Why am I always escaping from New York City? I've lived in seven different apartments in Brooklyn over the last 15 years, and left the city altogether 3 times. Each stretch has been punctuated by only fleeting bursts of contentment there, rare as a rainbow, that sense that maybe the knots in my story are working themselves out. Maybe I'd be better asking myself what brings me to New York City in the first place.
Right now I miss a lot of things. Writing about it is embarassingly rote at this point. I smirk at myself as I type. my god I'm rolling my eyes. But I do, I miss things. I'm all turned around by this new crippled economy, by the empty perfomance halls, canceled tour plans, and email silence from collaborators that just 4 months ago were a chatter of clattering potential, quick as a woodpeckers racket, now throbbing with silence.
This sort of transitory space between social activity and private inquiry has always been an unwelcome part of my work. Art has always been the narrow bridge between my natural inclination to isolate, and the terror of collaborating. I am more creative when left to work in tandem to someone else's project, side by side rather than head-on. I grew up doing my best drawings on the blank sides of bulletin inserts, slouched in a pew during church, or on the floor of an auditorium with my legos all spilled out around me while my father or one of my sisters rehearsed for a performance. This was how I found that higher frequency: safety in the shadow of others; safety in the spaces in-between.
I've spent the last couple weeks with family near Buffalo. We own a little cottage on a tiny lake formed by the same glacial forces that dug out the finger lakes further to the East. This lake is charming until your doggy paddle is ensnared in a forest of weeds not more than a foot under the surface of the water. The lake is best experienced from on top of the water, preferrably in a kayak or row boat.
Still, despite its limitations, the value of this place is undeniable. Presently, this little cabin is allowing me a little time to experiment with the notion of leaving the city for a while. Yesterday I drove around the countryside in my parents' car hoping a piece of inconspicuous property would call out to me. Landscape has always been my oracle. Particularly now, after 7+ years living in close quarters with 9 other people, in the heart of an industrial neighborhood in Brooklyn, I'm looking to the natural world to guide me back out again. I'm looking for permission to put up some walls around this intention of mine, to claim a part of myself, plant it in the world, to let my value speak, resound, arrive.
My dreams have been saying as much for months now, though I hadn't until this week taken them at face value. I scribbled this down mid-march after one such bright dream: "walking a long path through trees through the primeval, through eon, through bedrock and infinity, through vibration, through time, through beginnings, through collectings, through expansion, through decay, through story linked to story buried in story, tombs of tombs of time excavating and reburying in the sister sludge of its own birth, generation and spawn, stomp, echo, obliteration. grace. I built a house but first a lean-to in the trees, then a house in the clearing, hugging the shade of a small glade of poplars, not far from the forest edge, the great forest edge, the forest that runs the whole flat edge of this coast. In planning the house, I devise rooms without use, intending to finish them last, to leave a space devoted to expansion, devoted to change and chance, to the expansion of effort, to the expansion of responsibility, to purpose, to question. These rooms are scattered about. The room behind the pantry hallway, the little gap between the kitchen and shelves of storage, that room has lovely windows over the back patio. The heart-shaped room beyond the living room, with the spine of the back stairs cutting into its shape to create those two separate nooks at its wider end. The long room between the heart-shaped room and the mud room and side entrance. The upside down house. The house built around a trajectory. The house intends to move. The house is a vessel for potential. The house is not a tomb..."
I've been collecting ideas for such a house, and so far the only room I'm seeing very clearly is the mud-room. In fact, my drawings have given half of the footprint to this transitional room: a polished concrete floor, a reflecting pool positioned to slow one down, to allow the space between to make an impression. Or to allow the house a moment to savor its meal before swallowing.