About the work

The body remembers how to do certain things. Not just the muscle memory of turning a key, but the larger, slower knowledge of how to arrive at that turning. It remembers the particular quality of light that means the job must be done now, before the cold truly sets in, before the last of the day’s traffic makes it impossible to kneel here in the narrow way. It remembers that this is the time when the incidental onlookers fade into the edges of vision, becoming mere blurs of intention. And the things themselves remember too, perhaps. The hex key remembers the bolt, and the bolt remembers its threading, and the bicycle remembers the road, even as it prepares for an undressing. It's a kind of forgetting that happens only through taking apart, a dissolution of purpose into its constituent parts, until everything holds its own separate truth.