writing
holes
I was curious about the kind of holes Donner and Yang refer to in their track. I got my answer as soon as I hit play.
A narrator instructed me to look for a hole nearby. Starting the audio guide right as I left my apartment, I noticed several holes in the wall trim by the building’s staircase. About a month ago, there was a little flood in the main hallway right outside of my apartment door that destroyed the elevators and some of the walls. The trim right around the staircase that descended to the lobby was in transition of being fixed with spray foam. There were leftover cans of Great Stuff all lined up neatly on the floor, a foot apart from each other. It looked like installation art. While I was pondering on found object installation, the narrator whispered “The sound of my voice… is traveling through two holes in your own head.” I guess Donner and Yang were referring to any and all kinds of holes.
While I was cutting through a parking lot from Dearborn to get on Plymouth, I was instructed to take deep breaths and even whistle. I loudly whistled Keith Richard’s guitar solo during the bridge of the Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” Let It Bleed had been on my mind recently, and I would’ve been listening to it this morning walking if I didn’t have the audio guide playing. It was nice that there wasn’t anybody around walking near me. Barely any cars too. I closed my eyes taking deep breaths and got distracted by how cold the air felt in my nose when I inhaled.
By the time I got on Wabash, I was instructed to walk in any direction for 30 seconds. I kept walking north, as it was my intended route anyway. After getting to the end of the block, right at the intersection of Wabash and Van Buren, the narrator continued speaking by bringing up the various holes I possibly walked through during those 30 seconds, like doorways, arches, and maybe even windows. I’d never considered those as holes, but I did walk under a few construction scaffolding canopies to get here. I also knew that I would soon be walking under the el overpass on Jackson. I guess that would be another hole I walk through unnoticed. I received my last instruction from the narrator a block away from the Art Institute. She told me to sit down and close my eyes for a while, so I picked a spot on a ledge close by the Chicago dog stand on the corner of Jackson and Michigan. She asked me if I’d ever noticed how black a person’s pupils are. I hadn’t. I feel as though whenever I do find myself in a situation staring at another person’s eyes; I’m always fixed on their irises and their colors. About two years ago, I was working as a co-curator for a museum in Southern California called The Museum Of__. Mark (my co-curator and boss) had collected these big round photos of enlarged eye scans of all of his friends that he wanted to exhibit. They were massive, beautiful, and undeniably detailed. Who knew the human eyeball was filled with so much delicate linework? Being enlarged to a three or four-foot diameter, they looked a lot like satellite images of desert scapes and oceans. Just yesterday, I was at a friend’s house having her put clown makeup on me for a costume party we were both going to. Having to hold still for an hour or two, I noticed the color of her eyes for the first time and was reminded of that eye show Mark and I opened years ago. Talia’s eyes were very bright. Not quite amber or reddish; more of a pastel-like caramel brown, but they had a loud shine to them in the way that bright blue eyes, amber eyes, or even cold grey eyes do. I wonder what the dessert that lives in Talia’s eyes looks like. I wonder if it’s devoid of water, has unrealistically tall and sandy trees with no leaves, or even massive clusters of unbelievably slender sand dunes like the eyes of Mark’s friends do. While I was daydreaming about the details of the dessert in Talia’s eyes, the narrator had stopped talking. The sound of tourists, honking cars, and lighters being flicked to light up the busy people of Chicago’s cigarettes reentered my consciousness. I was still about a block away from the Columbus building, so I got up, put on “Moonlight Mile” by the Stones (Mark’s favorite song), and tried to picture Talia’s desert again until I walked into my studio to write this.
more writing:
i. otherworldly truths
ii. the high fiction project
iii. following people
iv. holes