I just finished a beautiful little book by Laura Raicovich about Walter De Maria’s The Lightning Field. It is an engrossing read, with its invitation to mentally dwell in the New Mexico desert for bounded periods of time, and its tendrils that reach into chaos theory and other topics.
A favorite passage, about Raicovich’s childhood memory of seeing:
“There were other windows,
and their buildings were mostly gray.
I recalibrated my vision;
I made the windows change.
Small squares and larger rectangles,
many sizes and permutations of window,
nothing close or far,
everything just there.
Even the curtains, most of them white, some of them lace,
some blue with a pattern, or red.
There was only one yellow, so that one was special.
But none were closer or farther, they were all just there. Because it was warm, some were open, so the curtains moved. This made it more difficult to keep the windows in their big flat pattern, but I did it. Until I stopped, and I didn’t mind.”