Things and not-things

Closeness is important for writing. What kind of closeness? I have to feel like I’m looking at something in order to write about it, which I believe is often why I write about the things I am looking at. What is this closeness you have when you look at something? ? Seeing something is to experience the truth of there being nothing between you and the thing you are seeing. Maybe not nothing at all, but where something would prevent you from seeing what you’re seeing, there is nothing. It’s nice to think of emptiness as the space occupied by sight. Sometimes seeing has the felt experience of that particular nothing that allows it to take place, but often it doesn’t. I only experience the nothing when seeing is incredible, when I am seeing something incredible. In looking at a striking thing, there is a wonderment about the sight of it being there at all. A “how could it be?” kind of feeling. Seeing something incredible is to feel that the sight at hand has been exposed, or even that it h...

One wall of The Pond Froze Over The other day, I dashed into what was a radiant and sensitive show up at Procession Gallery, The Pond Froze Over . I stepped through the space with the slightness and waver of a pencil’s line--just in the way that the space’s atmosphere compelled me to; you could not step boldly through the room for you would drown out the sound of the works--quivering as they were as though (or perhaps they actually were) balancing on a singular spot of softness. Early in my arrival, in the midst of getting my bearings, I happened to turn around and face the outside that I came from, and there happened to be someone out there, on the other side of the street, tagging, with black spray paint, a few objects that were leaning against the brick side wall of a building. This filled me with glee. It fulfilled the strange rareness of witnessing someone mark-make while being surrounded by mark-making in the past tense--unwitnessed marks already having been made. These few thoug...

There are a few objects that I can construe as viewpoints. What each object is, at least in part, is able to be used as a way to see something. This has occurred (this being the turning of an object into a viewpoint) with objects whose unique appearances are built upon, or take place within, structures that feel easily generalizable from each instance of the object’s individual presence. In other words, something can be taken away from the existence of the object, from one specific instance of its existence, while still being true to it. (To generalize is to take from one thing and bring somewhere else.) Still, the question of how true? stays close. How much truth can the generalization retain? And how far does a generalization stray from the object it comes from? The primary example I have of an object with this ability to be generalized (somewhere along the lines this becomes an ability, but it probably more accurately starts at what is a quality of the object that leads to this b...