Sometimes I am not sure if it is art that I miss or if it is art minus the art world minus galleries minus art discourse minus October and Ranciere and semiotic squares, minus formal analysis and historical contextualization, minus theory and visual analysis (bordering on psychoanalysis, etc etc etc)
Which is maybe just distilled aesthetics, maybe, maybe it is just this sense of hallowed ground, a loft in Chinatown somewhere, galleries up in the sky, painted wooden floors, leaks, drips, gutters, brick walls, the absence of drywall, the presence of rough being, of this persistent imagery I have of a screening in Sunset Park some 5+ years ago, industry city, tall warehouses, sodium yellow lights, oblong yellow windows, all these things;
very little to say because all that persists is just a very specific sense sitting on the tip of my tongue.
--
I feel like I've been walking lately, jogging, slowed to a tiptoe. I miss a little bit the feeling of my entire being on fire, rushing ahead headlong; instead there is lethargy and slowness; but if there's anything I am newly learning is that there is something to be had in here, a lesson to be learned; that slowness and lethargy are, among many things, an indicator, and that if they exist that sometimes it is for a reason, sometimes because there is no making without lethargy, simply because people sleep, because the gestation period of human beings is nine months old, and then a few years old, and then a dozen years old, and until you're somewhat formed into the world it's been nearly twenty, so the lethargy of slow movement perhaps could be seen as a kind of a dance, largo, legato, content to act with deliberation and movement, punctuating these fiery moments of thunder, rushing force, magic at the end of one's fingertips and prickling at the nape of one's neck.
--
today while washing my hands after having pissed into a urinal:
it strikes me that sometimes it is good to know that things will never leave you; that you are steeped into them; that certain desires are yours through and through, unconsciously, like breathing, or eating perhaps, desires that over time wormed their way into your being like termites. and that here we are like an experiment onto one's self. in that case, all that is left is to trust myself a little, to understand that the tracks I run upon are both regular and unpredictable, that I should listen to myself, to hear what it is saying and to sometimes doubt it, to sometimes agree with it. that I should be critical but not too much
to dangle my being from an outstretched arm like a second skin and examine it, stretching it this and that way with a jeweler's loupe in front of one's eye
(strains of paul motian from freshman year)