1 - robin

• The white strata are bunching into clouds. The bunches are competing with each other to imitate animals. A sheep, a platypus, a sheep, a tortoise. A sheep, a sheep, a sheep. The leaves are breaking out, obscuring the white strata, the sky animals, the irregular spaces or cerulean between everything. The fields of the daffodil farm on the other side of the valley are speckling yellow and yellower as I watch. Why do I feel as if I'm being killed when it's the season of renewal? Cars don't crash when the days are long. Rapists don't prey in the sunshine and old folk don't catch pneumonia and expire in their rocking chairs. Houses don't burn down in spring. (2)
• And so my grandmother died in the night after all, as one should. No change in the light. A temporary sleep becomes permanent. (3)
• I loved that tree because it had acknowledged the ending of my grandmother's radiant yet under-celebrated life by momentously uprooting itself. (4)
• ...trees know in their heartwood that if they don't surrender their foliage in autumn, high winds will sail them to the ground. They know they must expose their timber bones to increase their chance of remaining upstanding through to another spring. (4)
• I understand how it can be that I am being killed when it is spring. I am being killed very slowly; now is only the outset. My small world is coming apart because it is swelling and there's no place for me any longer, and I still want to cry out but there's no point because I am a grown individual, responsible for myself. My mother will not come.(6)
• Anyway, what's the point in perching on an earth without sea? Once I saw a jackdaw flying amongst a flock of gulls. I was on the top deck of a bus, level with the flock. I witnessed the member of the family Corvidae who wanted to be -- who maybe even trusted that he was -- a seabird. I thought: I am that jackdaw. At home with the sea even though the sea is not my home, and never has been. (6)
• Objects don't seem incongruous if they've been there forever; doings don't seem ridiculous if they've always been done that way. Why is it only now that I can see how many ordinary things are actually grotesque? (7-8)
• The tree which falls without any human hearing still falls, as the creatures who die without being found by a human still die. (8)
• But that house doesn't feel like the place I grew up any more. ... Whenever I visit, there is always some new structure flattening what used to be a patch of pleasant green. (11-12)
• In a row above the draining board, there's a weathered wood St Joseph, a plastic flamenco dancer, a three-legged camel, a panda-bear-shaped pencil sharpener, an oblong pebble painted with the features of a mouse and each one of these silently onlooking objects are immeasurably precious to me, because my grandmother can be found in them. (12-13)

2 - rabbit

• My mother knows everything. I used to think all mothers did but in recent years I've come to realise it's just mine. My mother alone knows that, in point of fact, nothing is extraordinary. (39)
• And it came as a revelation to me that daytime television is repeated at night; that you can live your whole waking life over again in the dark. (40)
• And out in the hallway, the swaddled trappings of my independent life lay like dead bodies in the wake of a murderous typhoon. (43)
• This is the best of conceptual art: by means of nominal material, vast feeling is evoked. A message enduring long after the posters have been replaced by car ads and clothes ads and Coke ads at Christmas. Its message: appreciate the people around you. Don't re-plump their pillows until they return safely in the evening. (44)
• There are daisies around the redcurrant bushes, daisies in the strawberry patch, daisies beneath the hedge where my mother buried the curios. I've never seen so many white specks since the lawn of the last house my grandmother lived in, as if she brought them with her -- the soles of her shoes stuffed with seeds which shook free with every stamp. (47)
• I believe: I am less fearful of being alone than I am of not being able to be alone. (48)
• And once you have enough money, it doesn't matter if you are old or small. Once you have enough money, you can buy yourself youth and you can buy yourself magnitude. (52)

