words I thinked

“The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who'll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you're sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that's almost never the case.”

― Chuck Close

I am sticking this here to say I did, nobody will ever read it or give a shit if they even see it. I am writing for an audience of one and that is me, you are welcome to read along but…yup.

Let’s a songs about roads that don’t go anywhere. Every road may well have a purpose, but many do not announce their purpose, they just are. And in the summer, they are tunnels that define verdant but also stop time. The passage of time is measured in flashes of filtered sun that race across skin and eye. The lack of a destination is freedom, freedom from the crush of expectation, of becoming, of judgement, of the imposition of valuation, from the need to hope for validation that won’t ever come.

Those roads may have purpose to those who live there but purpose is not the sole measure of being, for me these just are, places to shut down the thinking, the naming, the goal setting, the measurement of self against, the naming of time. Those roads stop time, slow it, resist it, quietly, imperceptibly. Time ticks down from the moment we enter the world, whether on purpose or not, we only get so many ticks of the clock. We don’t think of that at 18, we rush to destinations we think we know of, that we imagine we understand and race towards. The alternative is to have no sense of the destination and carry on where we are taken.

What happens, then, when your past, that accumulation of boxes ticked, , becomes a place where you have no place, no welcome, no home. Every place that seems it like could offer even the smallest corner of belonging, a refuge of comfort, of being known has been taken, taken or devalued, or demeaned or vanished in a verb like sense. The good old days belong to everyone else and you have been cut out of the pictures with one of those wee pointy exacto blades. Faces peer out of photographs, both faded and fresh, people you may have known but who no longer have any use for you and so you are vanished. The hardest part is that those that care the least also notice the least, out of sight is out of mind, is out of existence. That road with no apparent destination becomes a little refuge from time but like a 9 inning baseball game, sooner or later… it ends. Then time comes roaring back, and with it, those reminders that the only certainty is an end which creeps closer every day.

Driving down one of the roads, Booker T comes on, Green Onions, it is a comforting warm organ sound. It’s nice, but…it wasn’t written for me. Recorded in 1962 it was made for a different world. Recorded in Memphis, I can hear the sound of the pickup truck, driving across along a delta field, a tinny AM radio playing a tinny AM radio station, windows open the thin sound bleeds onto the field. The smell of sweat dances with a wreath of cigarette smoke. Are the truck’s occupants talking? What would they talk about? Such a different world it’s hard to know. Sports had not become commodified as the national distraction, is the growth of cotton a thing that requirement to moment to moment attention? In 2025 we have so many narratives built to distract us, we assume that everyone had that small talk. We assume that everyone had easy access to ‘news’, we forget that talk radio was not a thing, that news papers were probably a thing of certain classes. Booker T, music that speaks of other times to us, those who have that time laid out in front of…behind us.

Watching my elder cat dream, paws move, front paws one at a time… back paws more or less in unison. Whiskers twitch in small arcs, his head moves back. Something in this world catches his attention , piercing the curtains of Morpheus. He wakes with a stretch, a yawn and a swiveled head, eyes wide..  I guess wondering where he was, where he just was. This morning he came, late, very late, to breakfast. My breakfast. He sat on my lap, bolt upright and looked me right in the eyes. For a while. It would be presumptuous to assume that he was trying to say something, though eventually he intent was clear: my food fool is empty, fix it. At the moment before though he seemed content, clear, focused, living in a moment, such that a cat does or does not, and connecting. Scritches were dispensed and accepted. In a way, that was a moment of the sublime: undefined, unpurposed, unsurpassable because it did not succumb to measurement. In a few moments the younger black cat came to have his scritches dispensed, more of a hostage taking than a moment of shared clarity, he lingers pondering the economy of scritch. He is the chatty cat, chirps give way to sentences that invariably end with a question, a rising chirp that also seems clear in its intention, even if the question was, well, long and not well organized.

There are times I wish I could hear my voice at 6, not just the smallish of it but the logic, the reasoning haltingly articulated in time. I can remember an ongoing argument with my dad about about the legitimacy of pop music. He was quite adamant that classical music was the only music. ( ironic, I realize now, the sound track of my youth was more. ) Me arguing that a string section made it classical….even now, I don’t think I was all that wrong.

