I’ve always been rather slow and spare with words, going so far as to joke that my first language is art while I’m working on English. When I was 24 and mid-PhD in sculpture, I mourned that I’d never write a novel because I was too old, hadn’t been to school for writing, and had zero capacity to read Shakespeare (quadruple lol). After I was hit by a car in December of 2008—the more visible scar on my forehead—I gradually began to write, so completely did I need to be shaken before I could bring myself to fish for a page of words. And when a few years later the uncategorizable Geoff Dyer selected me for a writing residency, I was unabashedly the butt of good-natured ribbing by the group for being the writer who wrote the least. As usual the I Ching has guidance on the matter. Been thinking about this quote, to the best of my fallible abilities, since I first noted it a decade ago. It’s taken quite a time to see connections well enough to bring a few to consciousness, but how else would nature teach me that she so loves patient devotion.

Over the past year I’ve stumbled into an occasional hobby: When I come across someone standout in an area I’m mildly obsessed with, I reach out for a consult in whatever and ask a bunch of questions. So I did this last month, it was ridiculously great and life-altering, then the expert was like, ‘oh I have a new book out today.’ Later as I searched for this new book, the first thing that came up was an entirely unrelated book in a diametrically opposite field—but by a different author who has the exact same name. It turns out this utter gem of a tome, rare and obscure, by said doppelgänger is exactly the thing I didn’t know I needed, like some key to a hidden door of questions that’ve been quite shut. And as I read the one author, I can’t help but think of the other and how eerily linked their ideas are—separated by a generation and a continent, one an inquiry into mind and the other math. Who knows what’s percolating there, but as I look back each of my larger artworks hinged on marvelous serendipities, so thoroughly and so strangely that I’ve come to regard a nose for information as among the most mysterious, and essential, of senses to cultivate. Threads even better appreciated with coffee, particularly a single-origin Guatemala with chocolate notes.

In 2015, I spent some weeks in Northern California to install A house made of air and distance and echoes. Of the people I saw Frank stood out—he couldn’t help but stand out as a giant slab of a man, a cross between a farmer and gargoyle but asymmetrical, perennially lilting starboard. He did handyman work around my dad’s rural home, and lived to rope you into one-sided conversations about his days as a sheriff in Mexico, each story more eye-popping than the prior. The last time I saw him was at a Thanksgiving dinner the following year, when he stood framed in a doorway, carefully combed, beaming, fully prepared to engage the chat functions, and I was overcome by a strange sadness that made no sense. Months later, out of nowhere he was diagnosed with an advanced, inoperable cancer. I’ve never before or since met a man whose heart so overflowed with love for his son as Frank’s did. Wherever his conversations rambled, they invariably set once again on Brandon—who was shy and loved computers—in the most pure and genuine way, so much so that it would be impossible to mention Frank without this gift that’s never faded. The old yogic systems link the heart with the element of air, and it feels as if I’ve been gently led by those whose paths have crossed with mine to consider that all the love we’ll ever breathe is here, every bit as light and easy to overlook as air.

Already fluent in stories, Frank was not a bookish or artish type. One afternoon I described the sculpture I was making—that it would be constructed from plywood and covered with printed vinyl giving it the appearance of shadowy stone, that it would be sited on a 35-acre abandoned airfield, and that I would photograph it like the ghost of a building under conditions of dense fog. Without missing a beat he replied, “Ah, like Christo,” and recalled his memories of Running Fence by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, an environmental sculpture that skirted the hills of Sonoma and Marin like a ghostly wave for 24 continuous miles before dipping into the Pacific Ocean. Though over four years in the making, the monumental work persisted for just short two weeks in 1976 and vanished from sight. In fact, almost always when I spoke about my sculpture with anyone in Northern California above the age of fifty, they mentioned the Running Fence, so vividly had that artwork woven itself into the landscape of time and memory.

The title of the sculpture A house made of air and distance and echoes comes from a line in Cesar Aira’s slim novel Ghosts, in which a crew of construction workers live inside the very apartment building they’ve been tasked with constructing, squatting with their families and a slew of ghosts who lounge in the nude. I love Aira’s digressions, which are really the entirety of his work, here probing a dream and there crafting a delicate, provisional architecture of dusk, like some conjurer of consciousness itself. With each brownian turn yet more of these delicious reverbs and echoes drift forward, such that his pages tickle open the book of my own life and more than a few of its meandering, harmonic threads, as a favorite does. And it gets me thinking about the many ways we’ve always grasped at metaphors for the virtual, insubstantial, and subtle with which we coexist.

