Rock worship

Kind of transcribed from my journal on June 12th

Live from the Noguchi Museum. This place has shut me up and calmed me down. I feel so struck. Sitting on a bench in this room of stone. Out the window to my right is Costco. A bleating crow on a wire. To my left, a showcase of wood, marble, granite, and metal. The pieces are meticulously sculpted and perfectly balanced. They fit into each other like Tetris. From the start, all I wanted was to reach out and touch. Trace my fingers across the rock, from jagged to slippery smooth. I want to put my fingers in those perfect circle cutouts making pockets of light in the harsh stone. Want to pour some water in and watch it flow out the other side. It’s so quiet here.

All this work feels nostalgic and familiar and the feat of manipulating these materials to your will is making me emotional. I think of patience. Geometry. I think of every toppled sculpture in a silent studio. Precious work crashing with a resounding boom.

There are things in here from the 1920s through the 1980s. I am floored at the idea of a life’s work. I think of the ideas I email myself with subjects like, Take this seriously or Do not ignore, and then promptly laugh off and forget. I am trying to get better at this. Follow through and commitment. An urge to take myself more seriously which is hilarious to me. I am in the midst of willingly turning my life upside-down. Doing a wager on myself. I am trying to trust the bigger picture, trust the famous process, trust that everything will fall into place. A pebble on a pedestal.

The 2PM tour has just come in, disturbing my peace, but at least I get to eavesdrop and learn. The tour guide is quiet like the rest of the museum. She has thick, turquoise jewelry and a thicker Spanish accent. She ordered the visitors to pick a piece and draw it or write about it or freestyle on feeling. A man is drawing a pockmarked stone and the only sound in the room is him stabbing at his paper over and over again.

A rugged sculpture, a slab of granite balancing on wood, a marble obelisk, fine art. It could be something very stern and stuck up. The placards on the wall, however, tell me that the only thing Noguchi wanted was to build a playground. He tried countless times, getting edged by politicians who flirted with his ideas before promptly walking away. He wanted to create a shrine for play, to reimagine it as much more than a cheap thrill. He tried for Central Park, Riverside Park, Washington Square. None of it ever came to fruition. He said his greatest works will never be made.

It wasn’t until I left Miami that I realized a fixture of my upbringing was a work by him. Slide Mantra, his winding centerpiece at the Venice Biennale in 1986, has been stationed in Bayfront Park since 1991. I have gone to that park since I was a kid and it became my backyard in high school. Slide Mantra was sleek and snaillike but my child self never considered that it could be a work of art by a prominent sculptor. It was a slide for sliding down. And climbing up. I was small and I’d slip right through, smooth marble steering me through the spiral until I got spit out on my butt.

When I got older I’d wander that park with my friends, eating sour candy and taking dragged out hits from the cheapest, stickiest carts money could buy. We’d slide down just the same, crouching beneath the marble, climbing up the white staircase, never having heard of the Biennale or Akari lamps or Isamu himself. All we knew, or all I knew, was fairy lights on instagram and that Art Basel meant nasty traffic and that it felt cool to be a teenager in a playground at night.

We’d hoist ourselves down the spinning slide since our bodies had grown too long to efficiently speed through it like we used to. Laughing all the way down. Bayfront Park’s amphitheater had no late-night security so we’d rush the stage and rock out, some of us on stage, some cheering in the stands. The same place we saw The 1975 in 2016, Dua Lipa and Clairo in 2018, trying to imagine the feeling. Every time I got my friends to leave the quaint neighborhood we grew up in and join me Downtown I’d feel so grown and so free. We would bring a tiny speaker with us and listen to Grimes or the SKAM soundtrack and feel untouchable.

Here in Astoria, there are no signs telling you to behave and be quiet. The sensation simply settles upon you. You ease right into it. The one sign, naturally, is that you cannot, must not touch the work. The structures in the sculpture garden surrender to the elements. Pummeled by wind and rain, spiders spin their webs between carefully crafted crevices, water pools and dust collects, but we can’t touch. Can’t play. You can read about Noguchi’s plight for play but you can’t actually do it. Not here. I didn’t realize how lucky I’ve always been.

When the tour group wraps up their assignment, the guide repeats a phrase she mentioned when they entered the room. Noguchi says that sculptures don’t move, but you can move around them. In this room you can look but you can’t touch. I think he would have wanted us to clamber and climb, poke and prod and play, but not in this room. You’d have to go to Miami for that.

Later, I discover that Bayfront Park as a whole was redesigned by the late artist in the 80s. Not just the slide, but the amphitheater, the whole place as I’ve always known it. The Claude Pepper Fountain, that big basin at the center of the park, where I’ve walked countless laps to angsty music and taken photos with my family and watched my dogs piss on the railing. It’s also the Challenger Memorial, a white steel structure that shoots up 100 feet tall and gets climbed on by children by day and ravers by night. He tried for New York his whole career, he wanted us to slow down so badly. To make room for play and pleasure. Just at the end of his life, he got Miami. It was my city with its hedonistic reputation and big dreams of relevance that gave him some license to let loose.

In the garden it’s all birds, sun, stillness. Rock worship. What it means to be immovable. There are at least three different birdsongs being sung around me. Harmony. When I told the lady at the ticket counter how I excited I was to be finally visiting she said that today wasn’t the best day to be here because it is so hot. I am sitting and baking and moving so slow in a way that only happens when it is ninety two degrees. I’m forced into perfect stillness. Sun-baked gratitude.

I leave the museum and cross the street into Rainey park. Straight to the water. I look at Roosevelt Island just across the way and think I could swim the distance if the river wasn’t famously disgusting. Right beneath me the water is lapping at the kelp coated rocks on the shore. When a boat floats past, water rushes and strikes them again and again. They just take it on the chin. A few weeks ago a friend told me that I do that and I know that it’s true. I’m still not sure if there is anything I am supposed to do about it but just keep taking it.

There are a handful of people sitting in the heat, taking it. It’s so quiet and I am doing the thing where I stand and close my eyes and look up and let the sun wash over me. It feels performative but that would only be true if I took my internet brain outside and I left it at home. There are loose boulders in the grass and a girl is laying and tanning in her bikini with her phone propped up against the rock. At that moment I find these park rocks just as striking and meaningful as the work across the street. Even more so, maybe, when I consider their welcoming cohabitation with the world around them. I hope he wouldn’t take offense to that.

On the G train from Brooklyn to Queens I started reading sigh ‎ ‎ ‎ ⊹ swoon’s new book with the wise rock floating on the cover. As fate would have it, I finished my last book, a brutish football novel, the day before which meant I had to start Practices in Apparition on the day I was going to the rock museum. It opens with a quote from The Sacred and The Profane about finding meaning in the mundane and it all plays out right before my eyes. And I get it. I see it in the Costco shopping carts that are upended on the shoreline and the pink ice cream truck that rolls past me on the street full of warehouses. I see god in it.

I wrote this from here xoxo