Two

Stephen Vincent, "Two" for GH (2001)
Sometimes, if the day offers us one gift, that is enough for a living.

A few days ago, Stephen Vincent sent me a numeral 2 that fills entirely the space of its creation. The two is a magical number. A sense of one in it without being one. The sense of two ones in one. A number important enough that some languages have dual forms of nouns (along with singular and plural). It is the color blue, which was my favorite color as a child. (Now an adult, I have taken pink as a favorite color, making it seem that I'm changing sex roles, but pink was the color denoting boys even in the early 20th century.)

Even the simplest of symbols provides for a string of thoughts. The gift of thinking is the gift of experiencing the world and of digesting that experience.

Today, Stephen Vincent sent me the photograph he took of a simple glyphic graffito in his neighborhood, which is the Mission District in San Francisco, which was my grandmother's neighborhood for the first three decades of her life, which is where she was when at age six, in 1906, a great earthquake hit the city. Stephen asked me if I were in his neighborhood making such things, but I could never create such a glyph. The fluidity and freedom of the brushstrokes are not like my brushstrokes, which are defined by their control. I'd love that freedom, except that I don't know how to handle it.

It may be that freedom comes through sleeping, by dreaming, by allowing one's brain to do what it will unhindered. It may be that even an artist encumbered by thoughts of freedom is never free when creating art. It may be that dreams would be our best works of art, if only we could capture them accurately.

To sleep now.

Stephen Vincent, "Huth 'sign" (found glyph) (2011)ecr. l'inf.