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We walk the planet with twelve billion collective legs. Last night, I went down to the beach and saw creatures traversing the sand, shuffling on the threshold between land and sea. I thought about this insignificant sandy perimeter separating us from our marine ancestors.
source(s): Theo Jansen
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Eventually, lines must be drawn, redrawn, drawn, redrawn.
source(s): Rob Voerman
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el recogimiento
Twenty years before my death, I wake up to el recogimiento. In it, I am looking at myself in a self-knowing, self-referential, inward-facing feeling of absolute, total solitude. In this completely solitary state of mind, in the year 1987, I am forced to consider isolated instances of destruction. During one such time sequence, I am on the open plains of the First Peloponnesian War contemplating the sordid relations of ancient warring city-states. It is on the eve of battle. I am eighty-four and on the last verges of life.
In another occurrence, I am documenting and cataloging architectural homologues: columns, buttresses, pylons, and their other structural variants throughout the ages. I am in mid-life and I am thinking about a faceless woman. Outside my window in the night sky is the residuum of a widely-accepted cosmological model: a sudden and untimed expansion of matter, then the resulting orbiting patterns of heliocentric bodies, and various astriferous arrangements in the shape of unformed constellations. Astronomically speaking, we are in a time before, during, and after creation.
In the years after el recogimiento, I do not grow older. To the untrained eye, I am an adolescent, but in fact, I am ageless. I give the remainder of my immortal life to the study of things phantasmal: the semi-permanence of archival paper the moment before it turns to dust, the center of percussion in solid objects before they are struck, the cyclical feeding habits of the pied-billed grebe the second before its arrival in the hunter’s iron sights, among others. During these flights of imagination, I visit nameless cities of past memory, places situated on Aegean shores the color of vermilion and dahlia and ruled by former despots whose influences ripple in all directions. Looking closely as a seasoned cognoscente of time, I can see that these ripples extend forward, upward, downward, outward, inward, but never backward. -
everywhere we are is where you are with me
A man sets out on a project of compression. By its end, he has effected twenty thousand little cube nuggets, one for each of his numerous belongings. In his backyard, he stacks them on top of each other to create a skyscraper three inches wide and one mile high. Following suit, I spend sequential lifetimes devising similar systems of visual demarcation. I map out luminous emittance of street lamps in my neighborhood, the viscosity of melting ice cream in an energetic child's hand, the erosion of rivers and streams into various levels of peneplains, etc. Nearing the end of my alloted time, I start to extract all the various contours that make up your body. I take all these lines and flatten them out. I space these parallel next to each other in a linear symbological arrangement, vertically, and I draw them out on paper. This piece of paper is in turn is folded up onto itself to the theoretical maximum of twelve folds. I put this mass in my pocket and I think about other possible physiographic delineations of you. There is the second excursion to the Catskills, the fifteenth weekend up at Bridgeport, the cover of my favorite book, the repeating patterns in denim, and phantom memories of Thanksgiving dinner with Pete, 1992.
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strange feelings from the orange sunlight on this sandy dry country road so far from home
Why did Vincent van Gogh paint sunflowers? In the final summer months of the artist's life, he moved to the suburban commune Auvers-sur-Oise, just northwest of Paris, to board with the retired Dr. Gachet and his family. Vincent's sister-in-law, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, wife of his brother and patron, Theo, remembers a day at Auvers. She writes: “Soon after, the 10th of June, we received an invitation from him to come with the baby and spend a whole day in Auvers. Vincent came to meet us at the train and he brought a bird's nest as a plaything for his little nephew and namesake. He insisted upon carrying the baby himself and had no rest until he had shown him all the animals in the yard, where a too-loudly crowing cock made the baby red in the face for fear and made him cry, whilst Vincent cried laughingly, 'the cock crows cocorico.'”
But why did Vincent paint sunflowers? Why does a narcoleptic academician have trouble with the interpretation of dreams? Why is it that the atrophied muscles of an old man who has not known hard labor induce images of pensiveness and melancholia? Why do we build buildings just to have them fall? In my mind, these questions ask themselves over and over. In German, there is the phrase ruinenwert, which translates roughly into “ruin value,” an architectural concept pioneered by the Nazi architect Albert Speer. It is a theory that propounds that buildings be conceived and designed in such a way that the eventual ruined and naturally-collapsed remnants of the structures should be more aesthetically-pleasing than if they were maintained at all. Controlled dereliction, decay, and ruination.
When walls are demolished to reveal shells of half-standing rooms, we fill these empty spaces with days. In a retrospective, an individual's time is no longer measured in hours and weeks, but condensed and summarized into years, decades, and periods. Corresponding with his beloved brother Theo in a series of letters that spanned the better of eighteen years, Vincent writes in #573, dated January 22nd or 23rd, 1889: “You may know that the peony is Jeannin's, the hollyhock belongs to Quost, but the sunflower is mine in a way.”