What then happens to a memory when we pass beyond the ability to give it voice? Where are the instances we catalog, where does our memory palace go when we are forced to abandon it? Is a memory palace, in a sense real, made up of the rooms of our homes, at the least the ones that made an impression on us. And does the palace extend to places? The song Wildfire comes on, a song of girls and horses, a struggle in deep winter. Somehow on the school bus heading to the one room 6th grade school house in Newry Maine, this song hits a powerful chord: The rock face across the street, the powers cemetery just before the wide part of the valley where the school sat. Cold, so cold, the wind was rarely still in the bear river valley, often blasting down the valley from the notch. The memory of that space is SO detailed, people known who have passed, where did their memories go? Memories of them strong, names fleeting but the images of them so strong. The places of their memory palaces are well marked…but essentially unknowable to us. THAT is part of the mystery of the memory palace. A Simon & Garfunkel song comes on, one that involves ‘feeling groovy’, I am immediately in the gym? Lunch room…my memory palace doesn’t have a label, but it has rows of chairs, folding chairs, metal folding chairs. My Grandfather sitting intently listening, in 4th grade I am not sure I knew what groovy was, I am not sure he did either, but there he is. There I am with a large group of other small people, singing that song. Where will that memory go when I am not there to grab it from the ether? I wonder if there are other people in the singer have a memory of it…I wonder if they remember my grandfather.

A song in a playlist, undated except some have some measure of proximity in time. They all have memories, they were assembled with intention, each to spur a thought, a memory of a place: the light, the . Some where share with another, hopes, aspirations, dreams… most gone with most people. All that is left of the past are images of eddies in the flow of life, eventually eddies spin off into the main current and dissolve, the eye that saw is all that is left. Alone.  There are no reunions, there are no home comings… there is no home to come to. Soon, very soon, the seeing eye too will dissolve into the stream of time. Forgotten, ephemeral, inconsequential. A mistake made and unmade by time. Memories are thought of as reservoirs of nostalgia, syrupy sweet, tinged by hopes… but hope is a sharp edged knife. Too often it points to people we failed to become, hopes that are, in retrospect, cruel cudgels of the people we didn’t become. In listening to those echoes,    Becoming is a hard thing, it is made of expectations, expectations are hopes that became rules

So...at some point, maybe it's time to stop looking for relevance. There have to be hordes of great thoughts that have been thought and cast in to the ether...only to evaporate with their thinkers. And that's just great ideas, it says nothing for hunches, ponderings, delusions and even more dangerous pursuits. I think there are some thoughts of

Sitting in a coffee house in Edinburgh, a place with layers of history more complex than the layers of the now passed croissant who’s crumbs litter the space next to an espresso that is also leaving rings of absence. Cities here are littered with monuments to people who I might know, probably should know or who wished I knew. But. To Walk through a cemetery is to see the hopes and dreams of names and the named, eroded by time and forgetfulness. Names written to last forever, but already the context of their being is diluted, if not gone. We hope to last forever in some form or another, but it seems unlikely. 

Mahmoud mandami : ( zohran mandamis father, a prof at Columbia) to be a minority is also to see the truth of the place amidst the promise of it

“Sauver quelque chose du temps où l'on ne sera plus jamais." (Save something from the time we will never see again.) -- Les Annees Annie Ernaux 

( connected) morning clouds wander by, when the tea water was boiling they were electric pink, now the tea waning they are stark white. The life span of a cloud is seldom discussed. They are at once ephemeral and immutable. The scene outside my window alternates between a slow waltz of vapor and a sprint across the sky

What animates movement out side my window is most ephemeral of all, the simple movement of the air we breathe. It seems so simple, so in consequential as a force. And. Yet.

Nothing I say is worth saying or worth hearing or reading. There, done, my voice amounts to nothing, it is dead. I am on the downhill path that follows. My heart aches at the paths unfollowed, untaken. I read the books and magazines about the orchestration of space, design is too small a word, architect is too limited… composer, arranger, user experience hearer. I spend time watching surgeons, amazing…I would do that in a heartbeat. There are lots of reasons I could not, but still… there are lots of reasons I could, lots of reasons I would want to, lots of reasons I should. That is the cruelty of time and age. The person I was at 20 was afraid of the body, the unknown. The person I am know, is better with those things I don’t know, more willing to engage and find meaning, sometimes delight, In discovery

Landscape images reveal the elemental sculptural forms that form our understanding of space.

In the heavily forested hills we deal in revelation, as we move around the bases of the forms and through the intimate close spaces of the trees, spaces reveal them selves slowly, in bit and pieces, and then, every once and awhile with grand reveals of vistas, valleys and peaks, of spaces that had been hidden by their own complexities.