When I was being born, the doctor had to fold me in half to get me out. It was 12:58 a.m., my mother’s pelvis was too narrow, I was too anxious to be delivered. The doctor broke my clavicle, made me smaller, to bring my body from hers. The whole process took less than an hour. Weeks later, my mother found the break while changing me, and took me to see Dr. Williams, who had inherited the family practice from his father, William Carlos Williams. He told her to keep nursing me. Her milk, he said, would bind the soft bones.
***
I still like the world best just after midnight. I believe we come into this world knowing the difference between good and evil. What do you think happens in the mind the moment just before birth?
When I emerge from my waiting place, through the keyhole-shaped doorway of the Guggenheim Museum’s Aye Simon Reading Room, I am given a visitor to follow. The visitor is talking with a college student about progress. It is my job to follow without being seen. I listen to get a sense of what is on the visitor’s mind, and devise a way to intervene in their conversation, in a way that feels natural and connected to her own thoughts, yet somehow foreign. It amazes me that they never seem to sense me there, behind them.
I follow, I eavesdrop, I dash around an elevator bank and run ahead, I wait for them to catch up, I interrupt. The student introduces me, then slips away. I tell my visitors about scientists in Antarctica, listening to the songs water makes as it travels through icebergs, or the man I saw in Prospect Park wearing purple flannel pants and a clown nose, carrying a briefcase. I talk about a novel that revolves around a film the viewer cannot look away from, one the writer never describes. I ask, “What would that film look like for you?”
Sometimes, the visitor I am anticipating never makes it to me. The museum rotunda is, for the first time, stripped of physical art objects. But just before the reading room is the entrance to the Guggenheim’s permanent collection, and the temptation of the paintings, the familiar, overcomes them. Even some of those who continue on are disoriented, asking, “Where is the art?” The ephemeral quality of the experience is central to the work of Tino Sehgal, the creator of the piece that we are, with these conversations, bringing to life. His art leaves no physical trace. It exists only in its moment, and is documented only by memory. I tell my visitors, “This is the art. We are making it now.”
***
I photograph the locked suitcases, the indecipherable postcards, all of these signs, in vain.
For Sophie Calle, the French conceptual artist, the physical object is everything: love letters, address books, birthday gifts—what we save and what we give away—are photographed and reinterpreted, mined for what they reveal about the one who owns or gives them. In 1981 Calle took a job as a chambermaid in a Venetian hotel, and recorded the lives of the strangers she had been assigned: cataloguing their possessions, noting the placement of navy blue pajamas on a chair arm, an orange peel in the wastebasket. She read their journals and postcards, straightened their pillows, ate the remains of breakfast. She imagined a connection between two consecutive occupants of the same room, both of whom slept on the right side of the bed and kept their possessions locked in a suitcase: “fleeting images of a missed encounter.” Calle is attracted to disorder, uninspired by the compulsively neat and relentlessly private, who elicit “this immaculate feeling of boredom.” What makes people interesting is how much of themselves they expose, or how much of them she is able to decipher from the signs they leave behind.
***
The thing I am most afraid of is the Statue of Liberty. The life stories of late bloomers comfort me. I most often dream of disaster, or of falling down the stairs of the first house I ever lived in.
It’s amazing what people will tell you when they know they’ll never see you again. I find that, with my interjections, I am asking my visitors to explain the things that trouble me: my fears and dreams. The way I get nostalgic when I pass a dairy farm, and cannot appreciate tragedy without seeing some physical artifact of the loss. I want them to tell me how my heart works.
It works best when pieces of ourselves are shared between us. I give you the stained glass bay window my grandmother designed, and you give me the box your husband is making for your ashes. The window has an amber bullseye, like the windows of my ancestors in Krakow, and the box is made of excerpts from the woodwork in your mother’s sewing room. Tethered to this world by unknowns, we try to make concrete the mysteries of before and after. We fashion them from glass and oak. We speak them out loud, trading details until the exchange is even.
