enchantment

I made a doctor uncomfortable in my enthusiasm for my hysteroscopy procedure. It was beautiful and grotesque and he said I was the first person he ever encountered who was that excited about a hysteroscopy. I told him I was an artist and that perhaps I would make a work about the experience. He surprised me by responding that he was nervous about that. “After all, you never know what artists are going to do with things,” he said.

false door

In Ancient Egypt, a false door was a threshold between the living and the dead where the spirit of the deceased could enter and exit. The living would leave offerings for the spirit on a slab in front of the door.

“My point now is that enchantment is not simply an experience to be received but something to be made, a technical or cultured effect.” -Jane Bennett

micro memories

“It’s like in set theory, I share memories with X that I don’t share with Y, and everyone could choose for themselves a unique configuration from out of the complete set of our memories. It’s the description of a conjunctive tissue of a kind, in which a whole generation might recognize itself.” - Georges Perec

ENCHANTMENT

Imagine there’s a pebble in your shoe on the way to somewhere. It has been digging into the side of your pinky toe for some time now but you don’t feel like stopping to take it out. After all, you are trying to get somewhere. You could decide to ignore it and carry on knowing your shoes will come off eventually but you make a justification for stopping to remove the pebble. It might make you more efficient and you really just want to get a closer look at what is making your life so miserable before tossing it to the side of the road. So you stop and empty your shoe and what you find is the most exquisite rock you’ve ever seen. It is strangely shaped and unfamiliar. You don’t know how it came to be in your part of the world let alone in your shoe. This bothers you in a way you can’t explain - it’s both disconcerting and exhilarating. The pebble doesn’t make you forget about where you are going but it has enchanted the journey and propels you forward, thinking about the pebble and the path you are on that put the pebble in your shoe. When you arrive, you are there in a way you would not have been able to be before.

Finding enchantment is like noticing details in the sidewalk. You’re walking and looking down and noticing how the pavement has cracked. There’s moss or weeds settling in or pushing through. Then something catches your eye in the periphery so you shift your focus and there’s a small, glossy tile embedded in the concrete. It’s a tiny, handmade tile of a moon and as you’re leaning in you notice three more tiles with unrecognizable symbols hidden under the leaves. So you spend the rest of your walk thinking about what those symbols might mean. Who put them there and when? You think about carrying a collection of objects with you from here on out just in case you come across wet cement one day. The thing is, once you start noticing this type of thing, you can’t stop noticing.

I watched a documentary about the late W.S. Merwin. One thing that struck me was his prediction or observation about noticing then choosing to ignore connections between injustice and personal experience. That ignoring or deliberately forgetting injustice will result in deep psychological damage. I immediately saw this as a powerful commentary on where we find ourselves today, culturally negotiating a never-ending list of global injustices and environmental trauma.