Even if he seemed to be annoyed by the huge flow of unrequested postal communications reaching his mailbox every working-day of the year, I have a feeling that, in the ascetic loneliness of his studio, Raymond Edward the J meticulously inspected each and every single piece of junk sent to him, with his third eye always looking for that elusive riddling element that would make something click in the vast inventory of his fertile archivistic memoray. He never became that rich, but used an art grant to photocopy all the New York Correspondence School documents in his possession, piling up crate upon crate of xeroxed letters (what will happen to this mammoth depository?). Sure, the Ray-Man of Letters didn't always answer. In fact, the more you pestered him with gifts and requests, the more he seemed to recede into indifferent invisibility. But when you had totally given up hope of getting yet another message, one of his enigmatic envelopes would suddenly appear out of the blue. In December 1978, when I was still a novice of the mail art circles, I had sent Mantah Ray a necklace made out of tiny photographic prints, with an alchemical snake as a medallion. Exactly one year later, he mailed me a pen and ink drawing of someone wearing that necklace (reproduced in Arte Postale! 4, January 1980), with the wording One Year Later - Whee Whee. There is no surprise in methodical correspondence, and of course Rayjo loved to remain utterly unforeseeable in all of his manoeuvres. Through the years, I received sporadic contributions to networking projects (like Mail Art & Money Do Mix! or The Stickerman Museum) and the occasional weird piece of mail from him, intermitted with long periods of no-reply. But when I started my Mail Art Handbook of 1986 (Arte Postale! 55) with the sentence "Whenever a self-appointed historian jumps over his soap-box, he always starts talking of Ray Johnson as the Father of MA. I think this attitude is greatly misleading...", he promptly sent his witty rebuttal, addressing it to Victoria Barino and switching my text to the feminine ("she always starts talking of Ray Johnson as the Mother of MA", see Arte Postale! N.56, pag.4). A playful longing for homo tittle-tattle, or just an echo of the pagan call of Gaia? A penis for your thought. Send this paragraph to Holly Johnson's Hall of Fame.

I am often killed, he mysteriously wrote in a 4. 7. 94 piece for the Mailed Art in Uppsala catalogue. BUNNY DEAD - the NYCS bunny was murdered today 12.30.94: here's another suspect communication, sent to Artpool Space in Hungary just a few days before his death. The paper snake has slid unnoticed into the river, but he couldn't simply vanish just like that. The Big Punster has always been incredibly careful with details, numberology, anagrams, assonances, intentional mistakes, symbols and the like. I am sure that if he did indeed committ suicide, he must have left some clue for us all to find and decipher. So I re-read every Johnson-related item in my archive, essays and interviews in art magazines, catalogues, art history books, copies of private letters I collected from other networkers, looking for useful hints: born on October 16, 1987 in Detroit; on April 5th 1973 he wrote an obituary of the NYCS for the New York Times; at 62 he circulated a triangle with the sinister incription "Ray Johnson 1927-1989" (he often included in his works the date of birth and death of famous personalities); I discovered several recurring numbers but no January 13 (or 14, as someone else reported) of relevance. Friday 13th, Jason takes Long Island. The Cryptic Collagist had a soft spot for Valentine Days, so maybe we should read January 14 as the anti-February 14, a love-death metaphor. Knowing next to nothing about his health conditions or possible recent personal problems, I have found vague traces that he might have been a liable subject to depression in a few letters of his huge North Carolina Show catalogue: he is often over-anxious when the deadline of an exhibition approaches, feeling he might not be able to complete his pieces in time (almost all Ray's works grow through a slow process of accumulation and subtraction). If you have a tendency towards depression, the line between jumping and falling into a river becomes rather thin. In his younger years, the Zen MC of Gossip loved to mingle with celebrities and to visit or organize parties, he was absolutely not the reclusive worker, the hermit in jeans, t-shirt and gym shoes we have built up in our imagination. But when old friends start to drop around like flies, hours grow longer and you may even face the horror of getting tired of your own art-games. Speculations aside, I must admit I have been baffled, no apparent solution yet. Let us not S.O.L.V.E. Ray, Ray L.O.V.E.S. and dissolves. Murder, He Wrote: send this fax to Lady Angela L., care of Prince Charles.