3 - rat

• Most of Gallaccio's materials are perishable, her artworks concern mortality, inevitability, powerlessness. You can grow as many mutant flowers as you want, Gallaccio is saying. But you cannot stop a single one from dying. (64)
• I want to believe it was in reference to a period of her life in which she had been clutched by the fear that her hair was falling out and felt compelled to collect the fallen strands so that it might in some sense still belong to her. i want to believe this because I want to believe I have things in common with great artists, and that this must mean I might one day be a great artist too. (66)
• The trick to keeping going is to break going into burst: to stop, and otherwise occupy my brain for a spell, and then start going again. Nowadays I apply this to my whole day long. Each is a succession of shallow occupations, enforced intervals. Even my sleep is only ankle deep, interrupted. (68)
• In this age of ear-splitting communicativeness, how can it be that so many people can have gone so suddenly silent? I don't understand. Perhaps the world is vaster, more bottomless, less discovered than I've always believed. (69)
• Whilst flicking I came upon a mess of dead petals. Real ones, I mean, and not a painting. They were pressed between factories and matchstick men. They had mostly turned a dirty mustard, and so I couldn't tell what colour or flower they had once been. (70)
• 'I'd a grand old sheepdog there for years but then it up and died like your nan's and 'twas desperate sad. 'Twould put you off getting another one, y'know? Only to see it go like that.' He chuckles again, dispelling the sombre note. That's nonsense, I think. I want to tell him: you're an old man now, maybe you'll die first. I want to reason that one can't not do things because they might go wrong. (72)
• Patchie wasn't the last pet because the goldfish is still there on my parents' kitchen countertop, drifting in her murky tank-water, wiggling to the rhythm of the filter's ripples. She's big as a halibut now, and she carries an ocean's worth of sadness in her watery eyes. The halibut who refuses to die. (77)
• My mother was forever reminding me of things I had not forgotten. ... It was as if I hadn't learned a single thing in the seven years i'd lived independently, as if my mother refused to acknowledge knowledge attained from any source which wasn't her. (83)
• It wasn't my parents who annoyed me; it was the forsaken version of myself I helplessly revert to in their presence; it was the fact that my life was suddenly wide open. I had not yet, at that point, decided whether I wanted to get better or die altogether. (84)
• How strange, that he is old and admires modern, synthetic things. Whereas I am young and admire that which is antiquated, tumbledown, fusty. (92)
• Dibbet's piece wasn't a sculpture in any traditional sense but a series of studies which followed the movements of a robin around a park and were eventually collated, alongside other research, into a book. So where was the art? Dibbets manipulated the bird's movements by means of a number of wooden poles upon which it perched. A free bird, which could have flown anywhere it wished, perched upon anything it chose, and yet, it preferred to establish territory, to remain in that particular area of that particular park, hopping between man-made points. The art was the manipulation. (97)
• An angry, churning sky, tall yellow stalks, a grass-green and mud-brown path cutting through the stalks, tapering into the distance; a line made by walking. And a murder of crows between the stalks and sky as though they are departing or arriving or have just been disturbed. ... It took twenty-nine hours for the infected bullet wound to kill Van Gogh, and I cannot help but wonder whether, during that time, he changed his mind. (99)

