Loose notes
Some time ago, I dreamed I saw a whale breaching twice. Marine biologists have theorized that whales breach as a form of long-distance communication, or perhaps a bit of play. After writing down my dreams for many years, I can’t escape the sensation that both art and dreams encrypt far more information than we notice or admit. When I was growing up, two was my lucky number. Maybe it’s because my wonderful brother and I — my only sibling — were born almost exactly two years apart, both Gemini. And just two years before my start, in another idle coincidence, Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman published the first protocol for public and private key exchange, a duality in cryptography upon which so much future technology would be built. As ideas have meandered through my practice, I’ve often ended up at a sculptural dialectic — a ghost town in a new city, a freeway column in a library without books, and a neon flying buttress supporting the walls of a cave — as if to ask, from these antithesis what experiences might be produced? Lately I’ve been reading Dr Scott Sparrow’s writing on dreams. He mentions that wonderful quote from the Gospel of Thomas about one becoming two, and links this to the moment a dream arises — from a state of rest, an observer and observable world emerge. I was reminded that our eyes are never static as they gaze. Quite outside our control, they require roving motion to generate a kind of map which we call vision. Whether light or dark, heat or cold, noise or quiet, our senses perceive via difference. And in the absence of difference, as the yogis of time immemorial tell us, perception recedes and consciousness returns to stillness, the ocean as it were.
