Sum of Days

The mosquitos are hungrier. They know the game is ending, that the cold weather is going to kill them all off soon. The bites are desperate and one after the other. They are getting careless, sloppy, old. They are easier to kill.

Their hunger, their method of sating it, harms me, annoys me, and thus their life, their hunger, ends.

I am sitting on my couch, having just watched an episode of "Breaking Bad" with Jacob, him already asleep next to me under a blanket and me swatting away these mosquitos that are trying to get these last blood-drunk moments of pleasure in before their very short lives come to a conclusion, before the period is hit on the keyboard.

After going to the gym today and getting my hair cut and purchasing a book famously about Savannah, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, to read before going to that city in a week, I met up with Jacob at MoMA. We looked at the de Kooning retrospective, which, despite all my intents not to be so, I was bored by. Abstract Expressionism does not excite me. I could say "I don't get it," but theoretically I do, historically I do - it's just that in every other sense, the important ones, I don't. It leaves me cold. There is no surge of feeling looking at these things, interacting with them. A shrug of the shoulders and on to the next one. My eyes began to glaze over the images. There were a few paintings that I thought were really beautiful and evocative somehow of grand things with just big brushstrokes of color, most strikingly for me being "Suburb in Havana."

There is an installation by Carlito Carvalhosa, "Sum of Days," in the big atrium space, that did cause that swell, that surge of something. It's a hazy, energized high in which life seems to be about something and this art you are looking at comes close to somehow making that something seem within the grasp of your ability to put it into words, and yet, it keeps on eluding that grasping hand. There is a huge gauzy white fabric that is hung from the high ceilings and that winds through the space, creating a shifting maze of fabric, shifted by the breeze of the air and the people moving through it, for you to walk through, various sounds rising over the loud noise of people moving about a museum. A jazz sax would burst out a string of notes and I walked through this white fabric and felt like I was being born or that I was dying. It was really beautiful and I'm not sure why I should think so, why it should make me feel as it did, but it did do so and that it did is what matters here. My hand keeps grasping.