Compartments

A list of reactions ascending, painting by painting, through the Guggenheim’s Agnes Martin retrospective, December 2016.

1. The spines of experience are identical.
2. From far away, humanity looks like grey matter, but within each life exists a universe which thrives.
3. The mere concept of weaving might keep you warm.
4. Everything can become more than it appears, except gold, which is finally itself: nirvana.
5. A quote:
   “Once is enough for tragedy, I think. Not to repeat it.”
6. Symmetry is an illusion.
7. The spines of experience are identical.
8. A day can feel long or short, just like a life. It’s still 24 hours, or a bunch of 24 hours punctuated by dreaming.
   Some nights I don’t dream as much as others.
   Sometimes it takes longer to fall asleep.
9. I’m learning how to dream when I’m awake.
   Regularly, flesh emerges from beneath the surface of the day which is like all days; it is pink.
10. I am wondering whether all life is the same life, just more or less dense, and with more or fewer days.
11. I’m trying to spread the membrane that is the space between awake and asleep across the whole panel of my day today.
    It will be mostly white, and blue, and grey. Maybe there will be no flesh. Yesterday felt more greenish.
12. Some days are like tracing paper, and the days that came before are visible and they mostly look the same, even though I didn’t sleep much last week.

But mostly I am waiting to grow old.
To see the bright void of my existence spiraling down like a fantasy of Frank Lloyd Wright’s.
To ascend further away until my life, too, becomes a tooth-sized square on the infinite American plain.
And then it is obscured by clouds.