’m very sorry I won’t be meeting my deadline.  I’ve been battling technology and all its little hiccups and disasters for a week now, attempting to make another deadline for a group show.  And a podcast.  And the new class I’m teaching.  And the artwork for an album.  And all of the little pieces I put out to the world hoping for some sort of human feedback wave to continuously wash over me and tell me I am still doing, still doing, still doing and not lost and not too sick or too tired or too brain-fogged.

It was in the background noise all this week, dropping in and out of the periphery… enough for me to shake my head at the country I left, that I find myself defending in spite of and despite of… because I miss it.  That strange, warm, friendly and dangerous… failing, falling giant.

This morning, a break from battling yet another technology battle… I remembered it was set to happen last night.  I started reading the news with all of the geographical and cultural and economical and situational distance between us.  The sort of distance good reporting can provide.  It all crashed when I read about his last meal.

He had refused the option of a last supper.  He refused to accept that this thing looming closer could possibly happen.  Whose nature could accept that?  What nature could accept that?  He had a cheeseburger and baked beans and grape soda.  There was more, but that’s what I remember.  The grape soda.  There is something so vulnerable about a person eating. He had grape soda.

I have a tendency to position myself closer to animal rights than human rights issues.  There is something personal in this I struggle to articulate, though I always manage to come up with something when I’m asked to defend this position… which happens more and more. It’s seen as a luxury that can’t be afforded. I believe in the interconnectivity of things… I believe these issues are connected.  Today I find myself wondering, however, how we could possibly manage to take care of the flora and fauna of this world, when we could poison the life out of a human being and call it law.

Mornings like this I wonder if I should go on medication. I take a bath to attempt to thaw and lighten.  I notice I forget to take a breath, so I inhale enough for three.  The movement of my diaphragm pushing against the water causes a wave.  The wave travels and returns just as I inhale again.  For a little while, I am breathing with the water.  I am thinking only of breath and feeling only the water.

Then I think of grape soda, and quickly switch to  thinking of  the class I have to teach tomorrow… and how will I get such a large file to England for a show… and did I finish everything for the podcast launch…and what will I write to Mike about not making the deadline…

All My Best,

Maile

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 About the contributor:

Maile Colbert is an intermedia artist with a concentration on sound and video, relocated from Los Angeles and living and working between New York and Lisbon, Portugal. She spent the last two years collaborating with Binaural/Nodar and is currently director of Cross the Pond, an organization based on arts and cultural exchange between the U.S. and Portugal.

She holds a BFA in The Studio for Interrelated Media from Massachusetts College of Art, and a MFA in Integrated Media/Film and Video from the California Institute of the Arts.