With eyes closed, I recall reading about Robert Morris recalling the humid Missouri August afternoon, that surrounds his father’s house at the time of his passing. He pushes upwards on the paper with the same strength he exerts in lifting up his father’s frail body. When I move my fingers across my body, I feel the fat underneath move with the soft friction of the skin’s elasticity. The Vaseline underneath the blue pigment shifts, while the sensory nerves become saturated along my collarbone. I will recall this feeling and think of it at the time of my father’s passing.
In the darkness, the hands bear down on the last tangible edge the world offers. They move between length, width, and height, into a fourth dimension. One hand touches the other, while it in turn, registers this onto a transparent surface covered in red pigment. It depicts both the left and the right hand. Those disconnected hands come to be the stand in for a subject, but not wanting to submit to any structural order, I keep my eyes closed. If the eyes are not schooled along with the hand, the subject cannot be brought into line. The line swivels around my thumb, and I recall the pleasure of holding a pen. I did not enter language, language entered me.
Before the enlightenment I am subject to the gaze of God. But the thought of space being infinite — leaves him unplaceable. He can’t be inside the space, because he cannot be lesser than his creation. But there cannot be any outside either, since space is infinite. Then space becomes God’s sensorium, the organ which he makes use of to perceive things, and before he dies, his body has become a place of existence, and there is no existence without space. I move my hands in a curved line from the outside of my right breast to the outside of my left. Every year it will be August, and my birthday. When I pass the center of my torso — I feel my heart beating, and my desire matches the strength with which I press the finger through the pigment, onto a transparent sheet of plastic.
The surface serves as a ground for something Morris calls “the self”, and with his eyes closed, he reaches into the darkness, in an attempt to bring back a representation of himself as both the subject and the object, both the inside and the outside of a system. With my eyes closed, I recall the exact moment between touching and feeling and the traces come to outline a simultaneous memory. I start recognizing the fourth dimension as something other than time. Between length, width and height I become abstracted, taken literally like a hypostatization of language, that leaves behind delicately traced ruins.