On nothing happening (most likely)
except the meaning we choose to find
“I do not think that art should be understood, it rather should be experienced,” Robert Bubel
It’s 6am and we’re both sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee. Outside it is just beginning to brighten and another winter day is uncovering itself, tossing off the moody blankets of clouds, and exhaling a deep rose color into the sky. We’ve both been up for almost an hour, but my spouse Janyce was up first, instantly waking to the dog stirring on his cushion in our room, and bounding out of bed to catch him just in time, before he traipsed across our hardwood floor without his dog diaper, leaving a trail of drips.
“What’s going on? Is he alright?” I said.
“He has to go out,” she said.
The morning has been frenetic already, Janyce rushing the dog through the kitchen outside in the snow, a tense energy now pervading the house. For a brief moment, all the power went out in a surge, lights went off, and then clicked back on again, heat pouring out of the register onto my bare ankles. I’m at the table with my laptop open doing a google search, trying to figure out whether or not we should take our elderly dog to the vet.
“This one has a list of things that are common for a dog at the end of life,” I say.
I read it out loud to Janyce, who is sitting across from me and watching him as he moves slightly and rests his head on my sweatshirt. The other day I took my shirt off in the bedroom and dropped it on his dog bed. He fluffs it up now to make himself a pillow at night, sticking his snout underneath a fold and heaving a deep sigh. He can have it. I’m happy to offer it up as a permanent part of the dog bedding. I’d give him whatever he wants these days, only he really isn’t asking for anything. He wants to sleep, eat a little food, and follow Janyce around the house, even into the bathroom. He would probably climb into the shower with her if he could, but instead he will curl up on the bathmat and wait.
“We can check off every one of those things,” says Janyce.
“Right,” I say. “So I guess we don’t take him to the vet.”
All week, I’ve been flipping between my work screen to a screen of a visual artist I stumbled across on the Internet. He left a “like” on one of my Instagram photos of our faded backyard shed taken through the window screen. I looked him up at his artist page on a visual art merchandising site, the kind with the ability to view each painting in a room and how it might look hung over a couch. I clicked through several hundred paintings — all of them abstract expressionist, each with one forceful, muscular, paint stroke after another, and all of them rendered in a muted pallet of industrial grays and blacks. I kept coming back to one that isn’t a painting, but a charcoal drawing expressively titled: “Most likely nothing happening” and it stopped me every time. There is a lot of emotion happening on the page with its active composition, its frantic scribbled line in the bottom corner, a mass of blackness pushing up the negative space into a bulging path entering into an unknown horizon.
I like this one a lot. I feel drawn to anything active right now, possibly as an antidote to all my passivity. Janyce and I were having a spirited discussion last night, which maybe to anyone else watching would have sounded like arguing. But it was really just the two of us expressing a lot of pent-up emotion. Nothing seems to be happening lately, except maybe anger. The days end the same way they start, and we don’t make real plans anymore because we are in a weird limbo of waiting for something. Waiting for what? For our old dog to die? For our chance at the vaccine? For spring?
“God damn it!” says Janyce.
“What happened now?” I call out from the bedroom where I have crawled back into bed typing into my laptop. I throw everything aside and walk through the rooms toward the sounds of frustration. I find Janyce bent over in the hallway rolling up the mats and scrubbing parts of the floor.
“He had a little accident right at the door earlier and I didn’t notice. I stepped in it just now and tracked it all though the hallway,” she says. “He’s going to need to stay closed in the kitchen.”
“We need a better diaper,” I say. “But you should go downstairs and just do your workout.”
“I’m going,” she says.
In times of uncertainty like this, I look to words, and films, and visual art to help me find some equilibrium again. The whole purpose of looking at art is to pull out some subjective meaning. I’m looking at this road to nowhere in Bubel’s drawing and it occurs to me that in some ways I’ve have been snapping photographs of roads just like this one, roads that lead into the unknown, and noticing compositions where the negative and positive spaces are in tension, while an active, restless energy is building. In Bubel’s drawing, this feeling comes from his scrawled line, in my photo it’s in the gathering clouds.
Robert Bubel says that, “I do not think that art should be understood, it rather should be experienced. And that a single experience explicated by an artist, becomes a common experience.” I think he is right about that.
Most likely nothing is happening. Again today. And our old dog will just take another long nap.