The whole process is supposed to take six minutes. In six minutes, as we travel up a designated length of the Guggenheim’s spiral ramp, we will come to know each other, or we won’t. We will gain some new insight into a buried, yet ever-present thought. Or we won’t. It takes three minutes for an eighty-eight-year-old woman in make-up caked like a clown’s to take my arm and tell me she likes me, five minutes for her to say, “Everyone I know is dead.”
***
The night before my wedding, I dreamed I was a cat. I had not chosen my dress yet, and the cake was unfinished. But my sister said, “Don’t worry, you’re a cat.” I looked in the mirror, and I was. I was a cat.
The woman who dreamed she was a cat is a perfumer. We discuss lime blossoms and madeleines—the one passage we know of Proust—and how the sense of smell is the one most intimately connected to memory. The perfumer never has to write anything down; she remembers everything with its own scent. The first time she was stung by a bee smells like meat tenderizer. Her husband’s birthday smells like geraniums, or the dirt around them. I tell her that, when I want to conjure my grandmother cooking butter and onions in the kitchen, I wear her favorite perfume, Shalimar. Or cook butter and onions.
In the reading room, between visitors, we, the intervenors, share our various philosophies of approach. Some begin the conversations with their memories, some with the news, some with Plato or Vonnegut. We intervene in the thinking of others in an act of exploration, an attempt at connection. And we do this with a willingness to risk failure; the part of ourselves we choose to share may not strike a chord with the one who receives it. More and more, I begin with a dream, perhaps because the dream world is so connected to conscious reality, but it allows us to speak of the impossible. There we can both expose ourselves and deny that we have done so.
In my disaster dreams, I am both inside and outside the event. I am on the plane as it hits the ground, and watching the crash from a safe distance, behind a tree. It makes me wonder how we split ourselves apart in our waking lives. A theatre director tells me about a production of The Diary of Anne Frank in which Anne is played by six different women. During moments of terror, three, four, or five Annes speak at once. “You need several selves sometimes,” she says. The mind has its own way of protecting us.
Only one woman tells me she does not know me well enough to share her dreams.
***
On the subway this morning, a woman was muttering “She has to die, she has to die,” and when I looked over, she was staring straight at me.
Asked which sense they would give up if they had to, most people choose the sense of smell. Asked to visualize a film you cannot look away from, most say it looks like the ocean. A woman from Vienna tells me she visits the ocean twice a year just to make sure it’s still there. The idea of it is too large to hold in her mind.
Their main concern is that the piece is scripted. “Do you ask the same question of everyone?” It is uncomfortable to feel as if you are inside someone else’s game, a structure you have not built, and do not understand. Like the unknowing participants in Calle’s work, like a mouse in a maze. It can be difficult to convince them that there is no way for them to get it wrong.
But most of all they want to know that their encounter is one of a kind. Because the greatest fear is that there is nothing special about us, or what we have to say. That where we discern a deep and abiding connection with the other, the other does not really see us at all.
I do not fully understand this until, two months later, I am sitting across a table from Marina Abramovic at the Museum of Modern Art, where she has invited visitors to sit with her in silence for an indefinite period of time. When I take my chair, and Abramovic lifts her bowed head, it is as though every thought I’ve ever had, every memory, passes through my mind at once. I feel dizzy, rudderless, and I search her face for some signal, but her expression never changes. A slight, barely perceptible parting of the lips, but nothing else. No response. I’m hyperaware of the brutal light trained on the square—reminiscent of a boxing ring—we sit in the center of. I’m unable to block out the fact that the experience is being relentlessly documented, by the artist’s photographer and videographer, by the eyes and cellphone cameras of onlookers.
Abramovic calls this piece The Artist Is Present, but I wonder. I wonder if she sees me, what she wants from me, whether anything significant can be shared this way, exposed, staring at one another in silence. For a long moment, I am incapable of any but the most mundane thought:
***
It is impossible to look someone in both eyes at once.