Ain't it a shame about Ray?! There will surely be a million commemorative shows and correspondence projects in honour of Brother Ray, crumbles of his charisma rubbing off onto everyone's hands. Praise and prayers, he deserves 'em all. He might have been an irregular correspondent (wouldn't you, receiving fifty pieces of mail every day?), but he surely understood better than anyone else the entangled mechanics of networking. There are other mail art prophets & saints, but it was he, after all, who wrote the sacred Tables of the Law, paving the way for all of us to follow: the basic concepts of feedback and cooperation (even if you only watch his collages, you are allured to become a party to the game, to find new relations between the various elements, etc.), of a correspondence open to anyone (not just humans, he even wrote letters to pet-snakes, for Gossake!), and of a free distribution of art and information. You must participate to understand that the NYCS has no history, only a present - he used to say - and it really does not matter how you call it or spell it: just let the correspondance begin, and choose your own partner. I most of all regret not having ever been able to visit the smiling Locust Valleyer. I never even tried to phone him up, me stupid slobbo. But this is not really the end of the story. The Pope of Recycling Art adored clever forgeries, he invested a lot of energies imitating other people's calligraphy. There is a wealth of witty genius in mail art archives around the world that should be shared, not treasured. So recycle your personal Raylics, mail photocopies around (to my address below or to the Artpool Ray Johnson Memorial Space, to Guy Bleus, to magazines and museums, or to who you like most) and wish/ask/get other Ray-o-gems in return. But also create your own Ray Johnsons and let them freely mix with the original ones. Let's keep the legend of Virtual Rays alive and visible (wasn't he already declared an afro-american?) and scare the shit out of art dealers and posthumous glory exploiters!

All the bunny rabbits, all the snakes, all the ducks, all the Petunia skunks, all the tadpoles, all the snotty Babars, all the Mickey's hats and Marylin's slips, all the young Rimbauds, all the Elvises and rebels without a corset, all the Sluggos & Nancys, all the naked torsoes, all the armpits, all the hairy skeletons, all the tombstones, all the toilet papers, all the milkbottles, all the potato mashers, all the combs, all the dollar bills, all the light-bulbs, all the fingernails, all the crumbled underwear, all the neckties, all the sandals, all the burnt matches, all the condoms, all the tender buttons, all the silhouette portraits, all the bald heads, all the shaved heads, all the backwards signatures, all the Please Add To And Return, all the fuck-this and fuck-that, all the Ray Johnsongs, all the rubbings, all the Nothings, all the no-yes-no things, all the evaporations, all the Only Yous, all the throwaway gestures, all the floor rolling events, all the phone events, all the Fan Club meetings, all the Valentine Day performances, all the Universities, all the Correspondence Schools he's left behind. Dada Daddy has gone to play balls and starfish with Joseph Cornell, in that big Pink House on Utopia Freeway. An exquisite corpse. Send this list to Leo Castelli's ghost.

Ray Johnson hommage, the most famous unknown artist of the world: Moticos were graffiti art-shapes thirty years earlier, he pre-Popped Andy Warhol's each and every move, he's in the same class of one-of-a-kinds as Duchamp, Cornell and Maciunas (and Joyce, Cage, George Herriman, etc.). He expanded our notion of what is art, and did it in a entertaining yet enlightening and uplifting sort of way, using only "poor" materials (e.g. sandpapered painted cardboards) and slices of everyday life, keeping to small-size in spite of the dealers' demands for more saleable items. He took the pleasure of opening the morning mail (or reading other people's mail) and made it the foundation of a life career, the Supreme Poet of Tidbits: a single bottlecap is worthless, but what about ten thousand different bottlecaps from all corners of the world? He understood the true nature of obsessions, swinging cheerfully between ingenuity and sofistication, public and private. He was a natural born catalyst, a great collector and assembler of lists, chaotic and neatly meticulous at the same time. Those learning to travel the electronic highways have a lot to learn from him in terms of strategies, conceptual tricks, share-works practices and multi-mode transmutations. January 14th 1995 may as well become the event/date that signals the end of the "golden age" of mail art, that big wave of postal networking that Ray was instrumental into originating in the early Sixties, with fax/E-mail/Internet picking up its inheritance. The completion of a thirty years cycle. Ray's Gun. The world will be a bit less remarkable due to his absence absence absence. The January 19th obituary in The New York Times ends with the laconic phrase of circumstance "no immediate family members survive". How wrong. He left a world-wide family of whee-wheeping networkers. We are all his children.