the Lacrimae Rerum: the tears in things.

I wonder if Architects ever think about what their building designs will look like in the rain, hugged tight by haze, or the season's first snow.

Walking to the train, down Lexington Avenue after a late job, I noticed a building I've never noticed before. Wrapped in fog, light from its top 6 floors reached out and caressed the low slung cloud forms. Were all of those lit shapes offices? Was that wall of light a modern day beacon of some sort, drawing Suits to the Capitalist flame, declaring our cultural values? In the semi darkness it looked like an animal, like it was shifting in its skin, prowling in place, as the fog rolled and fumed, covered parts and revealed others. Is it a creature of the future or the past? A beast of steel whose veins run underneath the city streets, is it a shadow of Titans who walked the Earth before Man, chained to the earth so we could rule? Maybe the shifting weather is the only chance it has to breath, to contemplate taking a step, of freedom, of sighing and swaying in the wind and snow.

Of course it looks alive, after two days of me consuming nothing but coffee in the depths of the Armory, with its giant steel ribs. I always think of Jonah, trapped in the belly of the Whale. The Armory follows me home, I woke up later, throat so dry I couldn't breath - the moisture stolen from my bound-water-being by the dry floor boards, by the thirsty mold growing in the rigging. My sacrum talks to me of the weight of my brain, my skull, thoughts and frustrations dripping down my spine for days with no reprieve. The heaviness pools in my pelvis, I can feel the pressure at the place where hip becomes thigh, a sneaking strain at the joint that feels like the femur may just fall loose from the socket in exhaustion. I wonder if that is why buildings groan. Maybe I rest my body's weight in the center so I can stay light on my feet, so I am never caught rooted in place, never unpacking my bags. I'm a ship, not a tree. A fish pretending to be a fox.

Peeling off my clothes, I notice the familiar subtle rash I always get from places like the Armory, especially in the winter. The Piers are the same way - once, in Pier 59, after days of crawling around on my back underneath platforms that barely cleared my chest to bolt the floors together, someone told me it was one of the places the rubble from 9/11 was stored to pick through for body parts. Was it the pain and fear of so many people's final moments that seeped into my pores, my skin broken out in anger, my nose leaking with black mucus? When I finally had time to shower, the grey of my body melted and pooled around my feet, in retrospect, I wonder whose skin it was that I had shed? Is dust from buildings not intimately related to the dust of our own skin cells? Will some of these buildings sink so deeply into my flesh that their elements become tools for my bone cells to construct their crystalline homes, my scaffolding, my stronger-than-reinforced-concrete structure?

If those resourceful creatures use what they are given I must have bones made of coffee, of lack-of-sleep, of lost time.

Will I eventually/potentially pass on some deep genetic memory of those buildings I have labored in, the minerals, chemicals, psychic energies finding their way into the blood lining of my womb, into the breast milk that may one day nurture my own hybrid creature, born fractured - part Selfness, part Steel?

twisted geometries, centerless plans, and shards of glass and metal

Post class reflection on the nature of memory and its relationship to object:

We cannot deny the idea of Sacred Space, that it is something everyone finds somewhere in their lives. Maybe it is the comfort of cooking and embodying a kitchen. Maybe it is the yoga studio or gym where we take an hour or two to reclaim our bodies, to remember our movement and breath as belonging to ourselves, after all the other time spent using them for money, to accomplish other people's tasks and priorities. It could be a church, or going home for the holidays, a museum, a forest.

Where does the resonance of any of these places come from? Was the kitchen inherently sacred, or was it the actions of my body, repeated through time feel like grooves already existing on a cosmic record, is it my memories clawing their way out of my subconscious to breathe a few more sweet breaths of life? The worn floorboards soft in specific places I find myself standing in declare a physical truth of other bodies and lives having been lived in this space, with that evidence, how can I deny the possibility that some piece of them isn't alive in my apartment still?

