where does light go in the air, what is asking to be? i tried silver wire, at the insistence of people I can’t believe I ever questioned.

how to effect the teetering balance and tension of the wire, i have only apprehended an iota of this work, overall. I wait patiently for sound, which keeps nearly getting here, my ecstatic terra-world explorations handing me nearly this sound and nearly that sound at least four possible ways, and so far nothing has arrived. which only makes me relax because when these things get here,

and movement, also nearly arrived, even once I had installed a motor, and at the last minute I removed it because of the grey little grinding noise it made.

why does it open this way and not that, what way of putting it together? it warbles like the surface of the pond on this supernaturally perfect summer day, how i go back to it again,  after so much time, can nothing fade? i let the amazed chatter bounce away on the rippling window to the woods in the world below and just look at it. pair-o’-dice. i must have made it long in advance of myself.

the piece states itself like a fingerprint in my sketchbook, its vision of itself clear, as I wear away the opaque film that keeps me from seeing it gleaming in the air before I make it.

It knows itself and it trusts me. it gives me seven or eight markers, mantras, visions, like keys. ‘Simplize’ is one of them. I think of the last installation, where half the piece asked seven long, eye-rolling hours from me, adjusting and adding and taking away like a cocktail waitress getting her hair right. Then the other half took less than 15 minutes and stole the whole piece.  but only because of the seven-hour one thing that makes the next work. Just like Sasha said.  you have to finish every piece, he told to me, there will be one aspect that makes the next work, and you can’t know it until the end. Simplize.

A shift in symmetry that can’t be pinned on anything, but that creates. like three pages makes four empty spaces. like the amplituhedron shows, the absence of the tiniest ‘anti-‘ knocks the protractor of creation off enough to slice material out of possibility. and particle science, seeking Helen, poised to see only her footprints.

Ssssllink, the final piece slides into place. I had to quit talking to hear it.

the piece makes itself too difficult, too big, it makes me inventory what it calls for and check it against even government standards of sanity. i have everything I need to figure it out, and even the helper, and the already scheduled days. it will just take a little counting, a little list making, and sorting the activities into available days, and devising a system to sculpt on the screened back porch. but first i carry it. i examine every little part of it. figure out what it will take to make it, and plug that task and the objects it requires into the lopsided squares I drew on the journal page for planning calendar.  then the same kinds of tricks I have to do with math are required in order to make it just in time, like pretending certain squares don’t exist, rounding up to the next week, doubling my estimated time on everything, and scheduling a few days for unexpected typhoid, or vehicle getting stuck in deep mud. and then like the dice, I give the calendar one more shake, take away a couple more days from my availables, and whatever fits in there is the installation.

what do I choose about my work? I don’t choose its size, or its location, or even its contents, although I have made choices about fabricating the emitters, which kind of wire, and so on, that’s only because Muse plays a bad joke on me making me solder, and live up top ladders and scaffolds, zinging and jittery and barely breathing for involuntary fear of heights. i choose where to snap the picture of it. I choose to devote myself to it, to the exclusion of a regular social existence.