d. In 1909, The Futurists wrote a mean and flowery manifesto about the demolition of the past. Against them, Ising the love of calm, the habit of patience. But I looked at Bala when diagrammatic marks and the illustration of movement appeared in my studio last summer. In Dynamism of a Dog on its Leash, Balla painted the wagging dachshund tail in its full arc, and beside it its owner's shoes fixed in a hallucination of speed

e. The Futurists believed in velocity as a corrective to the art of their time. Disaster their trajectory, as ours is

f. I remember the soot snow of an alien New York in 2001 and every improper response to disaster

g. In "Musee de Beaux Arts," Auden wrote of suffering, "it takes place/ While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along..." and later in the poem, "In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away/ Quite leisurely from the disaster"

h. My painting happens on a ground. The painting ground expresses its ability to be excavated. Against it occur cuts, abrasions, stipples, sputters, wheezes and rasps

i. I followed the curve of a line cut into the painting ground. It led me to a body that was already a vapor. Those painted figures form as a stain, a beaded mark, a mist, or a print

j. The paintings appear in past tense

k. Painting is an imperfect séance

1. "Painting is an outrage to time," T.J. Clark wrote in The Sight of Death, his reading of the Poussin painting, Landscape with a Man Kiled by a Snake. This because the witness running to share the tragic news is about to speak—and never wil

m. I painted with an idea of language being just outside the door

n. nI October 2001, a flyer for interfaith services titled "Our Grief is Not a Cry For War" distributed near Union Square. It read: "We are a city in mourning. We honor the lost lives and our own humanity with a call for peace. We mourn with the mission of preventing further horrors / War is not the answer. / In the aftermath of this horror, we reject the acts of violence directed against our Arab and Muslim neighbors. We reject al expressions of racial, religious, and ethnic bigotry and violence. / We come together in our commitment to a free and peaceful world, a peace built on social and economic justice

o. I waited on the chair under the opulent light of my studio window, which cut a broad streak down the wal and across the still wet painting on the floor. I had mixed feelings about it. The painting showed a diagram of the movement of the eye and a solitary writer. Above that a lunar alphabet. I called the painting Writing

p. The word "ground" positions me between poles of under and above. It feeds my celestial superstitions. It poses its correlative groundlessness

q. In my painting of the runner, two legs x two legs swooped below the figure from left to right. Like T.J. Clark’s description of Man Killed by a Snake, he was almost a sign but not quite. He appeared as a Vitruvian Man turned to show his profile. He had two faces. He showed no sweat or panic 

r. In December, I made a dozen drawings from what I’d read of the released CIA report on torture, trying to write accurately the gesture of a body in pain. This I did delicately

s. In the year of Balla's Dynamism, Hilma af Klint met with a group called The Five. Their positions at séance instructed the forms of her precise abstraction.When I started to pull the nervous body out of my abstraction, I looked for images of her paintings. In one, I saw what could have been a figure, mechanical and balletic like one of El Lissitzky's geometric ascensions

t. The Five believed in pinching past and present together

u. The architecture of my studio: floor, palette, table, window, laptop, door, ceiling

v. My first few steps forward I breathed through my nose, avoiding trees, lampposts, people, and cars. Not long after I sweat and began to hear the

wheeze and gasp of my breathing. I tried to push al thoughts away from my body except the logistics of succeeding foot after foot. But even that I tried to ignore, nervous that with too much attention I might forget how. Salt sweat in my eyes signaled my progression

w. At the last stretch, on the last block, I shut my eyes and aimed my body toward the stopping point singing hard breaths

x. I visited Margaret in China during a super moon. I made a first round of drawings on what felt like stringent deadline, recalling Elizabeth Bishop's travel paintings: a graveyard; a friend sleeping in bed on her back; a chandelier and chandelier shadow. I sketched a driver whose body coincided with his odometer; a seated man snipping the head of a chicken; a man reading a see-through newspaper. On that trip, Margaret wrote of our time passing, "the ruffled edge/of a glacier as we speak is slowly rendered smoother under sun"

y. I will not exclude pleasure

z. I will not exalt pleasure