to be reworked to resemble the originals (but aren’t the ‘degraded’ ones still the originals?). Some believe Hesse made a terrible mistake.
She said, “Life doesn’t last, art doesn’t last… It doesn’t matter …”
“The whole issue of the unfinished is a living idea … something unfinished changes. That means it’s in a certain way alive.”
(I think of her making sculptures as she sickened. How they grew up around her—fiberglass forests; broken, aging windows; the sound of something mixing in with nothing.)
(Her hand as she sickened … That unstable, still-willful, leaving hand …)
For years Aught was kept in boxes. “The curators were afraid to take it out… The last time they exhibited it, a couple of days into the hanging it started to weep, that is, the latex began to drip.”
An expert on latex explained it could drip just as easily inside the box as out. What was gained from keeping it hidden away? Hung once more, “for some reason known only to the latex, it remained completely, utterly stable for the whole two months on display.”
In a small notebook she kept lists of words: “Aught—anything, in any degree or respect. Anything whatever; any little part.”
(All those parts you found to make me … How you fevered as you arranged and rearranged. As if we inhabit a controllable, known world. But what if our world is mostly, and ever will be, unknown?)
She believed chance is articulate. After filling four latex and canvas panels with polyethylene sheeting, rope, and other materials, she hung them on the wall so the random falling and settling would show through.
Dying, she lay in her bed partly directing, partly watching, the hands of others. This was for her piece Untitled (Rope Piece) made of latex over string and wire.
(There’s a ripped beauty in the mind, a harsh tangling that wonders, doubts, falls silent.)
(I see I’ve left out her childhood in Germany—she was born in Hamburg in 1936—and how she and her sister were sent to Holland to escape the Nazis. I’ve left out her marriage and much else. Mostly I don’t think about or feel those things when I look at what she made, but intersections of presence, absence, namelessness, the vulnerability and utility of form.)
Her lists of words included: Sequel. Accretion.
She kept the business cards of: World Plastic Extruders; Joe & Manny (General Contracting of all kinds); Alfred Covered Wire; Toy Balloon Corporation; John Boyle & Co. (Outdoor, Industrial, Marine Fabrics); Paris Lighting Fixture Co.; Arko Metal Products, and AEGIS Reinforced Plastics. (Manufacturers/Consultants).
She died in New York City on May 29, 1970.
Notes on Albertus Magnus
He believed contemplation is the highest form of human happiness.
He asked many questions.
“Do there exist many worlds or is there but a single world?” “Does the sight of the pains of the lost diminish the glory of the beautified?” Of what is our intelligence composed? What is the distinction between truths naturally known and truths that are mysteries?
This was in Germany, in the thirteenth century.
(Those days when I read behind the bushes, the words lifted me over threshold after threshold yet I never moved. All those dirty pages found in gutters—even the ripped ones, those with missing parts, still posed their questions, and each question was a wound and partial healing: “The proper names of things are the rays by which we”—by which we what? Or, “Why is the race of man so timorous as to need to believe more in things that are not, than in things that are?”)
He built a Box of Secrets. Three sides were lead, three gold engraved with the signs of planets.
(Mary also had a secret box. She took it with her to France when she ran off with Shelley. But somewhere along the way she lost it.)
Nothing much is known of his early education. Most who knew him thought him exceedingly slow.
(When I consider that word “slow,” I wonder why it’s used to indicate some lack or flaw. Clerval, translating, considered so many choices, ways of saying, pausing to wonder which was best, knowing there’s never one that’s perfect. Why shouldn’t such choosing be slow? I think of the “owe” in slow—how feeling one owes the world an honest faithfulness, and trying to fulfill that, can be mistaken for malingering, distractedness, forestalling.)
When he was a child, a woman in white came to him in a dream. This happened more than once.
“She appeared to me again, her white veil stained crimson, the scent of vanilla in the air …”
One night she leaned close to his ear, breath warm