Hello friends, The first week of December has been a chaotic one (hence why you're receiving this on a Thursday). My family came to visit me over the weekend which was a strange mix of excitement to see them and the stressful awareness of the work I'd need to finish as soon as they left. As we walked around Midtown, we tried to make our way across Rockefeller Center (my grandparents had never been there before and wanted to see the tree they knew only from T.V.) only to get caught in the congested throng of other tourists trying to scrunch themselves within the glowing frames of the Sax Fifth Avenue storefront displays and squeezing their arms upward to get a brief video of the department store's light show. I don't say this to be cynical, but rather because that sense of my brain being stuffed into an inadequately sized Tupperware container hasn't gone away, it still lingers even as I turn in final assignments. Oftentimes we think of "conflagration" as destructive through its sheer power of clearing out, carving into objects, bodies, and spaces. But there's also an element of clotting, I think, the piling up of leftover ash and debris, the way smoke rises and presses itself into the highest corners of a room, the stuffing of text and images into your mind and memory, that odd warm throbbing of your eyes from looking at your screen for too long pressing up to the boundaries of your corneas, the anxious chewing of your cuticle until bleeding. For this week's letter, a four-alarm fire and its residual aftermath. //
010. Conflagrated Reliquary
010. Conflagrated Reliquary
010. Conflagrated Reliquary
Hello friends, The first week of December has been a chaotic one (hence why you're receiving this on a Thursday). My family came to visit me over the weekend which was a strange mix of excitement to see them and the stressful awareness of the work I'd need to finish as soon as they left. As we walked around Midtown, we tried to make our way across Rockefeller Center (my grandparents had never been there before and wanted to see the tree they knew only from T.V.) only to get caught in the congested throng of other tourists trying to scrunch themselves within the glowing frames of the Sax Fifth Avenue storefront displays and squeezing their arms upward to get a brief video of the department store's light show. I don't say this to be cynical, but rather because that sense of my brain being stuffed into an inadequately sized Tupperware container hasn't gone away, it still lingers even as I turn in final assignments. Oftentimes we think of "conflagration" as destructive through its sheer power of clearing out, carving into objects, bodies, and spaces. But there's also an element of clotting, I think, the piling up of leftover ash and debris, the way smoke rises and presses itself into the highest corners of a room, the stuffing of text and images into your mind and memory, that odd warm throbbing of your eyes from looking at your screen for too long pressing up to the boundaries of your corneas, the anxious chewing of your cuticle until bleeding. For this week's letter, a four-alarm fire and its residual aftermath. //