Part Two
And then came the virus.
And so then — the museum shutting its doors, so to exit and retreat home, retreating not returning, though requiring a turning, a torque into what would become new relationships with waiting. To imagine it while doing it, a slow walking backwards, still facing Etel’s paintings, at first framed by the gallery walls and passageways, then cropped by the closing elevator doors, then enclosed by the monumentalizing architecture of the museum itself, and then, though long disappeared from sight, through the locked entrance doors, now reflecting the waning light of dusk.
And so then — slowly walking further backwards as the sun begins to drop behind the museum’s tower, its dark orange tactility like a smear of Etel’s paint, until retreating from downtown, up or back through the several blocks of now closed storefronts, ghostly empty stoops, the strange silence of evacuated streets, up and into the house. To greet the dog with gentle pats, in response some licks for her human, to close the door and then move to the window, where a new framing of the light would henceforth crystallize the kinds of perception this new experience of time would enable, the fading rays of sunlight alternatively moving through or reflecting back onto the clouded double-panes, until soon one’s spectral reflection gradually appears. And so this — to see oneself looking at oneself looking out from inside, the outside pressing in.
And so then — sheltering, alone, inside, returning to Etel’s paintings, now on-through the computer screen, shrunken into two-dimensional thumbnails, absent the ambient and sensor-controlled light and air of museum-space, the sensuality of their materiality, thus flattened if more readily accessible. But also this — not trusting the color reproduction or the sense of scale, the glow of presence — whatever presence is — replaced by the glow of the screen and the easily distracted interfaced-mind. To zoom in and out rather than move one’s body in relation to the actuality of the canvas and its emanating light. To feel out of joint with the time of such looking, within the uncanny temporality of quarantine, with its own modalities of uncertain waiting in contrast to the seeming immediacy of internet drift-flow. To know, or more precisely to be confident in believing knowing having read, that the average time a museumgoer spends in front of an artwork is seven seconds. To assume the average time one spends looking at an image online is surely less. To feel that one is passing time rather than being present in it, filling time with scanning-viewing as if in order to make waiting-time seem other than empty. To click on an image of a painting and then another as if opening portals to a constellatory multiverse, to know such constellations are ruled by algorithms attuned to one’s viewing and purchasing habits as much as any free whim, to put the computer down and return to the window, to look through and out at the sun, hovering above the hills, through a by-now noticeably less polluted atmosphere, framed by and refracted through the window, with its smudges and dust refracting light, the dirty glass lending texture to the composition, a depth of image more tactile than the kind of perspectival sight habituated to when walking through the seemingly invisible outside air with its minute and near-invisible droplets and particles hovering and gently falling on and around oneself. Sensing the sun’s light as if in isolation, through the atmosphere and particles and window, time passing in the slow movement of shadows across the walls and floor, the whirring of the laptop’s fan, the dog lapping water from her bowl in paragraphical measure.
But also this — returning, if only in the mind, to Eva Figues’ novel Light, remembering or misremembering Monet’s wife waking early and sensing — from habit as much as sound — her husband getting ready to meet the sun’s rise upon his tended pond, brushes and canvas at the ready, apprehending from her bed the slow movement of light across the room, the play of light revealing the unspooling measure of time in a day otherwise not demarcated by working hours as much as the gendered and upper-class rhythms of overseeing the servants’ attention to meals scheduled around the whims of the patriarch whose own tagwerk would be determined by the movement and play of that day’s light, each ray an event for his ravenous perception and capture, while for her each ray refracted through the window and suffusing the preparing for the day.