A lil peek inside Inverted Dome, which is now available for purchase in the New Laconic shop.

My grandfather lived in a tar-paper covered shack with his young wife and my infant mother while he attended medical school at Columbia College on the GI Bill, and eventually graduated as a cardiologist. In pictures he had a sense of distinguished presence that belied his humble beginnings, and a sensitivity that could be seen but never reached behind his deep reserve. Late in life, his own heart problems came as a surprise, and he underwent a quadruple bypass operation. In the years that followed heart surgery, his personality changed: He acquired a lathe and turned wooden bowls in the shed behind his house, several of which were collected by a Japanese bank. He explained to me that imperfections were a feature, and when a knot fell out of wormy wood, he filled the space with clear resin and crushed gemstones. He took classes in Computer Art, and though he declined with gruff shyness to disclose to me what went on at those affairs, on my last two visits he gave me 8×10 prints of images he had made.

The English language has stock phrases for the heart that vaguely gesture in the direction of the vital organ, but never specify what might be happening therein. One is more likely to receive medication for high blood pressure than any sort of instruction, let alone wisdom, as to the mysteries of the heart’s workings in daily life. We are left to piece together hints from disparate sources, such as findings from the nascent field of neurocardiology, which indicate that the heart has a complex neural network of its own, quite independent from the brain, and that more information originating in the heart is sent to the brain than the other way round, as so often assumed.

Recently, I wondered if searching the text of the I Ching might yield a different kind of illumination. If you haven’t come across the I Ching before, it’s the oldest of the classic treatises from ancient China and a treasure of a book. As some indication of its priorities, the Richard Wilhelm translation mentions “heart” 63 times, and “mind” but 60. The sifted quotes below are a selection, excerpted from throughout.

“Even with slender means, the sentiment of the heart can be expressed.

True kindness does not count upon nor ask about merit and gratitude but acts from inner necessity. And such a truly kind heart finds itself rewarded in being recognized, and thus the beneficent influence will spread unhindered.

There are secret forces at work, leading together those who belong together. We must yield to this attraction; then we make no mistakes. Where inner relationships exist, no great preparations and formalities are necessary. People understand one another forthwith, just as the Divinity graciously accepts a small offering if it comes from the heart.

The original impulses of the heart are always good, so that we may follow them confidently, assured of good fortune and achievement of our aims.

When a man has learned within his heart what fear and trembling mean, he is safeguarded against any terror produced by outside influences.

If one is sincere when confronted with difficulties, the heart can penetrate the meaning of the situation.

It is very difficult to bring quiet to the heart. While Buddhism strives for rest through an ebbing away of all movement in nirvana, the Book of Changes holds that rest is merely a state of polarity that always posits movement as its complement. Possibly the words of the text embody directions for the practice of yoga.

The heart thinks constantly. This cannot be changed, but the movements of the heart — that is, a man’s thoughts — should restrict themselves to the immediate situation. All thinking that goes beyond this only makes the heart sore.

The root of all influence lies in one’s own inner being: given true and vigorous expression in word and deed, its effect is great. The effect is but the reflection of something that emanates from one’s own heart.

A quiet, wordless, self-contained joy, desiring nothing from without and resting content with everything, remains free of all egotistic likes and dislikes. In this freedom lies good fortune, because it harbors the quiet security of a heart fortified within itself.

When, at the beginning of summer, thunder — electrical energy — comes rushing forth from the earth again, and the first thunderstorm refreshes nature, a prolonged state of tension is resolved. Joy and relief make themselves felt. So too, music has power to ease tension within the heart and to loosen the grip of obscure emotions. The enthusiasm of the heart expresses itself involuntarily in a burst of song, in dance and rhythmic movement of the body. From immemorial times the inspiring effect of the invisible sound that moves all hearts, and draws them together, has mystified mankind.

While man sees what is before his eyes, God looks into the heart. Therefore a simple sacrifice offered with real piety holds a greater blessing than an impressive service without warmth.

Confucius says: Life leads the thoughtful man on a path of many windings. Now the course is checked, now it runs straight again. Here winged thoughts may pour freely forth in words, there the heavy burden of knowledge must be shut away in silence. But when two people are at one in their inmost hearts, they shatter even the strength of iron or of bronze. And when two people understand each other in their inmost hearts, their words are sweet and strong, like the fragrance of orchids.

Here the place of the heart is reached. The impulse that springs from this source is the most important of all. It is of particular concern that this influence be constant and good; then, in spite of the danger arising from the great susceptibility of the human heart, there will be no cause for remorse. When the quiet power of one’s own character is at work, the effects produced are right.”