the finish line is where

A lot happened today but also not really and furthermore I cannot quite tell you what the days are. All the signals have been mixed up, like timelines collapsing in on themselves. There are the movements of our swiftly tilting planet and then there is the internal metronome ticking on ahead and somewhere between them, the truth of their synthesis. 

My father was trying to talk to me about Nord Stream and the Sassoon Codex and would I wear an Apple Watch, subjects in which he assumed I would have a marginal interest but I really do not care. I’m afraid I’m too fixated on transformation and ascension to go beyond briefly acknowledging such passing episodes in regular life, even as I must observe their larger patterning—it is cultivating light in and of and through me that requires most of my focus now. And when he spurned the meditation I put on in the car driving uptown I was reminded to accept that this practice need not include anyone else…

I have not been feeling very social these past few days, or I am social only as it relates to my art, calling up friends, talking to people about it, trying to divine my ongoing and forthcoming concerns. On the phone with Rachel this afternoon I explain to her seven year-old baking buddy what it means to be dignified. I am thinking about the durational and sculptural impulses that have been running across my paintings, like strobes, I want to burst through the two dimensional. When he asked me what I was up to I told my dad I am doing a great deal of inner work, to which he replied, how do you know when you’re finished…

He was joking—laughing at the process itself, because it is so alien to his own and because he fully recognizes I never will be, that my nature is to be relentless, the same way I have difficulty stepping back from my terra-cotta maquettes even when my teacher has declared them ready for drying. There is always an elsewhere to reach in our art, and in consciousness, sometimes it is the elsewhere that is most familiar, and sometimes for that very reason it’s the hardest to detach from, suddenly returned again to this large, confusing Stratford-upon-Avon, world-upon-worlds.

song: Return Again (2005)