This icon hangs prominently in my studio space. It’s an important personal memory, but also a much broader symbol for any other pilgrim. It’s like a “memento mori” which was a visual signal in medieval art, often a skull placed in the picture as a reminder of the reality of everyone’s end. My subject here is more than that certainty, but rather a still shot reminder of the lingering time I have until I also drop. I titled this “Lingering Moments”. This is a monotype, a one-off impression made on paper with an etching press. I printed this in 2006.

The impetus for my imagery here was the sight/memory from my television screen, five years earlier, of papers flying out of many broken windows in the twin towers in New York on 9/11. The horror on the ground, and behind those windows could not be seen nor heard on the tv. That was a mercy, a veil at least for us glued to our screens trying to grasp what was really happening there. But I was fixated on these floating bits, as if they were what the Japanese call ukiyo-e = “pictures from a floating world”. That day, what was actually floating were fragments from meeting agendas, spreadsheets, architect elevations, love notes, hand scrawled grocery lists…whatever had been in minds just earlier for thousands of people…and now an ephemeral randomized conglomeration cast into the air.

There was a strange lightness that masked the horror. Five years after that my heart was still etched with the memory. When talking about this with a friend, how to adequately illustrate the import of that day, he said more time would be needed before any sensitively viable imagery could be accomplished… 20 years out my heart-etch remains, and so today, I make an attempt with words.

The flying papers were stand-ins for the gravity of it all. The papers represented particular individuals, doing common work, with unique histories now all jumbled into a common national tragedy. And there was time in the falling of these fragments. That was what struck me: the slow articulation full of weight, like last rites prayers, moments for reckonings on one September day no one ever anticipated.

The papers all fell and turned to dust, but while they wafted in the air there was some time, precious little, yes, but moments just the same between impact and finality.

Time, if even just the minutes it took for the papers to lay down on the dirty street, has long seemed to me a mysterious grace. Whether it is 70 plus years assumed from first breath to last, or just 39.37 hours, or 3 minutes and seven seconds  —  the time any of us have individually is as if a slow-motion camera has been turned on. The moments we have provide a serious possibility for when clarity can pierce through. Let…a sober…wisdom…pierce, my friend. Time is an ephemeral resource toward that end, it’s a declining dash, a whisper of terminus for each of us. Attend to that whisper — with all your beating heart.