Everything Takes Time

11 X 17 Inches
3-color Offset Lithograph Print
Signed
Created in 2020

$30

The passage for this print comes from the short story “Forever Overhead” from “Brief Interviews With Hideous Men.” It’s something of a coming of age story for a boy on his thirteenth birthday, spanning only a few minutes. The narrator acts as the boy’s own inner mind (and as your inner mind as it is written in the rare 2nd person perspective) while he faces the task of jumping off a diving board at a public swimming pool. Adulthood is about decision and action and it’s frightening. At the core of that fear is a relationship with time. No other writer, with the exception perhaps of Virginia Woolf, can deploy ink characters on a page with such perfect form and trajectory causing so much, familiar, direct sensation and qualia in your body.

A koan is a sort of zen thought experiment. One that acts as a vehicle to pass the limitations of thought. They are small objects of language that trip up our logic and offer a momentary transcendence. The one that most Americans are familiar with is, “What is the sound of one hand [clapping]?” Many Koans were created by specific zen masters and recorded by their schools and there is a sort of academia around them but the nature of the koan can be found in languages and cultures throughout time and geography, often in the form of poetry or enigmatic idioms or jokes. 

These “Bodhisttva” prints pair buddhist imagery with bits of language, penned by writers that I love, that offer this kind of koan magic.