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Spring awaits just like our camp’s sentry. Just days away. If my mouth could move I would laugh.
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It remains as cold and remote as our memory. This place is a white box, closing in upon us. The white multiplies, like stacking cubes. The only respite is its structure, revealing itself. Bits of blonde wood and nickel-plated hardware peaking out from the blinding white sheaths. Brown, blue, white and more white… we are drowning in this unyielding palate.
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The light stays with us until late, yet its only effect on my companions is they rest less and less. I hear them in the night, shuffling around the outskirts of our outpost. After another forage, I trudge back to the camp, and my companions have strayed. I drag them back, attempting to exert some sort of authority. They will not cohere.
EVIDENCE
We have seven more days here.
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It causes me to reflect, to search the camp for the thread of narrative. How clean and pure this place was before we began. The Shelter was so clean and contained, but I could not reside outside of it, tending to my companions’ needs from afar. My ego sought to abolish the boundaries between us and them. We before I. The interests of companionship over the interests of the self. But I was lying to myself. I’ve been fueling this exercise. I’ve been shoveling coal into this train. My companions were willing passengers, but all they have done is taunt me: my motivations, my autonomy, my movements. Why can’t I accept the beauty of their apathetic stasis?
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I survey the melting banks surrounding the Shelter, and I see the sedimentation of our time here. Like a geologic belch, Spring erupts all that transpired. Unfrozen and revealed. What wicked beauty lies in all we have dispossessed.
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Perhaps this is just a feeling of mutual melancholy. We fear because we do not know what awaits us. Knowing that the Season will change makes us miss the Season we are in. Does the prisoner ever recall the prison with fondness?
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NIGHT RITUAL
Something is strange since I returned. My companions have been moving closer and closer to the edge of the camp. Since they will not return to their Sleeping Pods, and will not rest, I have trouble resting as well. Their is a sinister energy in the air. I fall asleep with the Hammer next to me.
Something is strange since I returned. My companions have been moving closer and closer to the edge of the camp. Since they will not return to their Sleeping Pods, and will not rest, I have trouble resting as well. Their is a sinister energy in the air. I fall asleep with the Hammer next to me.
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They stay perpetually upright like statues erected to watch over the fields with their stony gaze. They honor nothing. The wind wails and they wail with it. Like sick banshees they croak in the night. They long for something other than the collective US. “They” are divorcing themselves from the “We” we once were. Whether in fear, or in anticipation, they fall into stoic fits, becoming totally unreachable. I find them in the darkness engaged in some malignant ritual, where they ask for absolute conformity, but offer nothing in return.
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PAINTING SUNSHINE
We are running out of time. I awake with ill feelings towards my companions. They have bonded in the nights while I was away, and I cannot enter their circle. I have become so self-absorbed in our survival that I have forgotten to include them.
We are running out of time. I awake with ill feelings towards my companions. They have bonded in the nights while I was away, and I cannot enter their circle. I have become so self-absorbed in our survival that I have forgotten to include them.
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I decide to temporarily cancel my reflections. My companions need some juvenile optimism to carry them through. I want to open the curtains, let some light in. The colors of life… growth. I lay out a roll of unused muslin (too thin for our winter usage) and unearth a bucket of yellow paint I found on last week’s forage. I grind up the handles of our Scissors to add some makeshift orange pigment to this yellow concoction, and arrive at something reminiscent of the spine of a National Geographic or a disposable raincoat.
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My companions still taunt. Painting Sunshine? Like a fool chasing golden rays.
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My companions’ pessimism will not deter me. I will honor our daily Trudge, even those of the future. I dust off a footlocker from the far reaches of the Shelter and pull out a weathered pair of Green Vans. They will make good shoes for Spring. The warm and wet weather will make their holy sides useful to air out our damp feet. We may continue our root vegetable routine, but we look forward to edible green shoots from the forest floor.
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My companions have all but given up. They refuse to pick the mold off the bread or the eyes from the potatoes. Where before they watched the horizon eagerly, now their gaze has clouded, and they are melting into the horizon like the snow and ice all around us.
XTAKEOUT AND BURNERS
I build a platform to let all our Burners dry out. I’ve found them cast about by the Surgical Station where we performed many repairs on Our Hands. We’ve had to fabricate many new hands to continue our labors, and laid out to dry like this, they reveal our evolution and our time here. How many hands does it require to build a Shelter, make food, make clothing, use all our tools, keep the Epson 9800 stoked, keep contained, keep time with ourselves, survive the bleakness of Winter? Well, I suppose we have an answer: five sets, give or take.
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It puts me in mind of a beloved passage from William Morris from The Decorative Arts:
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“Now if the objection be made that these arts have been the handmaids of luxury, of tyranny, and of superstition, I must needs say that it is true in a sense; they have been so used… I must allow that these decorative arts have flourished among oppressed peoples, who have seemed to have no hope of freedom; yet I do not think that we shall be wrong in thinking that at such times, among such peoples, art at least was free; when it has not been, when it has really been gripped with superstition, by luxury, it has straightaway begun to sicken under that grip. Nor must you forget that when men say popes, kings, and emperors built such and such buildings, it is a mere way of speaking. You look in your history books to see who built Westminster Abbey, who built St Sophia at Constantinople, and they tell you Henry III, Justinian the Emperor. Did they? Or, rather, men like you and me, handicraftsmen, who have left no names behind them, nothing but their work?”
“Now if the objection be made that these arts have been the handmaids of luxury, of tyranny, and of superstition, I must needs say that it is true in a sense; they have been so used… I must allow that these decorative arts have flourished among oppressed peoples, who have seemed to have no hope of freedom; yet I do not think that we shall be wrong in thinking that at such times, among such peoples, art at least was free; when it has not been, when it has really been gripped with superstition, by luxury, it has straightaway begun to sicken under that grip. Nor must you forget that when men say popes, kings, and emperors built such and such buildings, it is a mere way of speaking. You look in your history books to see who built Westminster Abbey, who built St Sophia at Constantinople, and they tell you Henry III, Justinian the Emperor. Did they? Or, rather, men like you and me, handicraftsmen, who have left no names behind them, nothing but their work?”
What we have done here is no masterpiece of human ingenuity, no object to possess or treasure. It cannot be secured away or rationed out. It is not a singular, monolithic narrative, or even one, isolatable thing. It is outside of view, remote and impossible to grasp. You can feel at it, like the handle of the hammer. To can clutch to you like cloth. You can see it through tiny portals, like the aperture of a camera or a picture window.
What we do cannot be owned. It can be broken apart into myriad pieces and experiences, but those will only suggest the totality of what took place here. We are possessed, but we are not possessions.
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We will pack up our aprons, our tools, and our Second Skins. We will follow the trade winds back home, returning with what we’ve learned. You may have what we have done here as an example. We are done with this place. You may repurpose it for your own.
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Its time for now, to hang up the Work Apron. Lay out our Second Skin to dry before we pack. Perhaps, if you are passing through, next Sunday, March 25th, in the afternoon, on the fifth day of Spring, you can join us for some sustenance, and discuss what transpired here:
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Halsey McKay Gallery
79 Newtown Lane
East Hampton, NY 11937
Closing Reception: March 25th, 2018, 3 – 6pm
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