A week in summer

When we came upstate in late spring it was so green. Beautifully green but then too much alive like being on the inside of a body.  H wanted to catch newts at a pond close by and I said I would go with him but got nervous as soon as we stepped into the forest. The ground, the trees the sky having thunderstormed on and off all day, was almost vibrating. H ran ahead of me and then circled back and was pushing me forward like a tugboat saying ‘you have to be brave… be brave!’  He found a satisfactory newt about 20 feet in and we turned back towards the house. I have an image of him in my head jumping easily over a little creek without breaking his stride, the sun sparkling on the trees and ground and all around, all alight and him a part of it, never more alive and at home.

I want to write some thing for him.  Something that shimmers, something bright red that you could cup in your hand and it would be cool and sparkle just for you and you could look at it sometimes and you would see me and all the fullness of the everything.

Fear has been especially close these last few months, in addition to the pile up of the last two pandemic years, and I was thinking about Olivia Laing’s essay ‘The Fire This Time’ on the relationship between disaster and art.  She says, “Set it down: as a spectacle and artifact, as testimony, witness report and permanent record. The sky is rose-pink, rose-yellow patched with blue: the sky is very lovely, full of small gold darts of burning debris.”  It seems to me that the act of making is what we see in a work, and the impact of a work a testament to the strength of the artists afterglow. The Warhol Disaster paintings have always seemed completely lifeless to me until this year. Another large scale nothing, taking up space taunting me with it’s maybe there maybe not trauma. This year having spent more time with these works, the Disaster series have activated for me in a surprising way and I now find them fascinating and horrible at close range when you can feel the swift push and pull of the silkscreen, human hands moving with mechanical purpose, with the rush of color comes the sense that something has gone terribly wrong, something is visible that should not be.

Once at the end of a relationship, or in retrospect maybe it was just towards the middle, I went to a Dirty Three concert and I remember thinking that nothing could be more beautiful, more fulfilling than that music and how could anything terrible or fearful really eat you up when you could be eaten up by beauty instead.

This is the happiest week, despite being in the middle of a longish covid recovery. My birthday and wedding anniversary in one week in the height of summer.  Why is it that happiness, real contentment and fulfillment inevitably lead to remembering of other happy times and then to a sadness at people ‘who we love to have with us and who are missing’ as Josef Albers might say. This is a week like Christmas and New Year’s when there is such deep joy and grief dancing together. People who couldn’t make it after all, birthday letters not sent, happy photographs blurry with real smiles and busy arms, after swimming tiredness and ice cream and watching movies I first saw in middle school. Everything that happened, all that might still happen. I just wanted to mark it, to name that feeling- an elegy to happiness. I think that’s probably why after over a decade in the city I still am essentially 15 years old seeing the skyline in real life for the first time. All that past and possibility humming and twisting around each other. I wanted to make a video of it, a video like a painting. The muchness of it. Brightly colored, too much, but also flat and quiet. But sometimes also just right.

The urgency of right now perfectly expressed in this stunning last line “But you’d have to come now. Right now. Like a tiny nub of glowing charcoal, this brightness and warmth isn’t long for our world.”