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Whately, MA 01093
Untitled
Arturo Marin
Polaroid SX-70, 600 Series film
Logic will break our hearts. When we read maps, those pictorial representations of terrain and topography, we are apt to see logical, organized, two-dimensional aerial projections of the grounds we walk on. Geomorphometrically, they are zoomed-out views of the land: the bucolic expanses of Paranapiacaba, fields of bougainvilleas in the west, crop circles as seen by cereologists, sloops cutting over the waters of Lake Michigan, etc. In the same way that national borders offer a division of governments and jurisdictions, I can say that state lines are buffer zones for the emotional quotients of travelers crossing them. In one instance of my mind, a man takes a car to be with someone. Fact is, he's not in love with her in any discernible way, but he goes anyway. The bed they share is partitioned into two invisible halves. In another instance, it is divided thrice, one for each a woman and her two co-inhabiting lovers. In the shower of the bathroom, the water runs hot momentarily as someone flushes the toilet next door. In these two separate cases of intimate geometry, we apportion and section off parts of our lives logically— we compartmentalize our mortality into ways easily referenced later. We do this because we like to keep things forever. So when I look at hills, I don't think of changes in elevation. Instead, in this instance, I turn around and nudge you from over my shoulder where you are sleeping. I say, wake up, the kid next door is taking flight again. You don't want to miss this. Wake up, sleepyhead.
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hello again, it's been a while
Clearly, you've never seen the moon fall before. It happens all the time here, actually. Last time it happened to come too close, a group of self-described lunar enthusiasts wrote their own pamphlet warning of impending doom and distributed it worldwide. “On the Effects of a Second Giant Impact Hypothesis: A Proposal.” Instant best-seller. I mean, what else are you supposed to do in event of a moon disaster? Funny thing was, it worked. It slung itself back to a safe distance in a few months. Parties, celebrations, festivals, bacchanalia, all these wild parties for years after. All the futurists and fear-mongers slunk back to their paper buildings in their hovercrafts, munching on peanuts and expired packaged junk food and mumbling under their breaths in their unintelligible, generationally-inflected form of Pig Latin about the dangers of suburban entropy. All types of characters. Remember the high priest of string theory who was obsessed with long division? He tried to shave your head when you weren't looking. Probably to tie the strands end-on-end to measure the circumference of the Earth. Me though, I'm mostly concerned with lovers. To me, they're statistical anomalies of human personality permutations. I'm working on the algorithm for us, us two. If the moon were to fall again, would that make it any likelier? What would we do? Terrified, we could paint the sky a shade of monochrome grey and decide that yes, why indeed yes, it's going to be all right. Is that fine though? I mean, how long have we stood here looking at the atmosphere? How long have we both been alone? It's been a while, darling, hasn't it?
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things to tell you
I promise I wasn't watching you sleep last night.
It just happened to be someone who had a mask,
which just happened to resemble my face.
And he just happened to be standing in the bushes
outside a window, which just happened to be yours.
Perhaps he was a lover of landscape vegetation,
practicing acts of immobility in the shrubbery,
this curious man outside your window.
I swear he had things to tell you,
about a broken bag of beans strewn on the sidewalk.
Drawing lines between them,
he saw constellations in the concrete:
superimposed images of Orion, Crux, Taurus,
and outputs of EKG machines:
those visual readouts of heart palpitations;
and print-outs of distant airwave frequencies:
physical representations of radio chatter over Luxembourg—
all these things.
The elasticity of a rubber ball,
a man with a saxophone,
Leo Tolstoy's history of the Cossacks,
the ingenuity of 20th century civilization,
the structural relics of Palladio and Gaudi,
the technical theories of Vitruvius,
and random animate displays of affection,
all these products of human perception.
I promise I wasn't watching you sleep last night.
It just happened to be someone
who thought he was me.
You see, I had things to tell you,
mostly about the upsides of my augmented reality,
and how I get lost from time to time.
Looking out my window now,
everywhere everything is dancing.
