The Brooklyn Rail

Black Mirror

She reached into the medicine cabinet for the seagreen plastic bottle.
Through a scrim of tears the letters floated before her: LYRICA (TM)
is not for everyone! She unscrewed the top & three capsules fell into
her palm. She swallowed them one by one. Then she put on her coat,
picked up her umbrella, & walked out into the rain. Umbra, she thought,
from the Latin, “shade, shadow.” Ellipsis, eclipse, from the Greek,
ekleipei “fails to appear.” The full eclipse of the sun was only a week
away. She was still absorbing the morning news. An old friend had
passed away at his home in Orient Point. Fierce, defiant, using the
force of gravity he had bent space to his will, erecting towering
monoliths of cold rolled steel. “I have no interest in how you feel
about my work,” he told her. “I am not a humanist.” At one point,
mid-life, he hit a wall. His marriage had ended, his mother committed
suicide, his father died two years later, he was alienated from his
brothers. She lent him her copy of Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace
& recommended a therapist. “I don’t know where I’m going,” he told
the therapist. “Nobody knows where they’re going,” the therapist
replied, “especially if they think they do.” That’s when he started
“drawing in the dark” inside out from the back of the paper because
“I don’t want to know where I’m going until I get there.” She saw
the piece he gifted the therapist. It was a wall-size opaque oil stick
rectangle called Elevation. Contracting light, densely weighted, it
reminded her of a page torn from a giant blacked-out daybook, a
way of burying, obliterating time. When her daughter was a child
she danced in front of it, she thought it was a black mirror. In the
wake of Giacometti’s tortured Woman with her Throat Cut
abandoning the pedestal & Brâncuși’s parabolic bird soaring into
flight, his sculptures appeared. The one clear memory that survived
from his childhood was the afternoon he was four when his father,
a Mallorcan welder, took him to the San Francisco docks to watch
the launching of a ship. “When we arrived, the black, blue and
orange steel plated tanker was … balanced up on a perch … large
as a skyscraper on its side,” he later wrote. “It was a moment of
tremendous anxiety as the oiler … rattled, swayed, tipped, and
bounced into the sea, half submerged, to then raise and lift itself
and find its balance … The ship went through a transformation
from an enormous obdurate weight to a buoyant structure, free,
afloat and adrift. My awe and wonder of that moment remained.”
As the immense vessel, unmoored, was slowly eased into the water
he realized something that would come to shape his life, that “an
object that heavy could become light, that that amount of tonnage
could become lyrical.” She stared down at her iPhone. The word
of the day was occultation—1. The state of being hidden or blocked.
2. The passage of a celestial object in front of another, hiding it from
view. fr. Latin occultare (to conceal). & the thought of the day, “A
neurosis is a secret that you don’t know you’re keeping.”