Memorials offer a concrete and visceral relationship to our past. The act of burying the dead was one of our earliest distinctions of man being no longer ape, and though the shapes of mourning continue to shift, our need for marking what we've lost has not. Things like the 9/11 memorial remind me of Indian burial grounds, where the generations of us who experienced it are unable to release the dark energy of that place. It is now a place for the dead, and for some time, no new ideas will grow in the space that was made. That loss is defined by the massive emptiness of its design, allowing us to stare down into the footprints of giants and imagine what it felt like to still be alive inside of a dying star. There was a shift that we may not even be aware of yet, in what we consider the patriotic heart of the USA. This is a dead end. But we are far from processing why it manifested in the first place, so maybe this part is necessary before we can move on and reclaim it. Maybe it will be a scar that remains forever.

Maybe like the ruins of Pompeii it will have to be forgotten and rediscovered much later, so we can fold it in to our collective experience, humanizing our past and giving us permission to live inside it for a moment of empathic time travel. Much like the voids in the ash that we filled with concrete stuff - turned ancient people's last breath into a truly physical experience, allowing the distance of time and the most elementary human experiences seem so small and so close to us in the here and now. Like seeing a million Jewish children's shoes at Auschwitz, or every hand that has ever touched the ancient Wailing Wall in Jerusalem and Juliet's Breast in Verona, or stood next to a stranger and looked at art on a museum wall, it is the mundane and repeated that unites us - we are connected through the touch of our fingers and eyes through time and space to something true, to ourselves and each other as part of the fabric of humanity.

The idea of temporary 'memory-less' structures with lightweight rigging and tent fabric made me think of the kinds of things that get erected in the aftermath of devastating weather/land shifts. I suspect that, whether or not the intention is there - something primal exists in the idea of shelter from the 4 elements - that confining the 5th element (ether/space) is vitally important to survival. That if you strip away the noise of culture, shelter is almost like a platonic solid of being. The human body is two walls of muscle, front and back, wrapped around empty space at the center. Plato suggested that god used this 5th element/solid for arranging the constellations in heaven and Aristotle also postulated that the heavens were made of this element.

For many artists there is an inherent fear of the white page, the pregnancy of emptiness, filled with potential that we may or may not be able to live up to the brevity of, and when I translate that to bodies and buildings, I am reminded of the coral reef, whose act of shedding skin and bone become the building materials of its residence, like certain bone cells in our bodies literally produce the fibers that they construct their environment with. How a build up of history and resources and skills and marks on a page are incredibly important - which I build up quickly through a wash of graphite powder and light pencil measurements to escape the scary expanse. There was a time for the behemoth buttressed churches and rose windows, and there is still so much evidence on our landscape of that part in our history. But while those communal places of worship were being constructed, the shifting human narrative suddenly saw us as children to God, our Father, and all the deep wisdom about the human body from ancient Greece was lost. The paintings of this time look like children's drawings. With the industrial revolution, defined after large scale slavery, the free market helped change our relationship to self in our story. Maybe the communal and collective experience was no longer the church, but the factory. Maybe as we were turning the body into a machine, there remains a reciprocal ghost in the shell of these old factories as the lines between the two were increasingly blurred.. As industry left and continues in America to shift to information/insubstantial, these old industrial bodies littering our collective periphery are the churches of the 20th century, and worshipped at the altar of Capitalism, of the self made man, who was born as blank as a white page in Locke's estimation.

I don't know that we are far enough removed from that place and those ideas to wipe out the proof of that part of our history. We may forget, and have to repeat it again if we can't slowly start to reabsorb the polluted land, for what it represents, and allow it to grow and mature past the intentions of its birth along with us. Just as Penn Station being destroyed gave birth to the Preservation Act, we cannot always see the lineage we are apart of - things we create or destroy or ignore or forget or never notice have implications all their own, and we may never cross over or come in contact with them, they may have a rich life all their own.

 

"Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
You may give them your love, but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,...
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams."

- Khalil Gibran