The Wit of the Staircase

Last summer, BLDGBLOG interviewed author Erik Davis about Davis's new book The Visionary State – a book that was originally sent to me on the advice of a woman named Theresa Duncan.
Theresa was the author of an often disarmingly sharp blog called The Wit of the Staircase.

[Image: Artist/photographer unknown. From an old post on The Wit of the Staircase].

When I announced that BLDGBLOG was moving to Los Angeles last September, Theresa and I got in touch, and we began emailing here and there, maybe once a month. Soon, I saw her at the first BLDGBLOG event, back in January; she and her boyfriend, artist Jeremy Blake, tried to meet up with me and my wife at David Maisel's L.A. opening gala (but our timing was off); and then, after she and Jeremy moved back to NYC, to live in the attic of a church in Manhattan's East Village, they stopped by the closing party for Postopolis!
She also sent me links here and there, and her emails were incredibly encouraging – in fact, she's one of the people I thanked when announcing the BLDGBLOG Book back in May.
So I was stunned, saddened, and horrified to learn, in the context of an otherwise casual email exchange, that Theresa committed suicide two weeks ago. Somehow I missed the news.
A few days later, her boyfriend, Jeremy Blake, left behind a note in a pile of clothes on the beach and then "walked into" the Atlantic – and his body has yet to be found.
The story's been all over The New York Times, The L.A. Times, Modern Art Notes – basically everywhere – even as author Ron Rosenbaum has been using their deaths, somewhat irresponsibly, to speculate about what he wants to believe was a murder.
Of course, Theresa was well-known for her "paranoiac" writings about Scientology, the art world, CIA black ops, secret FBI files, and the like – this post, in particular, has received a huge amount of attention this past week (and it's a crazy thing to read) – but to throw her entire blog away as mere political ravings overlooks the vast majority of the site's actual content: short observations – often limited to single quotations and photographs – with an articulate precision and interpretive confidence other writers would only dream of achieving. She could be writing about supermodels, the occult, music, 9/11, Percy Bysshe Shelley, perfume, Los Angeles, or the films of Quentin Tarantino.
Not everyone will agree with the political views espoused in this essay, for instance, but Theresa wrote one of the best and most energetic reviews of Grindhouse I've ever read; and she posted a long interview with Father Frank Morales, an Episcopal priest, in which they talk about everything from Philip K. Dick and Jerry Falwell to the Moonies, Freud, Marx, science fiction, and Disneyland – all by way of a discussion about Jesus Christ.
Here's an excerpt:

Wit of the Staircase: You know, Philip K. Dick is really interesting on this, too, because he had a conversion experience in California – he famously lived next door to Disneyland – and a woman came to the door. She was wearing a fish sign, a Pisces sign that the early Christians used. And he claims he had this sort of mystical experience that was across dimensions of time. And he actually suddenly felt that time was an illusion. So he said ever after he had the feeling time was essentially created by Satan to prolong and delay the return of Jesus Christ, the Second Coming. So, under all of the supposed progress and all of the change, he says it's just an overlay over the same unchanging reality. It's still like the day that Christ died, and he felt the anticipation of resurrection, the thrill, he says, constantly.

Frank Morales: I totally agree with that.

Wit: So other than the hucksters, the Falwells and the L. Ron Hubbards of the world, there are these startlingly generous and original religious thinkers. P. K. Dick – obviously, he's a little wiggy, but he's an original thinker, and this old narrative was just completely alive for him. And Slavoj Žižek is great on the continuing radicality of Christian love and forgiveness, particularly in his book The Puppet and The Dwarf, which is also thankfully very good on Freud and Marx.

Morales: As a matter of fact, to use that metaphor again, without sounding preachy, reminds me of Buckminster Fuller's comments, why do you think they call the basic element of time "the second"? Because it's not the first.

Wit: Well, because P.K. Dick lived next to Disney World, he talked about the animatronics there – the servo operated puppets and the moving pirates and the fake birds – a place everything was artificial. And he said that that's like the second reality. But he said, someday a real bird was going to sing at Disneyland and uncover the first reality.

Morales: Ah, beautiful.

In any case, this is personal news creeping onto an architecture website – but I'm stunned. And I don't mean to imply that we were close friends – we weren't – in fact, we only communicated through email. But sometimes you look away and things just disappear.