In search for spaces in lines
Twenty six paces is what it takes to still the mind. I think. I did not really try it but it sounds like the right number. Brooklyn is a space with colour. There is life. And life that is simultaneously mundane and spectacular. Perhaps one constitutes the other. Or maybe it’s jst the paces I have been taking. I spent the last week looking at sidewalks. Because when the air holds you like knives, your body doubles up, and you find the warmth of skin to huddle up to, and your eyes are trained on the ground. Occasionally you look up, and there are skeletal fingers twisting up against the darkening sky. The darkness of skies has many colours here. Sometimes it is yellowing, borrowing from metal necks that dot the street in a more or less steady rhythm. Sometimes it is blue-black. Like a bruise. But my favourite is maybe when it is a kind of dusky purple. Not quite pink (I forgot about the pink nights). Almost lavender. That was the colour of the sky last night. In the biting cold of Central Park. After the calmness and slowing down of time, the making of expansive, regulated space, in the expressions of Agnes Martin.
I’m trying to understand how it moved me. Her words moved me. The call to empty the mind, and to probe instead for a kind of exuberant calm. To understand beauty in its most abstracted form of emotions, rather than in form. Where a white flower is instead a dark brown canvas in perfectly organised lines that shiver in imperfections. And when scale is not really the 6 x 6 or 7 x 7 canvasses that surround you, but the invitation to enter and keep walking.
Two pieces moved me deeply. And they were very small. I’m not entirely sure why they moved me so much. One was a small blue piece, a kind of cobalt blue maybe, lined up in small square grids. And within each grid, was a tiny dot. And they changed shape, the dots, as they moved along the insides of the gird. And somehow that small gesture, of pausing, and dotting each impossibly tiny square blue room, with considered gentleness - that moved me so deeply. The other was also another small piece with blue. But instead, these are small square canvasses (I guessed painted before with a thin layer of blue?) cut up and tacked onto another canvas, again, in a kind of perfect/imperfect grid - some parts tugged down gently through time by gravity, forming a kind of ripple. That, moved me. The kind of conversation with something that is inevitable, that you have absolutely no control over, somewhere in future time. That no one can really prepare for. Even when you are so meticulous and careful in the spaces you make, even as they are meant to grow and become expansive, even as you make space for the small chaos of life, this happens.
Pebble and rain. Both I saw and felt, even as I saw and felt.
-
There are half-formed sentences swimming inside of me, waiting to meet other schools of words so that they can form a finished thought. But right now, it feels like condensed milk being stirred into a murky disappearance. Some threads are holding on to their forms, in their own time, but even they are dissipating.
-
The woman next to me keeps shaking her legs. I am trying not to let it bother me. And the only way is to wonder if she has something like restless limbs. Where somehow her inner metronome is very close to her muscles, and must be expressed. Like how some people cannot help but move their bodies when music enters them. So maybe she has a perpetual inner music. I wish for her though, maybe pockets of stillness. I feel like putting my hand on her knee, and give her that gift even if just for a moment. But then maybe it’s a gift for me. Airplanes are terrible spaces for either time, or space. You enter into a time machine, where all the hours stretched before you are compressed into a thin metallic body, and the sun and moon doesn’t make sense because you are not making sense. And you try to catch some kind of sanity in moments passing by counting the number of films you watched, or the numbers ticking on the top left corner, with a peg in some kind of grounded reality, at least in story. The pixellated plane moves slowly across the screen and I try to imagine how it looks like below. How close should I look?
Suddenly I am lost in an Agnes Martin painting.
Someone is considering if they should do the dishes, or leave it until after the programme on TV. Someone is feeling lonely because they haven’t been asked. Someone is sweeping the floor and screaming into the house, but really, what they want to do is weep. Someone is sharing a piece of music with someone else and their eyes are shining. Someone is hearing the sound of buildings being broken apart by a small bomb. Someone is holding someone against their chest and the only true thing is the temperature of skin shifting.
