It’s very dark down here.
Much of what I’m doing lately revolves around this place. I go down sometimes with friends, who come often to play and record. I’m still working, bit by bit, on this mural, although the weather’s gotten much colder and I can’t hold the chalk for long before my fingers go numb. I’ve also been bringing my violin down here to practice. The echoes are wonderfully rich and very forgiving. I feel less vulnerable when I’m playing, as if the music were a forcefield that I am generating, keeping some undefined threat at bay. It feels powerful. There’s a weird sensation of momentum, slashing the darkness with the violin bow, like some machete-wielding explorer hacking through jungle. Until I stop. Then the silence rushes in and I suddenly feel very exposed.
I’m also slowly working on a piece of choreography for that place. I don’t have much to say about that just yet, but at the moment I imagine videotaping, altering and projecting a solo performance, probably to an audience of no one at all. In general, I prefer any finished work of mine to be several steps removed from the initial impulse. I want to allow for the passage of time. I don’t much care if no one ever sees it. I vaguely imagine some time-distant viewer interpreting its layers, like an archaeologist, but I’m not equipped to make immediate connections with people. I am not a performance artist. I keep myself at a distance.
That’s what draws me to this place: its remoteness. It distances one even from oneself. Something about the dark, it creeps into all the cracks and levers apart all the irregular plates that you have grafted together into an identity. You feel yourself breaking up, like an ice-sheet cracking. You experience everything more purely, each sensation concentrated and isolated, from exquisite animal fear to a lunatic joy.
Whatever happens down there seems to happen to someone else. Whenever I go down to resume work on the Wall I approach it cautiously, curiously, as if it were the work of another hand, a long time ago. A cave painting by a direct ancestor. I am always baffled by signs of other human presence down there – bottles or food or used condoms, smashed lighting or objects moved around. It feels like evidence of time travel or a parallel universe: theoretically possible but so wholly improbable as to make me doubt my own perception. Who the fuck would come down here?
Except me, of course. Except us.