culture diary, day 6

Beautiful late afternoon. The heat wave seems to have broken, so much so that I've shut the a/c and opened the screened windows again. Skies are blue and there's a fresh breeze, the air feels dry. I went for a swim earlier, all delightful and uneventful as what I had always experienced in years past. I have just woken from a nap and feel langorous and still wakeful. I've spent most of my time in this apartment nude. So comfortable. It's a rare pleasure to spend long stretches of time luxuriating in one's own skin. I sit at the computer typing, and when I get up to go to the next room there's a beautiful antique oak mirrored dresser in which I see my torso reflected back. I've seen this image so many times now it feels almost depersonalized - my head is cut off above the curved oak frame. It's me, or it could be any rounded French Venus from throughout time. I step past the bed and there's a full-length mirror, and it's me again, hair pinned up, looking back at me, no longer faceless, anonymous. And then I step past the image and it's just the sensation of me again, spirit within skin, moving about the apartment. I stand at the sink and rinse a few dishes, hard granite countertop cool against my skin, droplets of water dampening my breasts and I don't care (oh the liberation of no apron!). Back in the study I lean back in the office chair, stretching beneath the circulating fan and smiling up at the clear blue sky and treetops at the top half of the window. A helicopter hovers in the distance, tiny dragonfly over the East River. My back is slightly burned from my noontime swim, the sun having its way even through pearly haze. If I go to the pool tomorrow it'll be at the end of the day. I think of going to the Guggenheim in the morning for an exhibit whose theme is hauntings and repetitions and recursions, right up my alley, but then see that they've reproduced quite a lot of it online, so much so that I sit deliciously in my primordial, timeless nude and enjoy the most unrestrained tour, and my mind floats and I muse and dream as I gaze at the images and read the notes, grateful to be momentarily weightless, give myself to apprehending it all (albeit on reduced, flattened scale) without the clamorous distraction of painful feet. I wonder a bit about the tone of the curatorial notes, I sense a subtext that disdains as sentiment longings for the past, of memory, of the desire to preserve, record, remember. The overview notes that the exhibit "documents a widespread contemporary obsession with the past, both collective and personal." Whyever not? How is this a "contemporary" obsession, or an "obsession" at all? Isn't it one of the most essentially human existential quandaries that the past recedes, disappears, yet informs our present, we seek it and perhaps it seeks us? And that for time immemorial this quest to recapture lost time has been a very raison d'etre for art? Another curatorial note, on artistic recordings of landscape, reads, "artists... insisting on the importance of remembrance and memorialization." Insisting? Those sentimental artists! I just sense another agenda afoot, that while ostensibly celebrating poetic and artistic contemplations of the past, they are viewed as suspect, marginalized, unrealistically interfering with the steady march of progress, redevelopment, changes in landscape, loss of memories, rituals, traditional ways, etc.

I'm completely babbling, and if you were here enjoying delicious rose, ice melting the wine to pale pink, I don't know that we'd mire ourselves more than lightly in a theoretical critique of a subliminally coded virtual gallery tour. Or maybe we would. But with a cool breeze on our skin and soft sheets beckoning we wouldn't limit ourselves for long.

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P.S. to KZE -- chasing your butterflies -- GG Train, Olivers Army, and all the delightful rest - LOL!