Pull up. The landscape is like the brightly lit insides of an animal. Ordered. Maybe bio-mechanical. Maybe I should jst say robotic. Or digital. Instead of trying to summon up romance in something that is a little terrifying because it has no edges or end to depth yet. And because it is growing (consuming?). It’s neat, these patterns. They follow the same path as mountains - earth suddenly seized in a hug and stayed. The same branching out as rivers, who mirror the path of limbs of trees. Do we follow the same path? In our decisions, actions, movements. I’m not sure. Maybe the poets will know.
-
Where have I been?
I am not sure my feet have touched the ground in the last 3 weeks. Or at least, my feet and my condensed milk insides have not met yet.
Maybe for another time.
I’m trying to understand how it moved me. Her words moved me. The call to empty the mind, and to probe instead for a kind of exuberant calm. To understand beauty in its most abstracted form of emotions, rather than in form. Where a white flower is instead a dark brown canvas in perfectly organised lines that shiver in imperfections. And when scale is not really the 6 x 6 or 7 x 7 canvasses that surround you, but the invitation to enter and keep walking.
Two pieces moved me deeply. And they were very small. I’m not entirely sure why they moved me so much. One was a small blue piece, a kind of cobalt blue maybe, lined up in small square grids. And within each grid, was a tiny dot. And they changed shape, the dots, as they moved along the insides of the gird. And somehow that small gesture, of pausing, and dotting each impossibly tiny square blue room, with considered gentleness - that moved me so deeply. The other was also another small piece with blue. But instead, these are small square canvasses (I guessed painted before with a thin layer of blue?) cut up and tacked onto another canvas, again, in a kind of perfect/imperfect grid - some parts tugged down gently through time by gravity, forming a kind of ripple. That, moved me. The kind of conversation with something that is inevitable, that you have absolutely no control over, somewhere in future time. That no one can really prepare for. Even when you are so meticulous and careful in the spaces you make, even as they are meant to grow and become expansive, even as you make space for the small chaos of life, this happens.
Pebble and rain. Both I saw and felt, even as I saw and felt.
-
There are half-formed sentences swimming inside of me, waiting to meet other schools of words so that they can form a finished thought. But right now, it feels like condensed milk being stirred into a murky disappearance. Some threads are holding on to their forms, in their own time, but even they are dissipating.
-
The woman next to me keeps shaking her legs. I am trying not to let it bother me. And the only way is to wonder if she has something like restless limbs. Where somehow her inner metronome is very close to her muscles, and must be expressed. Like how some people cannot help but move their bodies when music enters them. So maybe she has a perpetual inner music. I wish for her though, maybe pockets of stillness. I feel like putting my hand on her knee, and give her that gift even if just for a moment. But then maybe it’s a gift for me. Airplanes are terrible spaces for either time, or space. You enter into a time machine, where all the hours stretched before you are compressed into a thin metallic body, and the sun and moon doesn’t make sense because you are not making sense. And you try to catch some kind of sanity in moments passing by counting the number of films you watched, or the numbers ticking on the top left corner, with a peg in some kind of grounded reality, at least in story. The pixellated plane moves slowly across the screen and I try to imagine how it looks like below. How close should I look?
Suddenly I am lost in an Agnes Martin painting.
Someone is considering if they should do the dishes, or leave it until after the programme on TV. Someone is feeling lonely because they haven’t been asked. Someone is sweeping the floor and screaming into the house, but really, what they want to do is weep. Someone is sharing a piece of music with someone else and their eyes are shining. Someone is hearing the sound of buildings being broken apart by a small bomb. Someone is holding someone against their chest and the only true thing is the temperature of skin shifting.
Pull up. The landscape is like the brightly lit insides of an animal. Ordered. Maybe bio-mechanical. Maybe I should jst say robotic. Or digital. Instead of trying to summon up romance in something that is a little terrifying because it has no edges or end to depth yet. And because it is growing (consuming?). It’s neat, these patterns. They follow the same path as mountains - earth suddenly seized in a hug and stayed. The same branching out as rivers, who mirror the path of limbs of trees. Do we follow the same path? In our decisions, actions, movements. I’m not sure. Maybe the poets will know.
-
Where have I been?
I am not sure my feet have touched the ground in the last 3 weeks. Or at least, my feet and my condensed milk insides have not met yet.
Maybe for another time.