Light (Part 2)
an elf in the camera
By a bench at Washington Square Park, a woman with a shaved head puffs a blunt and dances in her own smoke as if summoning herself, an undulating jellyfish of tattoos and dangling earrings. Ivy and I sit across the walkway while hundreds of people stream between us, too many and too fast to imagine where they’re all going.
It’s the perfect backdrop as she speaks about wanting to do everything, how she switched instruments every year of middle school, how the possibilities of the City drive her mad, how you only have one draft of life.
There’s a cool logic to this: life as a sheet of paper on the drafting table.
—
The sheet shimmers and surrounds you. You descend, swallowed by the wilderness.
—
I can be, and have been, tormented by my decisions, some easy but cowardly, and some courageous but wrong. A sheet filling up with black stains.
The thin, soft pencil mark of my love of nature, constrained to the corner...
The fat hazy blob of centering-my-high-school-life-around-football (a sport I’d once called “a bunch of fat guys hitting each other”)...
The long trailing mark of my artistic dreams, which ran out of ink halfway through, leaving scratch marks at the end...
Right now my life is colored by my decision to jump into tech. It’s clear looking back how one decision led to the next – how shelter-in-place forced me to pursue online work, how my brother’s certainty about his own career influenced my view of the world. But I’m no fatalist. I know I could be living a better life.
—
“Mistakes can’t be erased,” says Richard Diebenkorn, “but they move you from your present position.” His paintings are visual music about the joy of seeing – wild, exploratory, and uninhibited, previous layers roughly covered up, allowing the painting’s past lives to bleed through. No surprise that his 10 Rules for Beginning a Painting read like rules for dynamic decision-making.
Right now, in the skylit kitchen of my San Francisco apartment, the 2nd rule snaps into view: “The pretty, initial position which falls short of completeness is not to be valued – except as a stimulus for further moves.”
Begin again.
—
As painting began to turn in on itself, painters and critics became fixated on the concept of the picture plane. The Tate Museum’s website defines it as “the glass of the notional window through which the viewer looks into the representation of reality that lies beyond.”
Painting as a window.
A view of life through glass, stripped bare, its spectral elements splayed like a rainbow.
—
In my worst moments, life feels like a blurry windowpane, smeared and out of focus. As if everyone around me is living and I’m watching from the inside.
I write to let the light through, to repair, clean, and polish the surface – removing the stains to achieve, as Oppen writes, “Clarity / In the sense of transparence, / I don’t mean that much can be explained / Clarity in the sense of silence.”
—
Or is this the process of life itself? To put the interior (the inner motivational force) and exterior (the practical realities) into relative focus?
I’ve been spending after hours reading about the publishing industry and sorting out the details of building a life as a writer. It’s an odd feeling, applying the startup mentality that I spent so many months faking to my actual work. And to know that this new venture will take a lifetime.
It puts the wide spiral of my previous certainties into focus: first, in college, complete ignorance of the realities of building a life around my interests. Second, a complete devotion to twisting these interests into a money-making enterprise.
Now, I turn the attention back to the center.
—
Lately, the distant dream has begun to feel real and present, like a cloud approaching. I imagine it sweeping over the hillside where I stand, chilling my cheeks.
—
Artistic mediums are more than metaphors: they’re the world’s calculus playing out in a constrained way, petri dishes for the properties of life.
They’re about something. Painting is about the sense in which life is simultaneously permanent and fleeting, indelible and covered up by the next thing; it’s about turning a toxic, chaotic substance into a surface that you find beautiful and right.
—
Some other mediums:
Music is about the unification of mind, body, and spirit; the intellectual, visceral, and emotional. At the heart of music is a mystery: the way physical vibrations tap at the source of emotion.
Words make us human. The core of every motivation is a story, a relationship of ideas, and words evoke ideas like chords evoke emotions.
Surfing is both a sport and an art. It’s a dance with the life-giving and -destroying energy of the ocean.
