spirit Archives

notes from any weekday afternoon

on arriving after the high point

Here comes a familiar question. So now what? It’s the end of the long part of the day and the beginning of the part where I mean to redeem some of the best of me. But the glass is empty too soon, and here’s a challenge. If I don’t rush past it, a response waits. Saying, now you try to make. Something, but not today. Today I want to open the notebook, the laptop, the inbox and find it already made.

In the Mass, there was a moment after the bells and before communion that some called the High Point, where we said I am not worthy to receive, but say the word. It came after the part where my grandma would whisper, Lord, I believe. Heal my unbelief.

I return each evening in a diminished form, somehow. Determination is not the posture of prayer, but of the glossy ad. It makes demands, offers vapid encouragement, relentless goading on. Get yourself together, this part insists. How can you be finished if it isn’t even dark? How when others are just beginning, can you be done for the day?

True, this day started at four, and then came everything I will not list. I mean to get beyond all of this. Here comes Dante again, interrupting a line of thought with whispers of how the dark wood were better followed, translated. I am inclined to agree, but keep finding concrete corridors, fluorescent track lighting, deafening bells. The railings and the gates and the traffic keep me moving over leveled ground, but airless, crawling in this steady stream. I eddy again among the bent ones, each of us shouldering the rest of the day forward until it turns on an eventual collapse, and comes back for us, again.

Encounter

A meeting with the art.

There is the event, what occurs after, and what will be remembered; what is in the frame and what beyond it, who stands beholding, and what presents itself, as composition. The artist tries presenting Time as concrete. For example, here’s a calendar and it can repeat endlessly without naming the century. Following these questions out, and out, and out, she creates a dizzying array of images, depicting a history. The effect is a sense of overwhelm, a sense of being tiny by comparison, crushed by the scope and depth of it all. Some will retreat immediately. For those that remain, there are other effects to come, and one of these is a certain euphoria of spirit, suddenly released from certain presumptions about its individual weight.

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Inspired by the work of Hanne Darboven.

Unfinished Business

Matters of making sense.

There is a sculpture in the center of our circle. We look, and when the speaking begins, it becomes clear that while we have been looking toward the same object in space, we have not seen the same sculpture.

It has often been assumed that when the eye sees, the spirit will know, but knowing is a palette, not a product.

One of us had a question. When working, how much of a given environment do you censor to meet what demands? He saw no difference between painting and sculpture, the idea being that any picture is a living thing, sculpted by changes imposed from outside, and never done.

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Inspired by American sculptor David Smith. The italicized question above is his.