simultaneity

Posted by Allison Rae on 14th June 2002

To continue on this previous line of thinking:

…These highways are hundreds of arteries, impartially channeling us from point A to B. And the roadside motels are anonymous. I always look in the mirror across from the musty bed, trying to imagine the reflection of each person who has stood in front of it.

And then there are the motel beds. I can never sleep in them. I get dizzy trying to comprehend everything that has happened on top of the dingy bedspread, under the covers, and on the carpet. For a moment I pull the scratchy white sheet up to my nose and close my eyes. That chemical smell of cheap detergent gives way to the smell of them, all of them all at once – the cold, the hot, the raunchy, the perfunctory.

It’s the same way when I’m in a museum. I stand in front of that huge Klein canvas, and yes it’s all blue, but don’t you see, his hands were all over it. It’s so easy to treat the work as static, to walk past with little more than a cursory glance. But the paintings don’t capture singular moments any more than a song encompasses one note. They capture series of moments, some sequential (he touched this corner then that corner then that one), some circular (he touched this corner then rubbed it out then layered on top of it). There is no beginning or end. The viewer provides the trajectory – sometimes it’s challenging, often alienating, but perhaps such is the viewer’s price for being treated with reverence as to his or her will.

So I’m usually more interested in the process than the result, and as such, vastly prefer to watch the world through a timeless space. Here I’m still allowed to write long letters to M.D. and mail them to random addresses in Paris. I’m allowed to look at anything a boy has ever written me and feel faint, simply because, well, I can see his hands simultaneously hovering above every square millimeter of the paper, all at once, and it’s too much.

Dynamism. Look.
Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash
Giacomo Balla, Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash

Look again.
Head-spring, a Flying Pigeon Interfering
Eadweard Muybridge, Headspring, a Flying Pigeon Interfering

See? The movement, it never stopped. You look at it, then walk away. You come back one minute, ten years later, and it is still moving. The function is continuous, at all points understood.

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