From page 25 of The Twentieth Century City, by Rev. Josiah Strong. c 1898. Found in the library this afternoon.
I finally found the secrets you left behind the mirror. I want to wear them, but it's not time yet. The new window is beautiful. I didn't think I would like it, so open and exposed, but it's really nice. I can see the tree outside, and it's so much lighter. I feel very possessive of it all. Here is the nest in progress:
Simone said I should weave little pillows into it, and I think she's right.
I feel like I fell into some weird vortex. Just crawled out of the Aviary after about 4 hours of reading and nesting and headphones. Everything around me feels distant now. Sounds are far away. Daylight's gone. Was it only four hours? Vision is new too. Like a just-hatched animal. What a jumble of sensory input. Disorienting to be down here in the midst of everything, after being so removed from it.
It must be quite a trip to come into all this as a casual visitor. To have no mission as you move through Elsewhere beyond looking and learning. I think of how disoriented I was when I first came here, and how having little projects to work on helped me to get my bearings. Visitors and friends, they have nothing to do, mostly, except wander around looking, or sit and chat with us.
Damn photos won't upload.
I'm getting excited about working with Molly on her installation. We had a long lunch meeting today, took notes on each other, and I began to do her bidding: did a petite performance in the front window, unwinding a long piece of white fabric that had been twisted into a rope and hung from the loft area. Feeling very much the metaphor of it: untwisting, untangling, like spinning in reverse. An exercise in patience, breathing, moving hands rhythmically. Lid-wrapping is in the works for tonight.
And some other things:
A little slice of the fabric workshop, from a few days ago when it was slightly calmer/less cluttered than it is at the moment.
Working in Kim's baby-doll war room today was more draining and crazy-making than I expected. Hours of picking beat-up and disfigured dolls and toys from a huge pile, tying wire or ribbon onto them, and tossing them back onto another pile - tedious! dusty! grotesque! Enlivened by the occasional flash of personal toy-recognition... "hey, I had this..." Interesting how some objects, like toys, seem to be much more charged with memories and associations than others. And to think that every single object here, and there must be thousands on thousands, holds somebody's memory. Multiple memories per object, per person, etc. Multiples - seeing multiples of an object here scares me a little. Like the dolls with yellow hair in the recreation area, the little-girl dolls up in Kim's room. Don't know why - in a store it's natural to have multiples of one object. But this isn't exactly a store. And not all the multiples bother me - little army-men figures, for example, are fine. Something specific about dolls, maybe.
Last night Molly told me to root myself like a tree, to move back before I move forward.
Elsewhere. City, store, secret boardinghouse, every place imaginable. Aviary, press office, library, kitchen, salon, fabric workshop, wardrobe, sky lounge, teaparty room, disneyworld.
That's not how to start.
What can I say? I've been here 11 days now. Should have started the journal when I first arrived. I was too overwhelmed then, though. Now I can't remember what it was like before here. Before I became mostly accustomed to seeing such a profusion of objects, things, everywhere. Just imagine who I might be after two months here!
Things I've been thinking about: scripting of conversations, narratives, ownership of place and thing and art, color-coordination.
Things I have done this week: made dinner for 10 people twice, swiffered the bathroom floor, helped excavate the fabric workshop, reupholstered a chair, sewed 12 coin-purse wallets, gone to the gym, walked around Greensboro fliering for 5 hours, had two teaparties and a tarot reading, had a couple of brilliant outfit-changes, ridden in the back of a pickup truck, eaten at least three quesadillas, begun a Regency romance novel that I can't remember if I've read before or not, photographed my desk every day, cried, laughed, sneezed, coughed.
Things I would like to do here: gather all the yellow things in Elsewhere into one yellow room, reorganize the Wardrobe, gather the courage to climb the ladder to the roof.
Constant overstimulation, intermittent nostalgia triggered by the oddest things. Total inability to articulate. Oh well! Input far exceeds output. Blockage in the pipes?
