Diary
Consider the omissions
At work. Laboring over yet another slide that will be enclosed with so many others, delivered, and ignored. I like that everything I make is disposable, and that my job is to be personally memorable and then to vanish. Someone tells me never to say “I” when presenting to clients, because I am not an I, I am part of our team, and “we can’t support you if you say I.”
I am at [redacted.] It is like an emergency room: running 24/7/365. Any break in the running incinerates millions of dollars a minute. To some extent, every business is like this, any “going concern” with sufficient velocity to have interested parties. All things are loaned some urgency by the zodiac’s interminable revolutions. Aries comes around again, typically. Inside [redacted] it’s so loud there’s nothing to hear. Thought-dissolving. Outside, I say to my host, “I bet you can hear even the slightest change in the rhythm,” who laughs at me and tells me it’s eight layers of harmonic and that yes, they can.
I go to the Whitney. The Whitney is a capital fire, an enormous Darvaza of blood money with a marketing department attached. The line exits the door, leaves the block. Everyone inside is dressed with the dissonance peculiar to people who have seen more event press photos than they’ve attended events. There are many branded objects, worn hopefully. There are ten perfect Hopper watercolors in a long row and around the corner there is a perfect view of the city, irreproachable, sure in its cocky aloofness, and the light rakes over the avenues with a less trustworthy name than recognition, the Grade-A winter butter light that turns the brick into bronze, and there’s still an hour before the blue shadows will turn brown. I go see my favorite painting in this building, by Charles Demuth, a water-refracted crucifixion of grain silos painted while he was dying of diabetes in Lancaster called My Egypt. Leaving I pass a video with Toccata and Fugue in D Minor playing,1 wonderful, bright not in color but in tone. There is a parochialism in seeing the origination of things, or maybe this is just how silly the clouds of novelty make one look. I leave.
I write these for you. Who knows if you will ever read them. Dear Diary. I lose minutes, hours, in wonderful slippage. One arranges fragments like feet beneath a blanket, and examines the shapes attention drapes over them. I’m still writing a diary for someone who isn’t myself.
At work, I say, “they try to give me all these people.” He says, “I know, I keep notes on everyone.” I wonder why he has to write them all down.
Many things I cook are on rotation with only infinitesimal finessing on the next occasion: spices, inclusions, greens. I’m making potatoes again. The sky is the hue that lands between blue and yellow, my favorite color, less a color than a temperature.
It’s by Mary Ellen Bute and it’s called Synchromy No. 4: Escape, 1937-8
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