I am going to tino sehgal's show at the guggenheim. I bike up from ps1, long island city, and full of exhaust tangled in my nostril hairs I get off and lock up my bike. there are kids running around everywhere. after I enter there's a couple embracing on the floor in slow motion, and something about the earthy tones of their garments and their curly, haphazard hair makes me feel this strange empathy towards them, and I know I will describe them as a 'beautiful couple', with similar matching energy. I wonder about their lives when they go home, after they put down their bags and put the keys on the kitchen counter, when they're mixing olive oil and balsamic vinegar and watching the fork stirring a mixture that will stubbornly not emulsify, how their lives are changed, what they think about. how they'll tie their hair back and slap soap on their hands before dinner like it's a gesture they'll never think about.

on the way up FLW's spiral one of the kids running around bounds in front of me and says 'do you want to follow me?' and I say 'yes', and he says "my name is ____" and I say "my name is ___" and he asks me in a remarkably un-rehearsed voice, "what is progress?" and I say "progress is what someone thinks will make everyone's lives better" and he says "so it's subjective?" and I say "always" and then while we're walking someone bounds up in front of us with hat askew and snaggletooth and you can tell his mother loves this pimply-faced child, and he shakes my hand, asks me another question.

and I am passed along, each time with someone older, and I talk about ambition and privacy and telephones and things like that and all the while there are two clouds that spiral off in my head like the color of foam on a cappuccino splitting in half and spiraling when you first dip a spoon into it: a) an dawning awe-full realization at what this will be, and a b) secondary wariness, of the presentation, an over-awareness of where I am. anyways I go and follow.

at the end I meet judith, judith who is a baker but used to be an artist and has brilliant blue eyes and short hair and looks like a female samuel beckett, similarly beautiful, and I talk to her about her son and about talking and about having choices and things getting better and she asks me my name and she says she's never been to korea -- but corrects herself immediately and says has never been to korea yet, and I say yes yes yet yes, and I tell her that baking might as well be an art, and I know that I am saying it sincerely for her, and she smiles and says goodbye and disappears. and I lean against the wall looking down towards ms. olive oil and mr. balsamic vinegar and there's quiet for a short little while with the sweat of the bike still drying cold on my back, and I think this comes and hits me, a sincerity inside the relentless upwards spiraling that is called progress, this work, this works.

all of a sudden things have fallen into place (I am blessed) and there are these twin paths I must choose from, things snap into place and I see that I want to go into these two directions, and there are no right answers, just an inward gaze and a questioning of ambitions and an examination of my priorities and the incessant yearning to know what will fulfill me.

it's not doubt but the hesitation at a costly, opaque endeavor as compared to a more transparent, possible one. for the latter, I could do this, I would know what to do, what doors to navigate, which phrases to say, what I want to do, and one snowy afternoon I went to this office in tribeca and I understood immediately then (I think) what the endpoint of this all could be. but for the latter, I could do this but there's a maybe attached, I could do this maybe, I would be running hard, on uncertain ground, part of my muscles devoted to feeling out this new terrain, but then I would be building things, michaelangeloly pulling sculptures out of marble, chipboard, wood, weaving the world together into a form.

but again again. what am I here for if not to look at myself and to be a self-changing self? why else should I travel? again again that foucault quote: "Well, do you think I have worked [hard] all those years to say the same thing and not to be changed?"

and finally the coda to the end of this exhalation is to think and to talk about people, persons, yearnings, stretchings. there are never any right answers and I will lie in bed awake wondering whether I did things right until the memory of things done and the memory of my own current self dissipates away to be thought of as a brief anecdote 'ten years ago, back then in new york, in that house' or such and such. as preciously sad and sadly precious as dinosaurs that have died, transmuted into petroleum, distilled into wax, mixed with pigment, smeared on the surface of a rough pulpy surface like a grinder, parts of itself given away to the world, given to the ether, a girl who gives herself away, the memory that this oil pastel has of creatures a long time ago.

all I say this round and around avoiding the main topic like in a spiral going upwards around a void, am not sure, not sure.