I had a friend who would run up to people in public places and photograph their eyes. He wouldn’t ask their permission. He was, however, good enough to disengage the flash. To really understand an object, he said, “you must look at it directly.” “Why eyes?” I asked him once, as his collection of thousands […]
How space can trick us, thought Ruiz, how its echoes might transform. Ruiz would soon be on the train home after his visit to the gallery in the city. Soon he would think about how certain interior spaces make the voice echo. How they augment the voice and, depending on the design, reshape it. They […]
Looking back, he attempted to resolve a two thousand year old grandmother whose heal he’d seen rise and disappear over a cracked and wormeaten threshold. Maybe she’d held a bird in her hand. Maybe she’d called and the sons and daughters had dashed off and out of ear shot to frighten her or make her […]
Henry told the story with a rush of arms and fingers under an animated and electric sky, soon to drop water on us. Later we’d hear about trees falling, crushings in the streets, but that’s only sidebar. “I found him in a diner, where she said he would be,” Henry informed us. “I went in […]
Ortiz’s party was successful only as art. Friends had flown in from Chicago, Amsterdam, Buenos Aires. He knew it had all been about orientation. A tall man, bald, with a gray right eye and the words en unión y libertad tattooed on his wrist, stood with a glass of white wine in the kitchen and […]
Yes, I persist with Ruiz and Erasmus, who are time travelers, but more on that later. In fiction, they could be time travelers. They could be cross dressers; they could be anything the story requires. Indeed, we could muck up the method of telling the story, which brings in the notion of narrative, with all […]
While the cat and dog picked through fallen leaves, Ruiz and Erasmus drank coffee at a cafe’ by the sea. Erasmus told Ruiz about his sister, who was a filmmaker, and a film she’d begun that suggested the space of human drama. He had snap shots, old photographs that he placed on the table one […]
Is space a number of protrusions, elements of perception that appear then disappear when we pass them? I started a book a few years back on the notion of memory and space, until a dog and a cat entered the villa and threw everyone’s timing off. People in the villa lived according to what might […]
“Exactly,” Ruiz said. “You mean, how we won’t know how we got to the edge of this roof, as how we got here has yet to be told.” “Yes, and how now everything is flowing as it is not meant to flow.” “You mean the incident with the leaf and how your day will begin […]
Can spaces overlap? This is somewhat of a break from a growing logical ploy on my part. But consider the question anyway. One of the reasons I enjoy thinking about space is that space is, in a word, everywhere. We can go from the designed to the natural space, the small to the large space, […]
Do spaces absorb sound? A birthday party would be a case to consider. The partiers gather, parents, children. The wrapping paper’s crumpled. It falls between the arms of the furniture. The pets wander in and out with castoff and twisted ribbon. There are many quiet thoughts under the reverberations of the real. The room is […]
I often think about how spaces shape human experience. I read a lot about the subject of space (I write “a lot” to lend this writing a colloquial flavor). Sometimes I consider how digital interface can be extrapolated to inform physical spaces. (Or the other way around.) The spaces we build are complex. To build […]
I once saw my parents drive into a wall of sheet rain. I remember my father’s hat, my mother’s wig, I think the dog was watching out the back but I don’t remember growing up with a dog. The rear lights of the car disappeared into the gray thickness, this odd tempest which cut the […]
In the West we like to see the human brain in two parts: the physical organ of the brain (which is a part of the body) and its properties such as thought or the things we think about, which is derived from what might be termed the philosophy of mind, examined by Plato in his […]
I told Lucy that I had a less than perfect relationship with her finger. I’d never write anything about Lucy that I wouldn’t say to her directly. I said, “Lucy, I have a less than perfect relationship with your finger.” This was years ago, of course. She said, “You mean how it points to Pegasus?” […]
