October 21, 2016
Chicago Public Library
There is a wedding on the Ninth Floor under the skylight in the atrium. No. It is a rehearsal. The couple has “booked” the Library in a space without books. There is no music. The only music I hear is the sound of the pens exploring the paper as I draw. The artist as musician making marks responding to the voice of the rehearsal mistress giving choreographic instruction to the gathered as to how to enter the atrium from the sides to variously gather in and about the couple to be married. Everyone seems in that ripe moment of imagining the event while, at the same time, studiously withholding them selves to make small talk about other moments in their various lives. Seated sporadically around the edges of the circle small children, as if a spontaneous chorus, clap and play “paddy-cake”.
On a day like today it’s such a sweet way to live as the pens savor and make color and work at revealing the shape and rhythms of the deeper structures of the material world.
It is also exhausting. I have now worked long into the evening. The silence that surrounds and foretells a marriage I want with sleep.
P.S. Obama says the day he leaves Office he will sleep for two weeks. I cannot begin to imagine the depth of his fatigue.