4 - mouse

• When I cycle in the mornings, I make an effort to appreciate even the most ubiquitous bits of nature. Not just the exquisite infestations of white blossom, but the elegance of each black thorn. Not just the petal-packed dandelion buds, but the hollow stalks from which their yellow bursts. Not just the swallows and song thrushes, but every different kind of crow as well. (102)
• I watch the neighbours passing. I think; there are only two directions, really. Away from home, and back again, and you cannot, in all sincerity, say that you are going somewhere when you return so soon, and play it over again the next day, without ever making any progress. (103)
• Works about Lying, I text myself: René Magritte, The Treachery of Images, 1929. The painting shows a pipe, and beneath it Magritte has painted the words: Ceci n'est pas une pipe. Because his image of a pipe is not a pipe, of course, it's a painting. Every painting is just a painting. (110)
• I turned my head a fraction and looked out my skylight at the real stars. There were only two, and at first, I couldn't figure out why they appeared and disappeared as I watched, a jagged kind of twinkling. But after a while I realised, of course, that there must be clouds at night as well. That it must have been because of the night clouds. (111)
• I read somewhere that children have an innate flexibility which diminishes as they grow. Slowly, slowly, adulthood deadens us. Muscles are forgotten, slacken, waste. And one day we realise we can no longer hoist ourselves parallel with the ground to fly from flagpoles. Unless we are acrobats, or digitally generated. (114)
• It's a work about the loss of childhood, about the pervasiveness of gibberish, about the insuperable difficulty of articulating what we honestly feel. It's a work about how, even as adults, most of our fears remain so petty. So inadequate. (116)
• A man is talking about how he is saving to purchase his own grave. He confesses he is not terribly old, dying, or sick. ... All the same, he is saving to buy his own grave and he talks about this as if it's perfectly reasonable. As if death ought to be life's foremost occupation. What a waste of water and light and oxygen this man is, I think. What a tragedy that so many others who are trying so frantically to continue to live, will die, while he's still saving. (117)
• I tried to think of a vice I want to sacrifice, and ended up reasoning that I need my bad habits, desperately, just to coax myself through each day. ... I need my mother to believe I still feel like doing the things I used to. I don't want her to know about how it has become necessary to coax myself. (119)
• The ability to talk to people: that's the key to the world. It doesn't matter whether you are able to articulate your won thoughts and feelings and meanings or not. What matters is being able to make the noises that encourage others to feel comfortable, and the inquiries which present them with the opportunity to articulate their thoughts and feelings and meanings, the particulars of their existences, their passions, preoccupations, beliefs. If you can talk to other people in this way, you can go -- you can get -- anywhere in this world, in life. (122)
• I hope that I also unthinkingly assumed the pigeon would fly away safely before I reached it, that its untimely death was no more than a tragic miscalculation. I'd like to believe, as everyone does, that I am innately good; innately wired to do good. (123)
• I picture the mouse trying to swim, to scrabble back out. ... Her back legs are splayed as if she had been kicking at the instant her heart stopped. As if, in the instant which came before the stopping of her heart, she learned to swim, a second too late. (128)

5 - rook

• I am stuck on question number fifteen: Do you see or hear things that others do not see or hear? How am I supposed to know what other people see or hear? (131)
• This way brouwn is an apt and forcible metaphor for living. For how: we start out trying to decipher other people's plans for us, a process which might last decades. For how: throughout all of this time, these decades, we have no choice but to obtusely, optimistically follow. (133)
• Following Piece, 1969. ... It's a piece, again, about aimlessness and pointlessness. About how selecting a total stranger to determine your path is every bit as reckless and jeopardous as trusting yourself. (137)

6 - fox

• Had he left the same bed every morning for eleven years at the same time in the same place and recorded it, this would have affected me more. This would have made it a work about drudgery, about incuriosity. About, again, workaday despair. (143)
• He talks about her days, his days, the whole family's days, play out in a state of 'suspended animation'. I am surprised by the elegance of his phrasing. It makes me wonder if living under tragic circumstances inflects a person's sentences, irresistibly, with poetry. He explains how his daughter will never get better even though she will continue to grow. Until she is old; until she dies of oldness like most people. (144)
• Every time I take the train, I buy a coffee from the snack trolley and the trolley attendant asks me the same question: 'sugar or milk?' And I reply: 'no, neither, thanks.' And he or she then presents me with, alongside my coffee, a stirring stick. I probably wouldn't have noticed if it had happened only once, or if it was always the same attendant, but this is not so. Whoever it is, every single time, they make the same mistake. I've been gathering these sticks for seven years now. ... They are a project. I have not yet decided how to display them, but they are a conceptual art project about the way in which people don't listen, don't think. (153)
• The artist came across the wonky giraffe, identified his force, and placed him in an exhibition. The art was the appropriation. (160)

