Paul Sharits (1943-1993)

                                            8-26-71

dear Klaus
thank you for your kind and complimentary letter--it comes at a time when i feel somewhat discouraged + frustrated (though not "madly" so...am rather calm these days...the south west desert + my present relative solitude have "given" me a truly new "base" upon which to, hopefully, grow) --$, as you know, is hard to come by...+ petty problems at school fragment my life...at just the time that it feels necessary to pursue my research + new projects--i miss dagny (she was with me the 1st time we met), unbearably so at times...will no doubt visit with her in san fran. bay area during quarter break ( + go to see matt + cosimo + check out the film thing at their university as i have a "sorta" job offer there for next year...am sick of mid-west + afraid of ((myself in)) NYC) ...all to say, i'm not sure when i can get to NYC again...perhaps late fall--

i didn't expect that many persons, even those who "enjoyed" (?) my older work, to dig SSSSSS-- for me, "flicker" or no, SSSSSS is a continuence of my central ontological concerns with cinema--i see it, in part, even as a direct clafification of that concern--although i was pleased that several good flimmakers did like it, i am not surprised that that feeling is, apparently, not shared by some critics...ah well, to "fail" is to become free of superficial motivation---one project i want to do (the most expensive), soon, is a 4-screen (super 8 loop cartridge/sound) piece* which expands the "frame-strip" focus to the point where "it" becomes the sole "subject"--
                 *(described a bit, herein)
as regards SSSSSS's soundtrack: a difficult thing to answer directly as the whole work evolved over long period of time + "motives" became overlaid--the "relation" of sound + image is one of my main preoccupations (even though i have, in various degrees, failed to "solve" "it", in all/any of my films), the most mysterious of problems "in" cinema, i believe-- i have no firm sense of what "should happen" between sd+image--

(side 2)

hollis recently told me, being himself quite concerned with what an integral relationship might be, that he has found or created a math matrix to absolutely control sounds + images...
anyway...i'm most interested in getting what i can only call a "heterodyne effect" between vision + hearing--ie, 2 seperate systems which are similar enough in structure (only i am not very concerned with any other level of "meaning" or "connection", e.g. "metaphor" etc) so that when experienced together they "interweave" into a new-emergent, percept-mixed "whole"--the sort of thing which happens in la monte young's use of 2 slightly out of phase(xxxx) "continnous" sine tones where you hear "pulses" which "aren't there" but which are generated...uh...i'm not being very lucid--i've asked regina to loan you a journal piece * "on" the making of SSSSSS which describes (i think!) some of the factors of choice of words + so on--basically i wanted 1. a sound structure-analouge of the visual subject(s) of the flim 2 a phenomenological relation of sound levels to image levels
eg
     EXOTHERMIC EXOTHERMIC-- -- -- --                                                         +SEPARATIONS--OF--"PLANES"+
EXO STOSIS EX O STO SIS EXOSTOSIS-- ----                                  = "normal" sound as =   like the water
-- ----- ---EXOMOLOGESIS EXOMOLOGESIS-- -----                                "meaning" level         plane (a "base")
---    ----- ----- -----EXO GENOUS -- ------

"S-S-S        S-S        S-S-S-S         S-S-S                               = hisses (emergent)= like the
                                                                                                                      scratch planes
          [ i've not done a very explicit thing
           here but perhaps it is suggestive...]

3 i was "informed" either by spirits or hallucination what general sound quality i should have...i heard these "female angel whispers" insistently but meaningfully "telling me" something one nite while editing the film-----after months of wondering what the sound shoudl be like----i must admit a certain "mysticism"--perhaps it is "unhealthy" but i have no "standards" to go by at times---