March 31, 2010

I don’t want to go back! It’s definitely true that it doesn’t take long to take your stresses with you. They came with me today. And it’s taken 2 hrs to get them out. It takes that long to let go and start to be free enough to work and dream. This whole idea of blogging makes you so exposed. I’m not sure about it. But I come here with my list of things to do, schedule, timeline, thoughts to make public. After a day I have already institutionalized myself.

It’s very cold in here today. It’s cold outside, too, relatively speaking. And very, very grey. But at least the rain has finally stopped. I got very warm just before I came out here – I was getting a cup of coffee and digging through my bag looking for my id. I just wrote idea instead of id. I think that’s pretty Freudian, no? Anyway, by the time I got to the boat, I was so hot, so I took off my coat and sweater and stood on the deck shooting video in my tank top for most of the ride. It’s good to feel the wind, but there was something frantic about the whole experience. My camera’s battery died just before we docked, so I didn’t get to shoot the whole trip.

I feel like I am always trying to insert too much into a space too small, including things to do in slots of time, tasks to complete with limited power. It’s quintessentially New York. I remember a quote about the city – something about watching someone parallel park an 8 ft long truck in a 7 ft long parking space. So much resourcefullness and creativity come from the pressure and tightness, but I’m not so sure about it sometimes. Necessity is the mother of invention, but where is the room for inquiry and mistakes? My space out here on the island is raw and institutional and empty right now – I haven’t brought out anything very large. It looks like I’m not working, but I am. I think. Or maybe I’m thinking. It’s really a perfect set-up – being given the space to think, three walls but not four, specific times when we can and cannot be here. I’m starting to think the situation of this residency is more important that the space itself. I wouldn’t mind a little heating though.

I’m reading Madness and Civilization. Foucault says:

"Montchau, who cured a maniac by 'pouring ice water upon him, from as high above as possible,' was not astonished by so favorable a result; to explain it he united all the themes of organic calefaction that had succeeded and intersected each other since the seventeenth century: 'One need not be surprised that ice water produces such a prompt and perfect cure precisely when boiling blood, furious bile, and mutinous liquors carried disturbance and irritation everywhere'; by the impression of coldness, 'the vessels contracted more violently and freed themselves of the liquors that crammed them; the irritation of the solid parts caused by the extreme heat of the liquors the contained ceased, and when the nerves relaxed, the course of spirits that had proceeded irregularly from one side to the other was re-established in its natural state.'

The world of melancholia was humid, heavy, and cold; that of mania was parched, dry, compounded of violence and fragility."