TEMPERATURE: 58 degrees
WEATHER: cloudy
NUMBER of OTHER PEOPLE: 7
STEPS WALKED INSIDE THE BUILDING: 3967
TOTAL TIME SPENT INSIDE INSTALLATION: 2 hours 45 minutes
I was sick. And, at a certain point, this was really the only future I could see for myself. Every day I’d wake up and drink coffee then read Robert Irwin and look at pictures of his work and try to tell myself that I could have a future even though I couldn’t get off the couch.
I re-read my margin notes from that time. They arrive as little (embarrassing) gifts to me now. But they also make me sad in the way they break down and out into love poems to no one.
“Given any new site, I would respond to it, modulate its presence: but first I had to be invited in.” is underlined and double starred. So is the line, “the kind fo work Irwin now wanted to produce could be done only, ‘in response.’” with a margin note: MARFA: My wriitng wil be entierly in response to the Bob Irwin piece.
Then, in the page break:
I would stand on your doorstep
For a decade
Wearing clothes that go in and out of fashion
Then tatter
Crying tears that run down
Plump cheeks and get lost in the crevices of wrinkles
I would memorize your favorite poem
And cook you linguine alla vongole
For every meal because I know it is your favorite
This earthy devotion gets sidelined
By spiritual ambition
But I can think of nothing holier
Than to cultivate patience in relation to another human as beautiful as you
Love letters from a self that doesn’t exist any longer. A continuous and fragmented self. A self that I keep company now. Irwin called a certain period in the seventies his “project of general peripatetic availability.” In other words, moving around, going where you’re asked, making things in response to the places and spaces you’re presented with. My friend James calls it “living in the wind.”
Flat light today so less to see. Or just more subtlety. It can’t be perfect every day.