(but also this — Etel on her solitary youth: “I didn’t have brothers and sisters to play with, so the light coming in through the window was a great event for me. I played with that instead of playing with other children…)
And so then — to remove the artworks and posters from the wall, to set up a small digital projector on the other side of the room, to elevate its tilt with a small pile of books, to adjust the lens to focus the beam of light into legibility, to see the heretofore invisible dust particles hover among the pixels being cast across the room at the speed of light, to watch coming into clarity upon the far wall the image of one of Etel’s paintings, a red sun hovering over a green-brown mountain against a yellow-grey landscape, or more precisely an image of a red circle hovering above a green-brown triangle against a yellow-grey background, or more precisely a set of digitized pixels translated into colored light particles, reflecting off an off-white wall, the eye translating the reflections into painted shapes, and then into representations — land, mountain, sun, sea.
And so then — to witness throughout the day and into the night time passing in the movement of light and shadow in the room, slowly changing the hue and cast of the image, as if watching the sun set across the painting-landscape itself, the image seeming to glow and cast its own spectral moonlight into the darkened room as night arrives, to imagine Etel’s actual paintings likewise glowing in the shuttered museum throughout the night, their light seeming to emanate from the paint itself, conveyors of energies freed from the museum’s stage lighting and explanatory wall text, unbeholden to the rhythms of human time or interpretation.
But also this then — to counterpoint the movement of daylight and shadow across the seemingly still projection — which nonetheless continuing to quiver minutely with the movement of light particles cast through a series of finely tuned lenses, bouncing off airborne particulate matter and the far wall with its surface imperfections and age-worn tactility — by projecting on the opposite wall a loop of the video documentation of Faith Wilding’s 1974 performance “Waiting,” wherein the artist rocks forward and back on a chair amidst a silent, seated audience, reciting a record of a life of waiting, from the newborn “waiting for someone to hold me… waiting for someone to feed me…” to the heteronormative expectations of motherhood, women’s work, and the loss of the husband’s desire: “Waiting for him to tell me something interesting, to ask me how I feel… Waiting for him to stop being crabby, reach for my hand, kiss me good morning… Waiting for fulfillment…” to the inevitable aging body and decline, until she is “Waiting for the pain to go away… Waiting for the struggle to end… Waiting for release…”
And so then — a woman’s full life of waiting condensed into four minutes and thirty-three seconds of recitation, Wilding’s blank stare and rocking body adding pathos to the rhythms of Etel’s Penelope’s “pure waiting,” looped in distressed video against one wall while on the other Etel’s stolid mountain-scape hovers near-frozen in geological time, beneath a never-setting red sun, foreboding but stoic. And so then — to sit on the floor between the two walls, between the two projections, waiting for the out of sync repetitions to find their own rhythms as time unspools, mediated by sound and light and rocking and stillness and the traffic and passersby on the street outside and the early afternoon fog drifting across the bay to slowly obscure the sun like a cloth mask, to be there then, in that, waiting for...
And so then — to pack a small backpack with a water bottle and apple, extra masks and a handful of dog treats, a copy of Etel’s Fog. To put the dog on leash and guide her into the truck, then drive north and across the bridge, then back south down to Sausalito. To look for Mt. Tamalpais in the distance, approaching ever closer if circuitously according to the roadways carved into the hillside overlooking the Sausalito waterfront. To navigate the narrow winding roads up the hill towards where Etel and Simone used to live, not knowing the exact location but trying to extrapolate it from the now rearview mirror’d image of Mt. Tam’s peak, still visible through the gathering layers of haze and mist, to speculate from what vantage point Etel’s many paintings and drawings of the mountain and its surrounding land and seascapes may have derived, to aim the truck towards that point, to match an imagined location on a mental map formed by Etel’s concentrated looking, rendered in ink wash and brushstrokes, with the physical landscape of high-end houses nestled into the Sausalito hills, each positioned towards maximum value vistas. To search in the rearview mirror, through now-gray skies and encroaching fog, for sight of the mountain, to lose track of the sharp turns in the street, to drive over a traffic calmer and hear the crack and then feel the slow deflation of a blown front tire. To turn the car around and roll back down the hill, pumping the breaks down winding roads to the dockside streets, to look at one’s phone for a tire repair shop, to turn on the hazard lights and drive slowly through town, to roll down the window to hear the metallic whir of exposed rim on pavement and to feel the moist chill in the air, the dog leaning forward to lick at her human’s ear, to follow the map on the phone while also looking up at the road and at Mt. Tam and in the side mirrors for weekday bicyclists and pedestrians, to turn down an alleyway leading to a semi-industrial area hidden away from the tourist’s bay-view gaze, to roll in and park outside a garage, to put on a mask, take the dog by the leash, grab the backpack, and exit the truck.
