On a Random Thursday

Thirty years, paper clips, and standing in the hallway of something too big to name.

Just a couple of days ago, the art room finally got organized, and somehow, oddly, I almost forgot to write a note about it.

I sat down to figure out what the last two weeks were all about, and my mind went mostly blank. Not much happening and nothing much to report. You know, business as usual—  

And then, somewhere in the slow fuzzy scrolling-back, I realized: Oh. Oh, right! The thing I have been trying to do, in some form or another, since I was a teenager — that thing — just quietly finished itself on a random Thursday.

There was no fanfare and no dramatic breakthroughs appeared to be forthcoming. Just a simple need to clear a closet. And then to open the closet I had to organize the closet. Then one thing led to another, and it was (just about) done.

First there was, say, 30 years of trying to get it in order, followed by everything slotting into place one otherwise uneventful afternoon.

“I keep landing on the word absurd ... like beyond the reach of reason to fully hold. The sublime has that quality. You come into contact with something genuinely too large for your current processing capacity”

I want to be careful here about what I mean by thirty years, because it sounds more heroic than it was. It wasn't thirty years of sustained, noble effort. It was thirty years of ALL THE THINGS being in the way. Boxes moved from one storage unit to another ... and then another. Bins shuffled between houses and rooms and phases of life. A whole ecosystem of materials — every medium I've ever worked in, every project I've ever started, two degrees, four jobs, two decades of ideas mid-process — living in a kind of suspended state. Not abandoned so much as just ... pending. Refusing to be organized until apparently now.

I've been told by someone I trust in these matters that I've spent the last seven years in a particular inward-building phase — the kind that doesn't lend itself to externalization, no matter how much you push. And I did push. Man, did I push.

For years I kept trying to force this space into order and kept hitting the same wall. Why can't I just get this done? What is wrong with me? But when that framing landed — that this phase has a shape, and the shape is inward, and also, importantly, that it ends — something released. I stopped fighting the direction of the current.

And then, apparently, the current moved on its own. (Yes, I know. This has been the recurrent theme for a while now.)

I can't tell you with certainty whether the shift was external or internal. Whether something genuinely changed in the conditions, or whether my frame changed, and the conditions followed. Probably both. Probably that distinction matters less than I think.

What I can tell you is what it looks like now.

It looks like markers organized by color family. It looks like paper sorted by weight and finish. It looks like a 1970s fluorescent desk lamp that belonged to my grandmother, now claiming its spot on the shelf like it was always supposed to be there. It looks like forty-five varieties of paper clip — maybe more — inherited from a woman who was, in every measurable personality metric, my exact opposite, and who apparently shared my precise conviction that you should always have the right paper clip for the situation.

Those paper clips are now in my drawer. Organized. (She had labels on some of them.)

I find myself walking through the space and just ... looking. Just moving through it slowly, registering things. Oh, there's that. Oh, I forgot about that. There's a whole shelf of me attempting to think about myself and my work at a meta level going back to 2004 — undergraduate papers, journaling systems, frameworks I built and sometimes forgot — and it's all just sitting there now, visible and available. A record of consciousness trying to understand itself across time.

And alongside it, my grandmothers' materials. Three of them, one from each branch of a complicated family tree — three women who kept everything (and one of whom annotated everything) — for reasons I never fully thought to ask about while they were here to answer.

The whole room is like that. Every object a document. Every shelf a kind of stratigraphy.

I keep landing on the word absurd, and I think it's the right one. Not absurd like meaningless — absurd like beyond the reach of reason to fully hold. The sublime has that quality. You come into contact with something genuinely too large for your current processing capacity, and so you fixate on the detail that your mind can actually grip. The paper clips. The fluorescent lamp. The fact that the exact right sachet of Royal Chai fits the exact right wonky pottery cup you made during a season of anxiety. The small, specific, slightly ridiculous thing that somehow momentarily represents the whole.

I don't know what this arrival means yet. I don't know what I'll make, or how I'll use everything, or what it will turn out to have been the beginning of (or the end of). It's like a hallway right now — everything visible, nothing processed, the feeling of standing in a threshold that doesn't have a name yet.

That feels worth noting, even without the resolution. Maybe especially without it.