01.|. 1978.01

A Hasidic man in long grey beard and longer prayer beads, was hunched over a notebook of numbers in long penciled columns.  It was a late day flight to JFK from Chicago, a flight which is dark with sleeping passengers in various stages of rest and restlessness, none with the overhead light on but this one man so intent on completing a task at hand.  Without any knowledge to what this work was, I identified far more with him and his mission than I did with the others on the plane.  He was completely absorbed in his world in the particular way that obsesses those who have an understanding of the perfect abstraction of tiny forms.  Of language.  Of pattern.

I’ve started to write.  Like so many from my NYC tribe, we all have stories to tell, some chronological, some of a single moment intensely memorable, others of a relationship unknown to the general public.  Mine… mine does not want to behave.  It does not want to run in a single line, or focus.  The writing is it’s own being, and I am clearly just a pair of hands to put it down in words.

I’m sitting in a hotel room in Syracuse, NY.  It’s cold outside, and I have hours of silence ahead of me.  I have an esophageal anomaly that causes me to be unable to swallow anything that is thicker than water without terrible heartburn or choking.  It’s quite simply, too small.  So everything I eat causes me pain.  I’ve always had insomnia, but now I can only sleep for 1-2 hours at a time, and that is with the highest dosage of melatonin and 2 over the counter sleeping pills.  Sometimes, I luck out.  Sometimes I will sleep for up to 6 hours, but only when I’ve gone through 2 or 3 hour long sleep cycles.  So all that time lost in the wee hours and between eating is spent thinking.  Thinking.  Thinking.  My brain is writing the story.  But it is like my broken sleep, my broken eating.  It only comes in chunks and spurts, unconnected, broken English.

So how do you write down a life in starts and stops?  

By starting.  Stopping.  And starting again.  Possibly the closest pattern to actual life.  There is no perfect continuum.  

In 1978, I was in my second year at SVA in NYC.  I would spend hours alone in the school library, writing in thinly lined white notebooks, utilizing every pore of the paper so that no space was spared.  I copied the words of artists before me… contemporary ones mostly so I could commit them to memory.  It was a time when I was the Hasidic man in his long grey beard, absorbed in an understanding of the perfect abstraction of tiny forms.  Of language.  Of pattern.

I desired no friends outside the few I trusted, I sought no attention for myself, as I had never received any.  I had no concept of being pretty, and certainly not of being desired, as that had always had bad results.  I was only interested in being as smart as I could be, long before I was smart at all.  I had been given no examples of exactly who that person would be.  Or who I might become.  

The other part of me wanted terribly to be admired.  But there was nothing about me that was particularly memorable or special.  I had been raised by someone who was sure that she and her entire family were all incredibly special and gifted people, and yet none of them had ever done anything that was even slightly memorable or unique.  

But to me, having no idea of the road you were taking was akin to death, so I forged ahead with the idea that I might take the same route as Helen Frankenthaler.  She seemed to be a perfectly suited example of an artist who also curated other artists; someone suited to the task of seeing and understanding, without necessarily being the one viewed.  But I am way ahead of myself… I should give you a little context first.

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