At The Museum

Thoughts on Stillness

Yesterday my dad and I walked through the SFMOMA, staring at photographs laid out in a wild array, taped up on the white walls. My dad said it was overwhelming to see so many photos all at once. Wolfgang Tillmans’ images in “To Look Without Fear” are signs of a hopeful man. Yet he seems a cautious one who never steps too far away from people, who seems to enjoy the loudness of the ocean and the movement within cities. This, after all, is where most of us live anyway. But still, I wonder what he feels when he finds stillness.

And yet maybe we are all that unsettled, rushing through our daily lives with the ferocity of productivity that to think, to make space for real questioning, real consideration and brain-spacer-y is just not in the cards for most of us anymore. Blame capitalism or social media or both or a lazy generation. Find your excuse.

As we walked more around the museum, that stillness was hard to find. Fernando Palma Rodriguez’s new works, creating spirits out of white hazmat suits, ladders, feathers, and motors seemed to bring about the chaotic manifestation of those spirits. I imagine him making them in a deliberate glee, like a child in awe of the world, trying to make us laugh, and yet consider what all this plastic, what all this metal, what all these motors have done to our spirits. Because the suits couldn’t sit still.

That idea of stillness still evades me, like it does many of us. There is little of it these days. I get in my car, and the engine sounds as though it’s in the cab with me. The roads are bumpy and shaking. The sound of the low-boy refrigerators, lights, sounds systems, all the din of work and the customers and our voices that join with it, an all consuming noise. On my days off, when I have nothing really to do, I head out for those messed up roads and go into the ocean, a constant moving and meshing, a shaking of sounds swirling together all at once and occasionally bursting with the booms of the waves, which can sometimes be felt on the safety of dry land. On days when I have things to do, I go into other parts of the city, see other people. You can’t hide from the noise, and I know this. Maybe that’s why, since the pandemic has ended, I’ve so readily embraced it. So readily gone into the noise rather than the quiet of a moment. 

But, there is just the constant, regular, everyday pressure of life in this country, in this world, in this system of economics. We have to work. We have to know what’s happening in the news. We want to pay attention to what’s happening in Gaza. We want it to end. We want to try to enjoy our lives. We want them to enjoy theirs. We want to be healthy and keep on living. We want to stop hearing of bombs. We need peace, the silence at sunset.

It amazes me how, for the past century or so, we have been living with the combustion engine, and how much that one invention has changed the lives of humanity, with amazement and horror. Maybe it is a bit of an exaggeration, but due to this creation, how we function as a species has completely shifted. We moved closer together, we built efficient systems to grow crops, we created more detailed accounting systems for all our trade. We moved even closer together. We created cameras. We exported items and ideas faster than was ever imaginable, even for the Venetians. And through all that change, through fast engines, better efficiencies in the economy, we are still left here in the odd marvel of a moment, surrounded by one another in these cities, yet staring at our phones, not knowing the names of our neighbors down the hall. 

We cannot escape the noise of engines, the noise of ideas, the noise of the news. And some of this is in no doubt good. But what of silence? Where is it these days? Where can any of us find it?

Even at this moment writing this, my fridge is humming, the keyboard taps and my neighbor screams hysterically to a friend on the phone and I’m missing out on the joke, just as I did the sunset. I was inside, making my dinner, wondering what I could write about today, wondering how the day felt, curious how I could stay productive, exhausted by the movement of the days, hoping to hold onto the beauty that is present here, everyday, despite the horrors we all see.