Falling In and Falling Out
The city’s color palette is changing daily now, drastically—rain yesterday, the mist muting the colors of the leaves, giving dull halos to everything it lands on, splashes off of; and today’s piercing clarity, the yellows and oranges of the leaves stricken by the sun which is today making a beauty of the public housing units across the street.
The span of a week analogous to that of a paragraph. A room-sized container. What does a week hold—what is thought, read, considered, done in the span of a week. The span and breadth and duration of a week.
On Wednesday we watched from the window as two men delivered a brand new water heater and installed it in the basement. I still think the shower doesn’t get hot enough, but Dylan disagrees.
Earlier that day I’d gone running in the rain, the trees on Eastern Parkway still holding their green, I wore shorts and wool socks, my legs reddened by wind and exertion. Someone honked and I wondered if it was for me, and then thought how arrogant to assume it was my body garnering attention on a deserted rainy path alongside a major boulevard. How self-conscious misogyny—it permenance and redundancy—makes us; how quickly self-consciousness becomes self-obsession, vanity.
On Friday I transferred $30 from my savings to go to the Whitney. I’m trying to circumvent my ongoing inclination to use my dwindling bank account as sufficient reason to never leave the house. It is, in my defense, a veritable excuse, particularly seeing as I haven’t had a full-time job for the last month, but it’s also one that’s too easy, one that becomes general and lazy. I wanted to see the Henry Taylor exhibit, which had been plastered all over town for weeks, and the Ruth Asawa drawings located a few floors above. I rationalized the expense by telling myself I would eat pasta for dinner.
Or if I was being honest, I wanted to want to see the art, but I remained unsure the art would be worth getting dressed, putting on my raincoat with a hole in the armpit, walking to the subway, letting the rain wet my phone screen while I stood on a corner in Manhattan trying to orient myself, navigating a group of kids on a class visit to the museum. So often wandering through a museum feels like posturing. Grasping for feeling, experience, description. While being unable to fully embody the presence art demands. Or asks for. I find myself present only in the moments between thinking about what to do after this, where I’ll pee if I wander around for a while, which train to take home. Between watching strangers take photos of the art on their phones and realizing I’m blocking someone’s view. The experience of going somewhere to see art just as illuminating, provocative as the art itself. How it becomes a part of the art. The art and seeing it.
What is it that I love about drawings—I came home and showed Dylan the photo I’d taken of one of Asawa’s drawings—an outline of a woman’s face, her hair, a piece that reminded me of something my grandmother had on the stairwell in her condo—and he said, you just love the little sketches, don’t you, and I said I really do. How unfinished a drawing is—the beginning of something ostensibly bigger, more detailed. A draft. I like the process drawing reveals; like a journal, or notes. The mind at work, having not yet reached the point. But getting there.
The subjects ranged from produce—watermelon, persimmons, a penciled green onion—to patterns, shapes alongside shapes. The ongoingness of these pieces, these repetitions of shape and color, began to remind me of Kate Briggs, which I was still reading or had just finished. Sometimes I wonder if I am not suited for looking at art, for appreciating it, because without context and description I am left only with feeling which appears to me, devoid of language, a general nothingness. Who cares about feeling if it cannot be described.
But these repeating designs, which I initially felt ambivalent about, drew me in when I began to consider each line, each shape—how such a thing is made both with care and reverence for each iteration of the pattern, as well as a kind of distracted, distractible drifting. How tedium can be meditative, focused, or absent-minded. How it is usually both, moving back and forth, attending to a conversation, a meal, an idea; returning again to the shaped thing. Or so I imagine. I think of my mornings in the basement of a steakhouse in Brooklyn weighing out dinner rolls on a purple scale, rolling them in the palms of my hands, making my fingers a cage.
“[New phases] kept on starting, and going on – playing out their own coexistent but unsynched durations, before being stopped or enabled to draw towards their own necessary but temporary conclusions – endings which may close the phase but do not (must not) end the work. This is what length (continuance; life) is made from (falling in and falling out)” (Kate Briggs).
And Clare telling me recently, over text, that we did not need to constantly be apologizing to one another for not performing our social roles as precisely as we may have intended. “A tribute to trust and closeness.” It is difficult to be wrong, to fumble. To not always mean what you say. To trust in the duration of a friendship, a novel, a life—the repetitions of pulling together and drawing apart.
Drawings so loose, so obviously in process. And as such, drawing as existing alongside a busy life of eating and getting dressed and caring for people. That’s kind of what I hope this space can be—art as, per Asawa, “not a series of techniques, but an approach to learning, to questioning, and to sharing.”
Things I Ate:
Pizza at Ellie’s
Extremely good hand-cut fries at a dive bar in Greenpoint
Meatball Monday for family meal yesterday
Other Things:
Some good places for your $$:
Also: here is a very easy/quick/effortless way to contact your reps regarding the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people at the hands of US-backed Israel!
Still thinking about this piece from a few weeks ago: “We Cannot Cross Until We Carry Each Other”
And I love this poem by Hala Alyan, also in Jewish Currents
A particularly poignant piece, Emily. Your description of a museum experience is right on, I just never knew the words to pair with the walking through of one. And I might be inspired to draw again.