A Companion
for Liberatory
Practice
II. Inhabiting Complexity
I. Openings
III. Breath, Friction
VI. Reservoirs
VII. Living Space
VIII. Seeds
V. Iceberg
IV. Hesitation, Iridescence
Interlude
1. House, Open
4pm Thursday Feb 23, 2023
I’ve just settled down in the stool between one of my creek-filled picture frames and the back ramp of the library’s gallery and decided to start describing the ceilings (waffle-patterned with inset can lights and two rows of adjustable track lights—they’ve fixed the flickering one, or else it has burned out) when I hear a swishing sound: a woman pushing a wheelchair up the ramp. From the angle where I’m sitting, I can’t tell if the bundle she’s pushing is another person or her bags, though I suspect that like many of the people who congregate around the banks of the creek she is unhoused and that she is pushing her material belongings with her on this wheelchair.
I flash a quick smile but don’t want to look like I’m staring, so I look back down at my notebook. The swishing must be from her pants, some kind of snow-material. She or they disappear around the corner into the nook that used to hold the public single-occupancy bathrooms, which are currently closed for cleanup of the meth that was found in the air vents in December. The swish of her pants gets softer. It sounds like sweeping.
The outer door swishes open and hums closed—it’s a sound that had felt comforting and hypnotic while I was installing, though now they appear to have fixed the mechanism that was causing them to open and close constantly, as if letting in a ghost every few seconds. Most of the people leaving the library this late in the afternoon carry canvas totes and walk quickly out the doors—I imagine they must work here at the library.
It's bags, not a person—the woman shuffles back slowly through the center of the exhibit, as if to leave through the double doors, which open for her; but she turns to the right at the last minute, bends over a pedestal, and I hear the clatter of rocks. I can’t tell if she’s scooping them up or just inspecting them. She then turns and walks over to the jars, picks up a Bon Maman jar that isn’t hooked up to a transducer, holds it up to the light, plunks it back down. In the clatter of objects (she flips over the rolodex that’s perched on a transducer) I hear a combination of ownership, belligerence, and childlike curiosity. She seems at home. She crosses over the exhibit to my grandpa’s iron trunk, opens the heavy lid, lets it slam shut. Opens it again, closes it gently. Turns the tiny flower pot over. I hear a creaking sound, something falls, the swish of her pants. She opens Harumi’s cabinet and sound floods out. She shuts it with a bang, leans over the shelf behind it. I hear rattling, scraping, the snap of a lid. Someone walks through the gallery and out the door, pulling their hood over their head as they leave.
I can’t tell if it’s the door humming or the woman. The extended leg of her wheelchair bumps against a table leg as she turns and walks out, doors sighing again as they close. I can see her standing a bit outside, and I wait until she’s out of sight before getting up.
When I walk over to the table, the cabinet door and trunk lid are wide open. Sound pours out. All the boxes that I’d left closed are open.
2. Nothing
2:30pm, Wednesday, February 22, 2023
A man drifts in, eyes glued to his phone. He pauses in the center of the gallery, head bent down. Some part of me feels let down that he’s in the space but not in it. I watch as he types. His red beard is cut bluntly, and makes me think of Tumnus the faun. He’s wearing a knit beanie with a little cuff of faux fur, a long split peacoat, and has a second dark jacket draped over his arm. He stays there for maybe five minutes, then turns without looking up and leaves, down the hall toward the cafe. Two women walk in the double doors, on a mission; one of them has a pair of hiking poles that click on the linoleum-tile floor. They disappear around the corner.
I’m sitting on a stool tucked away behind a mosquito incense tube and Liangyeh’s repurposed matcha tin, and I lean my head back against the wall. The sound from the frame above me comes into focus, glassy and high, feeling personal. I soak for a minute in the sounds, which mix so much better than they did in the shorter-ceilinged garage loft where I’d done the prototyping. A walkie-talkie chirps from around the corner at the security desk. The man with the peacoat returns, this time off his phone; there’s something a little deer-like about his movements. He leans in toward the pedestal that has the turquoise box, which isn’t connected to a transducer, then walks across to the transducer table and bends down to read the sign. A low quick series of hmms as he reads and nods. I can’t see his face but somehow I know he’s smiling.
He walks across the room to the frames, leans into those like he’s listening to a secret. Then he walks to the banner with the invitation to choose a stone to take home, stands for a while and then opens the reflection book and writes. I hear voices and the jingling of keys. The two women are back; their voices are a blurred murmur that weaves in and out of the water. The man with the peacoat walks back up the ramp smiling, second coat over arm.
I move across the gallery to sit by the station where the women are bent over the box that held Daisy the black lab’s ashes, and watch as they turn to the Rolodex, lean in to listen, smile.
The man with the beard is back. He puts on his second coat and wanders back toward the trunk, turns to look out the window. It’s snowing, small sifting flakes that stand out against the red rust of the frame-shaped sculpture just outside the library. The sculpture makes me think of a James Turrell skyspace, a giant square of emptiness cut into tilted solid metal. I can’t see the snow falling through the opening against the white of the sky, but something in my heart lifts imagining the snow falling through that cut-open space.
The man’s voice brings me back; he’s talking with Calloway, the guard on duty. They’re by the invitation poster; I can’t see whose hand is pointing at the part about taking a stone home, but I catch the words “take it home” and “comfortable” and “yeah, it was cool, it was really cool.” Their voices remind me of the rise and fall of grownups’ voices through a closed door as I fall asleep. I feel a little disingenuous listening in and not saying anything; my N95 mask helps a bit. Calloway walks away and the man turns to the double doors, which whoosh open and let in a gust of cold. He walks out, pauses to check his phone, and continues, breath like steam.
I wait until the two women have left and then read the last entry in the guest book, on the bottom right corner of an empty page. His handwriting leans gently to the left:
In this reflecting
pool
My ears
find relief
from tinnitus
my mind finds
relief from
a river of
thoughts
My spirit
finds nothing.
