Scarborough, Maine, August 16, 2024

Where in the past I may have erased construction sites—orange cones, yellow bulldozers, exposed concrete—from my vision, for the last few years I’m usually drawn to these happenings, even find them beautiful. The reality is that this is how everything (modern) we know is constructed, and there is a freshness to feeling that reality, even if there is also a sense of loss.

In sound, or in photos, tracing or creating the world as it emerges is a preoccupation I have. I’m deeply reverent about Merleau-Ponty’s essay on Cézanne, called “Cézanne’s Doubt.” He discusses this sensation of seeing appearances as they are at the beginning of the world—which for Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology is a perceptual world, I suppose. But he also alludes to an actual, chronological beginning of the animal world. Cézanne’s work apparently shows this, and this is partially why there is such eerie “non-humanity” to his paintings. I relate to this non-humanity, and I feel anger about humans’ habit (a natural behavior) of focusing on each other. It’s a matter of seeing more broadly, including humans in the landscape rather than making them ideal protagonists.