figure

Williamsburg bridge, nyc, 2004


This strips no longer exists, according to my best search, but in 2004 spaced along the bike-pedestrian path of the Williamsburg Bridge were a series of walking figures to denote that side on which people were supposed to walk. Somebody had added in spray paint various graphic and verbal commentaries to the figures, so what I said seems to be an additional (and perhaps now sole surviving) layer. This was certainly an instance of a visually driven composition.

What is not depicted visually or verbally (gestured toward in "lonely boat") but was in force at the back of my head: on the river, as I looked south from the bridge, I saw two fire-engine boats emitting great arcs of water into the sky that. caught in the afternoon light. cast rainbows in the sky. My mind attached these visual phenomena to Yeats' lines in "Among School Children"

Plato thought nature but a spume that plays
Upon a ghostly paradigm of things

and my words at their moment in part engage those lines to whatever degree of success partially addressing my discomfiture with abstraction as a way out. That there is no way out: nor in, for that matter.

Language is a surface and may only know itself: namely other appearances.