coastlines

i was in dallas about a month or two ago, one of the highlights of this trip happened to be at an art expo. called "coastlines", it´s going on at the dallas museum of art until august 22. at the time, i wasn´t really sure why i was so enveloped in all of those images and sounds, today, after a week of being near the ocean, everything makes a lot more sense.
when i saw it, i was wrapped up in the whole theory and poetry of the sea, and of course it´s all theory and poetry, because a representation of the ocean, coastline, whatever, isn´t in real reality a ocean, coastline, or whatever.
i wrote a couple of things down that until recently sunk in.

i need the ocean to teach me whatever it is i learn, music or consciousness, the single wave in the sea, the abyss of my being, the gutteral rasp of my voice, or the blazing presumption of fishes & navies- so much is certain; even in sleep, as if by the trick of a magnet, i spin on the circle of the wave upon wave of the sea, the seas university.
pablo neruda.

so it was, i stood in front of paintings, photographs, and drawings, i was seized by four photographs by hiroshi sugimoto, they were so abstract but so profund, it hit me like yves klein´s blue at the moma. i tend to be strangely drawn to overly abstract paintings/whatevers, especially monochrome ones, so sugimoto´s photographs were no exception, it was a series of four, each depicting a horizon, apparently it was the same horizon, the only thing that shifted from photo to photo was the exposure, the first was a whitish grey and the last one was almost black, but you always managed to see the horizon no matter how it had been exposed. i must have stood there for about an hour immersed in the infinity of this horizon. to add on to this absorbing experience, the curators at the DMA decided to collaborate with students to make this an auditory experience, so the sound of waves dripped through each hall, transporting the spectator to this imaginary coastline.

with my trip to the beach, i understood that the sound a wave makes is coming from infinity, never stopping, never tiring, always moving, and now i see with more accuracy what i told elsa when i was five, "te quiero como las olas del mar".