April 2, 2010

It's absurdly beautiful today. It's one of those first spring days when everything is beautiful, everything is perfect, it's just a miracle, and people are wearing shorts prematurely. Everything is very, very clear and crisp. No clouds. I'm romantic about the twinkling caused by the sunlight reflecting off the cars driving across the Brooklyn Bridge. You see what I mean? Ridiculous.

I've decided that I'm not really having an experience of confinement out here at all. It's more like an island retreat. So, I'm very lucky. I think the closest experience I've had to feeling trapped is the subway. The FUCKING subway. I took the 1 down today and it was one of those rides when they stop it for about five minutes before every other station. We spent more time "being held by supervision" than actually getting places. What does that mean:

WE ARE BEING HELD BY SUPER VISION

?

I think I'm going to get all metaphorical on your ass now. We are held by our visions, we are held prisoner by the extent of our visions, we are confined by both the limits of our vision and our ambition to have a greater vision.

Yup. Metaphor. Either that or I am spending way too much time on the subway.

Speaking of vision, there's a little sailboat going by my window. It's quaint. It looks like the kind of thing you'd put in a bathtub, except person-sized. But compared to the ferries and water taxis and helicopters and downtown Manhattan, it looks like a toy.

I'm thinking about scale a lot today, and motion. One of my students took me to see an installation he had just made yesterday. It sort of blew my mind. And it was about those things: scale, models, the earth, man-made creations, projections, vision and perspective, silence and slow time. He is a rock climber and we talked about plate tectonics, instability, and the fact that we're just very very slowly floating around on hot liquid all the time.

By the way, what happens when you drill into the mantle? I know nothing about this stuff, but it seems like all these punctures can't be good. He's also a ceramicist. And now I'm thinking about that Keats poem (Ode to a Grecian Urn) and looking at this crazy man-made sandy beach outside my window and making associations. Earth, clay, crust, heat, cracking, subterranean motion, water, the frozen moment.

There is a Lawrence Weiner piece painted on the wood of the Governors Island Ferry dock in Manhattan. It reads: AT THE SAME MOMENT.