A PREWRITING EXERCISE, AS A PRELUDE TO A TISCH EXPOSITORY WRITING THE ESSAY: THE WORLD THROUGH ART ESSAY.
Do pretend the entire premise of this piece isn't incredibly trite. Dandy.
Oh god, I wish you'd see this, ******n! Oh how I wish you'd see this.
Or maybe not, I dunno. This is for me, not you. I'm dealing with my shit this way, you need to deal with yours another.
(I'm such a chronic ENFP.)
You probably shouldn't read this. Or do—I have no clue who's even on here anymore or what strangers can see this or whatever.
I'm trying to write an essay right now. It's a really difficult piece about James Turrell. It's a consideration essay of sorts. Or maybe it isn't. I'm trying to develop thinking about him but it's hard to develop thinking when all you have to think about are boxes and light and space and abstracts.
I think I'm onto something though.
I could write it, if I had the mental capacity to—I don't at the moment.
Jennifer Gurss, light of my life, mentor, and second mother to me once introduced me to the concept of things taking up space in our heads, like ideas renting space. You should manage your apartment complex of a brain responsibly—those things that rent the most space in your head should give you the most return on investment. The good tenants who pay their rent on time and are pleasant and liked by the other residents get to stay. The ones who don't pay rent on time get evicted.
Except, I guess you're the one paying rent for them because they're your ideas and you choose to hold them and whatever this metaphor's breaking down maybe I should have thought of a mall and not an apartment but the point is this:
You rent a lot of space in my head. So, so, so much space in my head. And in return, I am met with an oppressive radio silence, materialized in the form of blue boxes in a long unbroken chain, unopposed. An empty bubble takes ages for me to fill because it's hard to have a conversation with someone in your head who you're almost certain isn't the same as the someone on the other side of the screen.
I can't not worry about you. I love you too much. I know you love me too, but when we say the words they obviously mean different things. I don't understand how you can ignore someone you love that much. You know you do. You say as much.
I wish I could tell you how much I love(d) you. How I love(d) you in all the ways you want to be, for your face, your hair, your body, for your freckles, for your eyes, for your lips. You fucking idiot. Don't you dare call yourself unlovable like that again. Because if you're completely unlovable, what have the past three years been for?
I-god, I want to write this essay. I really, really do. I want to expound upon the magical quality of Turrell's work, about how it's empty because the art isn't in what he shows you but in how you see it, that we're missing something by qualifying him solely as a light-and-space artist because that would make him such an empty artist—how we ought to qualify him as an artist of experience, too. How his rooms are works of performance and you are merely the actor on a stage he has set for you
but I can't! Because of you!
It's too hard to consider emptiness. They tell us in Performance Strategies never to have a negative goal, since it's insane in the Einsteinian sense to perform a deconstructive goal when all you have are constructive tools. Like how there's no real cold, just the absence of heat?
You are that James Turrell ganzfeld. I stare into your bright, alluring emptiness and in receiving nothing but uniform brightness my eyes must hallucinate the content. Being friends with you from afar is that unreal. It literally feels like I'm hallucinating a friendship. Do we even really keep a streak? Do we even really call each other on our birthdays? Do we even really text each other?
Opposites attract. I guess my heart is so goddamn full that I'd have no room for anything but someone with an empty heart I could fill.
“I love you, man.”
Yeah. I do too. Maybe a little too much. Maybe I ought not to.
Good fucking luck getting over her. And, on your behalf, I'll wish myself the same for getting over you. God knows I'll need it.
If you read this, and know how to contact me, feel free to. I obviously need advice.