There are explosions outside
not of fireworks,
but of intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Honest to God, I could really say it was,
if there ever could be,
this beautiful day without you. -
what we did and didn't know about time
the memory
First, a memory: I am walking out to the corner store to buy some milk. I don't know why I am doing this because in my refrigerator, stacked in a most efficient manner are cartons and cartons of unopened ones. They all have expiration dates with a shelf life of ten thousand years. I have been buying one a day for several years now in hopes of getting one not from the present and not from the future. When I open the grocery store freezer, I reach for the ones in the front and I see history. Printed in black dot-matrix ink on the cartons in front of me are numerical representations of yesterday— the rise and fall of the Ottoman Empire, the complete historiography of extinct Anatolian languages, the wars of the ancient Macedonian kingdom, the amalgamation of time lost readjusting clocks for a unified chronological system set to planetary movements. I go and make my purchase. The clerk behind the register looks more and more like a cow everyday. Twenty-two minutes and fifty-seven seconds after I leave, his establishment will be robbed by three adolescents out for a scare. The mastermind of the group had accidentally and unknowingly mislabeled the box of blanks and live rounds the night before. When I get home, I open the refrigerator and I put this carton in with the rest. Seeing the organized arrangement, I think of neatly-stacked containers on a transatlantic cargo ship.
the universe holographic
On a bus is a woman with tight pants attentively holding on to a straphanger's pole. Seated beside her is a man with eyes magnetically inclined toward tight clothing. In his mind, zippers have a tendency to burst and buttons are statistically likely to pop. When he squints with concentration, he believes he can see through objects. It follows that in a transparent universe where undergarments are unnecessary, there are young lovers dancing. When a hand is put between her inner thighs, there is a rhythmic concatenation falling in time with the movements of the clock on the wall.
the timestamp of the Holy Roman Empire
In 1936, a historian of classical antiquity glued himself to the ground. In his hand was a gilded, leather-bound history of the Holy Roman Empire. He believed in testing the effects of gravity on imagination, the effect of physics on metaphysics. As he stood there, he thought about the man who could not stand to caulk his bathroom tiles periodically, instead gouging his eyes out to avoid watching the mildew grow. He thought about the boy who had a habit of buying the same calendar year after year to achieve immortality. While permanently rooted to the ground, he lastly thought about the philosopher Gaston Bachelard who wrote a treatise on the psychoanalysis of fire. Ten thousand years later, a polystrate fossil of an upright man is found among the petrified forests.
the moment of our sudden metamorphoses
The image of the neatly-stacked transatlantic cargo ship is returning to me again. At a party, someone says they can see the effects of time on my face. I don't want to believe it at first, but then I feel it. Yes, on my face is the twitching second hand connected to my nose, the hour hand following thereafter. In fact, in the mirror, I cannot make out my birth-given features anymore. My head has effectively become a timepiece. I cannot believe my transformation and with my facial features indistinguishable, I can all but walk around unfounded. In my subsequent temporal dreams, I am in a large and empty cavernous room where sounds are reflected and magnified off each of its walls. I think of a taut membrane being struck in the vicinity, then of the production of vibrations and finally, of the geometry of echoes.
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untitled
I walk down the street and I pass by a shop I've never seen before. I've never seen it before in my life, but I can't help but regard an inkling in the back of my mind that I've been inside at one time, even if its existence was questionable every second prior to the one that I found it. You see, the shop sells cheese. So in this distant metaphysical memory of remembrances past, I am forced to think of cheese. In fact, while I stand in front of the shop's window, I am driven to think of not only cheese, but for some reason, also of functions. To clarify: at one point in his life, the French architect Le Corbusier was quoted to have said that the role of architecture was to put in order. Put what in order, one may ask? Functions and objects. So when I am standing here, thinking of cheese, I am also thinking of you because ultimately, love is nothing but a function of cheese.
In my mind, if cheese is a coagulation of milk solids, then love is the clumping together of not only two bodies, but also of sheets that threaten to stick to itself and to skin. So it follows: when there is a coalescence of bed linens, there is order. I ask the man behind the counter of the shop for some recommendations. It is only natural that when I see the example of a semi-soft, triple-cream, processed sharp cheddar that I immediately think of bodies. Bodies, bodies, nubile ones, old ones, but quite frankly, all naked. All these naked bodies are walking around, floating around, flying around, lying around, on the floor, in a chair, on a platform for the scrutiny of art students. By logical deduction however flawed: art students love cheese.
But this itself presents a problem. As I am watching them, looking over their shoulders as they hunch over their drafting tables following the contours of the female model in front of them, I restrain myself from drawing mozzarella. I have to tell them to use shadows, that hard edges suggest space, that soft ones suggest volume. By now I've taken my chalk to the floor in demonstration. I draw the figure of myself lying there forensically. I outline this figure with its own outline, and that outline with another outline, ultimately forming a topographical map. When I still do not see any hint of cheese on their papers, I run up to the front of the class. I take off all my clothes and I walk onto the platform next to the model. I walk up to her and I hope I can get all my points across to the people looking at me over their raised tables. I go up to this woman and we start to fall in with each other. Then there's an image of an enormous block of cheese in my vision. It's almost blinding me now and I can't see a thing.
