The Folded Clock: A Diary

Chapter 16: March 27

Today I brought some objects to the Museum of Modern Art. Among them

my great-grandfather’s meat grinder

the l’amour fou tap handle

a ring

the necklace I failed to give to my mother

an air meter

a doll-sized Webster’s dictionary

This was not a hostile takeover on my part; I’d been invited to do something, to read or perform or something, in the museum. I put my objects in the gallery where an exhibit called Inventing Abstraction was being shown; to get to this gallery, you must walk through a doorway over which appears the Kandinsky quote “We must now, then, renounce the object.” The first time I visited the show, I misread the quote as, “We must not, then, renounce the object.” I thought this was so balanced and open-minded of Kandinsky; even while penning a perception-altering manifesto, he was committed to seeing all sides and including everyone, even those idiot still-lifers clinging to their skulls and their rotting fruit. It’s okay, you people who love your objects — you’re included in our revolution, too.

Later I realized what Kandinsky had actually written. And I felt insecure. And then hostile. My mistake reminded me that I am not by nature a manifesto writer, in that I do not want to hurt people’s feelings or make anyone feel left out. I once wrote a manifesto, in which I tried so hard to be unbiased and fair. I suspect now that if I’d been rabidly biased and wickedly unfair, I’d have been better heard.

So maybe there was a tiny bit of hostility and insecurity involved because I’d been retroactively disinvited to the secession that happened, granted, decades before I was born. I am an object person. I cling to things. As a child I clung. Not for status reasons. Plain anchor reasons. Those objects that provided me with stability were rewarded with my protection. My bedroom lamp, for example. It broke. Possibly it was fixable, who knows; my parents were not handy. They fully knew what they were never doing. A broken lamp would stay broken. Better to remove the failed object from the premises. We removed lots of failed objects. A large porch, for example. Easier to tear off a giant, wraparound porch that was as sizeable as a cruise ship deck than to fix it. (To be fair—fair—there was no money. Removal was the only option.)

But when my lamp broke, and when I knew it would be thrown away, I put it in my bed. I slept with the lamp until I was promised: the lamp would not be thrown out. Lamps are shaped like people; they have heads. The sight must have been Duchampian (or Dalí-ian) — a wife lying in bed next to her husband who has been turned into a lamp! And the wife back into a girl!

My mother agreed not to throw away the broken lamp. As mentioned, I’ve won nearly all the domestic battles in my life. Perhaps this was the first.

So Kandinsky. MoMA. I decided to bring my objects to the abstraction show, fuck Kandinsky. Times had changed. Sure, in Kandinsky’s day, the ability to speak via telegraph and then telephone, the ability to dematerialize yourself or to move your body (by trains) at higher speeds to distant places, this was an exciting life enhancement. The quickness with which words and people traversed time and space helped spread abstraction as an idea. (Next to the exhibit entrance was a huge diagram — it resembled the route maps that airlines print in the back of their in-flight magazines — consisting of points and lines, showing who had spread the idea on which continent and to whom.) Swifter connection represented possibility and promoted thought contagion. It still represents possibility and promotes thought contagion, but things have become endangered. Literally, things. Extinctions loom everywhere. “Evacuation of the object world” is how the curator of the MoMA show described what the abstractionists were up to. Once this felt exciting and liberating. To be free of all that weight and volume, and from the hell of what a friend of mine calls “object management.” But now the whole world is being evacuated of things. Who needs abstraction now? Each day brings another tsunami wipe, or it can, on certain days, feel that way. Recently I picked up a book of matches and thought, Soon we’ll be saying, “Remember when we used matches?”

Before bringing my objects to MoMA, I took them to a psychic because I wanted her to tell me about their histories. There’s a practice called psychometry that purports to read the energy film left by former owners on the objects they once possessed or simply touched. I brought my objects to a woman named Durga. We sat across from each other at a fluorescent-lit table as though she were about to do my nails. She was blunt and no-nonsense; when I gave her an object to read and she wasn’t receiving, she’d say, “I’m not getting anything,” or, more crankily, “What do you want me to tell you about this?”

We also talked about synchronicities and how, the day before I contacted her, a friend had given her my novel. That a psychic should be reading my novel was not so strange for me (my novel was about psychics); flipped, however, the scenario did seem synchronistic. Imagine you are a psychic and suddenly the author of the book you’ve just received calls you out of the blue.

“Even for me,” Durga said, “this is an unusual degree of synchronicity.”

By the time I met her she’d read part of my book. She had some factual bones to pick. For example, she told me that the psychic ability to see numbers was very rare (one of my characters psychically receives a serial number). “Numbers have very low numinosity,” she said, which sounded so oxymoronic. (I later looked up “numinosity”: it means “of or relating to a numen.” I looked up “numen”: it means “the spirit or divine power presiding over a thing or place.”) “Only one psychic could see numbers,” she said. She’d forgotten this famous psychic’s name.

Two weeks later she wrote me an e-mail:

Dear Heidi,

The man whose name slipped my mind on Monday, the famous psychic who could see numbers inside an envelope, Ingo Swann passed away yesterday. Sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings. I always wanted to meet him, we had many friends in common, but never did.

Best, Durga

Because this e-mail arrived from a psychic, I thought it might contain a hidden message. What was Durga really saying? What synchronicities were encoded here? Ingo Swann died on 1/31/13, and the number 13 (as well as any numeric variations including 1s and 3s) is a meaningful one to me, and has been since the late ’80s, before Taylor Swift’s mother probably even began menstruating. The book party at which, arguably, my career as a paid writer began happened at a club called “13.” But probably the only secret message the e-mail contained was this: people can seem to be meaningfully near you, you can seem fated to meet them, but the connection, even today, maybe even more so today, because we assume the likelihood of connection, can fail to be made. Durga was connecting me to her failed connection. As is frequently my response when a person reaches out to me, and this reaching out deeply touches me, and even honors me, I do not reciprocate. I never responded to Durga. Whatever connection she sought, I did not allow it.