To wait, to walk the dog while waiting, to walk down to the water’s edge while waiting, as if walking the dog was not doing something but something-to-do while waiting, to turn and try to find the peak of Mt Tam through the clouds and fog, to note the sun’s descent, to turn back to the bay and watch the fog roll in, to mentally consider the phrase ‘roll in’ used to describe the movement of fog, its lumbering crepuscular and aerated mass marking the atmospheric passage of some nonhuman time in relation both to the space it travels and the space it engulfs, to make out in the distance the gently heaving container ships, stacked and waiting for the stalled pandemic economy to justify the sunk cost of unloading goods at depressed market rates, to see smoke rising from an as-yet small fire in the far hills, to sit on a bench and give the dog a treat as a reward for her patience, to have decided she’d been exhibiting patience only after the fact and in relation to the sense of waiting rather than any particular behavior on her part, to pull down the mask and take a sip of water from the plastic bottle, offering some to the dog as well, to return the mask over nose and mouth and chin and pull from the backpack Etel’s book, to remember to glance again in the direction of where Mt. Tam should be, to register some disappointment at the overcast skies limiting the view, or rather the view imagined from Etel’s paintings and drawings, where the light now obscured by cloud cover and refracted through the gray fog might otherwise cast the mountain in color and shading, crisp lines and sharpened contours, to understand that such light and color and the crisp event of such an image would have been more the result of artistic perception and representation than one’s touristic gaze or well-timed photograph, to return to the book and to read — “The fog’s project is to unsubstantiate reality. Mountains occupy inadvertently one’s complete consciousness. The sea retires into its distance.”
But also this — to copy down, later-here, the following from Etel’s The Sun on the Tongue: “every square is a fresh beginning / painting is not a shape, but it is a feeling.” To consider that each prose bloc might thus become a canvas for feeling-thinking, or for feeling some way to thought, in and through language, constrained by the logics of syntax — no verb tense for such feeling-thinking-writing — as if composing an image of the mind perceiving both the outside world and its own progressions, each with a different temporality and logic, conveying such thinking-feeling into language, describing images to obscure other images, as if through scrims of fog and dramatization, to narrate if only to oneself the time of such thinking-feeling-writing as both seemingly instantaneous and ever unfolding and stumbling through yet-unknown measures, as if to confirm that thought was not unidirectional but rather like an arboreal burl in a near-petrified forest, knotting itself into uncanny formations, form thus a writing outward and into.
To return, then, to another painting by Etel, even if-as mediated by digital reproduction on the machine-screen, its scrape-marks, or more precisely the pixels organized into reproductions of scrape-marks notating the movement of paint then-now settled into a stage-set for the play of light — whatever settled means — the sense of movement that at the same time might seize one with its utter material clarity and stoic facticity, as if the image perceived and its perception were fused, or as Etel writes, “perception is a translating of the object of that perception.” To have copied that sentence down in a notebook and then later transcribed it into the laptop keyboard, to have moved it around with a cursor, or more precisely to have moved one’s thumb and retina in consort with the correlating movement of pixels across the screen, to imagine a scraping sound on the surface of the screen, later to be counterpuntally invoked in the scraping sound of printer ink on paper, to then reconsider and instead erase the sentence and begin again, allowing the spectral trace of its words and their incomplete and imprecise propositions to shape an outline of a square, a container for feeling-thinking, replete with chaga conks and bulbous tumors, a re-beginning, while into the writing-time a plomb being dropped, gently but precisely, both a full-stop and a place-holder for living on.