Food is about love and death. What makes one thing worthy of sitting in the oven, breaking to mush in bone-singeing heat, or beaten to a pulp in a blender, while another is worthy of consuming it? Is this an act of care or violence?
(Steve Jobs famously thought of product design as an art; to me, it’s a day job. The question isn’t What is art, but What do you bring art to?)
—
It wasn’t until the late 19th century that people considered photography art. Too simple, and void of interpretation. In fact, it’s for this reason that photography – the act of imprinting a moment of perspective on a film – portrays the creative act so elegantly.
The photographer does nothing but skillfully arrange their lives so that the right imprint appears on the film. All of the machinery – the lenses and mirrors and shutters, cradled by the arm and aligned by the eye – all of it is centered around a single moment of witnessing.
I imagine the artist as an elf in the chamber of a camera, diligently polishing the lens and positioning the mirror. When he does it right, there is no reward but the image itself... and then the moment is gone. The world has changed!
Alacrity is the name of the game. The elf repeats it again and again, just for a flash in the eyes.
✤
Epilogue
Sebastian, an artist who used to be a skier with Olympic aspirations, thinks of skiing as art. I imagine them carving a path through the trees, intricate and playful and dangerous in the way of their artwork. Today, Sebastian is wearing their girlfriend’s blue jacket, knee-length, with a subtle floral pattern.
“I have a weird body, fat and skinny, tall and short.” I understand at once. Today, Sebastian is like a spirit of everything, collaged in clothing from all levels of formality, men’s and women’s clothing, serious and playful, interplanetary and earthly.
We step out into a sunny day in Queens and head West. We walk for miles straight along Myrtle Avenue, an eclectic cross section of the city, from Sebastian’s largely Hispanic neighborhood in Ridgewood, through the Hasidic neighborhood, and into Downtown Brooklyn. It’s my first morning in New York, and the city is still alien. People are so private in San Francisco; here, they spill their lives onto the streets. I duck under the arc of water from a hose; a man is washing his car.
The train track above us shades us from the sun, covered in ragged green paint that peels to expose bright orange rust. Strange, walking through a landscape molded by alien people, from another time, with their own beliefs. Who come up with names like “Flushing” and “Knickerbocker.”
Every so often a train spaceships over the tracks, interrupting us. Talking to Sebastian often feels this way, like talking to someone while swimming in a lake, between strokes. The interruptions used to annoy me over the phone, but I've grown to love the immersive texture of these conversations. We never spoke precisely anyway; we communicate in metaphors and misappropriated words, odd gestures.
—
Waiting underground, I’m watching water drip from the ceiling. See how the droplets gather at the edge of the metal slats. It’s raining above, I know, but there’s no map of how the currents flow, pinballing through the city’s skeleton, from the sidewalk to the edge of the slats.
On the train back from New Haven, I admire the blur of the New England forest, the rusty metal structures that emerge from it: defunct bridges, whimsical machines, hieroglyphic objects seen once and then never again.
It’s funny how these places are stamped as “New,” like a circle of gray-haired people talking about when they were young. Once, shiny metallic phoenixes from the ash of the Old World; now, beautiful in their accumulated harshness.
In the cold rain, lawns overgrown with summerlike madness, a man in a black hood staring from a tattered porch. In San Francisco, painted surfaces are bleached away by sunlight; here, chewed by the rough turning of seasons, the roiling of ivy. There, love of the open road along the California coast; here, love of these trains and their heaving rhythms, like the loping movements of a giant.
As the scene slows and darkens, I notice numbers and labels indented into the windowpane:
24 411 00014
FRA TYPE II AS5 LEXAN FRA25C M250
A shadow sweeps over; the route is ending. I’m thrust into the heart of Penn Station, like deoxygenated blood.
It pulls me to its center.
Love that Diebenkorn.
Love it. I'm so excited to see how your life unfolds from here.