Before the revelry began at the house
of a friend in my program, before the screaming and clinking and
cheering and cries of joy and relief, there was absence.
I biked to the courthouse on 7th Street on election day, hoping things might be abuzz. They were not.
In fact, the building was closed. I felt silly: should I have known
it would be? Instead, where there usually is a guard standing at the
metal detector arch just within the double doors, the doors were
closed and locked. I looked through the dark glass, cupping my hands
over my forehead to see if I could make out anyone inside. No one!
It was strange, knowing that the
hubbubs and noisy long lines and such were somewhere, a lot of
somewheres, but not there, where I stood. There was simply a paper
attached to the door that said this:
And I did not wander back there, because I was not an "election day employee". I did
not investigate what was going on. Whatever it was was important
work to be doing, and I doubted anyone would have time to answer
random questions from an absentee California voter. And as I walked
my bike away, I ran into someone with a badge! Who was bringing
papers to wherever I had decided not to loiter. Her colleague came
up and they were both in a big hurry—the files in her hand were some sort of batch
of files needed wherever the clerk office workers were doing their
thing, but that's all I could deduce from her rushed explanation—and they posed for a photo.
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And I biked home to the only real hubbub of my day: social media feeds. Since the 6th, watching the election recede in favor
of Sandy on my social media feeds, I see many NYC friends have made
calls for volunteering. I wondered about all the volunteers helping
at the polls on the 6th, keeping things fair and safe. I wondered how many of
them turned around and went back to giving blankets and food and
checkings-in on the elderly in hard-hit areas of Sandy, like Queens.
The performance of altruism is quite a big topic, but what struck me
as I managed not to organically run into any other evidence of Bloomington's election day (in spite of errand-doing about town) was that liminal
space that blooms up when the epicenter is elsewhere. That bloomed up
for me with both the election and Sandy: I flew out the night before
Sandy hit, 5pm out of JFK, after a friend's wedding. Similarly, I voted before election day, reading off
the progressive recommendations my mother sent me aloud to my friend Phoebe, who likes
filling in bubbles, as we drank cider and watched Dr. Who. I forgot
to buy a stamp and the ballot stayed in my backpack for my New York weekend,
and my friend Katherine put a stamp with a butterfly on the ballot,
which she mailed....from Brooklyn, so maybe it never got there.
What
do we have to say about the liminal spaces we're sometimes in, those defined by where
the hubbub is not? How would one put that into a museum installation?
Would 'customers' other than people at a Buddhist retreat ever stand
for an installation that made a point of the action taking place
somewhere else? I found myself thinking of Phelan and absence.
How
would the people in her piece, like the artist who hung blinded and
bandaged for 24 hours, treat that kind of quiet liminality? Perhaps this kind of
conveyance demands inviting everyone to something and then having the
focal point not be there. Perhaps my response to the prompt is organizing a thing like, come to the museum for an exhibit of
calligraphy scrolls and live music! And then, no scrolls and no
musicians to be found.
What is performed when we keep out eye out
for something and it isn't there?
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