7 - frog

• Works about Ineffectuality, I test myself. There is a picture in my head. Of a man in a stream in a row boat. And he is trying to smooth the surface of the water with his oar, to level the ripples. I can't remember the name of the piece, or that artist. Maybe it wasn't even an artwork. Why must I automatically assume that every strange object is a sculpture, that every public display of unorthodox behaviour is an act of performance? / An uneven arrangement of timber planks on the verge of a dual carriageway: art. / The sound of oboes from a decommissioned trawler lilting along a quayside in the dead of night: art. / But what do ordinary people think these things are? Is their world more generally mysterious than mine because they are not so easily able to identify public sculpture? / I think: I can read into anything. I think: I can read into nothing at all. (167)
• We used to share the same bathwater, I think, and yet now, somehow, it has become awkward just to say goodbye. (169)
• The black garden makes me remember my last night in the city, Jess wobbling away between the street lamps on her bicycle. Those suburbs were old, their front gardens established. There were low trees, hedgerows, shrubbery, and though I cannot distinguish blossoms -- cherry from apple from plum -- I remember how blossom was everywhere that night, hovering over the walls and railings like immobile snow. Why hadn't all the tiny flowers gone to sleep? It was so late. Instead it garlanded the scene as Jess cycled away, as if it knew it was a special occasion. (170)
• How do the flowers know it's night-time? Why is the moon everywhere? (171)
• Tonight, a book open on my lap, and an episode of Dragons' Den. I half read and half watch until I am only pretending to read. ... I look back to my book, finger the pages. But who am I pretending for, when no one knows what I am doing at any stage of the day or night anyway? / I am pretending for myself. / I cannot bear to be the kind of person who simply watches television. (172-3)
• Works about Television, I test myself: William Anastasi, Free Will, 1968. A set on the floor in a corner of a gallery, a video camera sitting on top. The camera is filming the corner obscured byt he set, which is being broadcast directly onto the screen. It's a preposterous piece about the preposterousness of what can pass for art. But also, about the preposterousness of television. How it circumscribes our sightlines, restricting us to corners. How it feigns showing us real things, when it is in fact obscuring reality. / Is the title meant to remind us that we are free to look around, to look away? (173)
• But I work hard never to think about what I look like. / What I look like will not be left behind; only what I make. (179)
• I love that an idea can be so powerful it doesn't matter whether I've seen the artwork for real or not. (181)
• How I adored to draw as a child, a teen; all my life before I began to try and shape a career out of it. As soon as I started college, art became a pursuit I might succeed at, and so it followed that I might also fail, that failing was the easiest way. Drawing and making meant more to me than ever before, but I was no longer able to immerse myself in their processes as I once had. Their processes no longer made me solidly happy. (182)
• Works about Validation, I test myself: Jennifer Dalton, What Does an Artist Look Like? (Every Photograph of an Artist to Appear in The New Yorker, 1999-2001), 2002.
• And there's no going back -- now I'm closer to thirty than twenty -- condemned by formal education to rationalise, conceptualise, interpret. Not just think, but rethink. Not just look for meaning, but make meaning all by myself. Art is the only thing I am able for. And yet here I am. All day every day. Doing nothing. Feeling worse. (184)
• I try to remember if I wasn't ever able to play toe piano, or whether I have recently lost the ability, as with my ears. another small part of me which has seized up, because I neglected to practise. (185)
• In this morning's paper, a story about a burned-out car meticulously covered in Christmas wrapping paper and abandoned on a beach: art. / A pine forest in the midlands where several tiny houses with tiny timber doors and tiny panes of glass and tiny floral-patterned curtains have been found built into tree trunks: art. (185)
• Who are the people who decide what sings will say and where to put them? And how many times have I obeyed a sign without considering thes ing-makers, how they are fallible humans too, doing a job they are humanly bored by, making human mistakes? (186)
• The artist gathers the pollen himself. I learned this years later. Where it comes from matters to him, matters to the artwork. Hazelnut trees, wild flowers, pines, or perhaps, all of these mixed together. Collected bloom by bloom, plant by plant, season by season. (188)
• We hug, limply, order half-pints of lager and squabble over who will pay, as if we are our mothers. Finally we pay separately, and settle onto stools in the corner of the bar, as if we are our fathers instead. (191)
• Caitriona was the first person who made me consider the possibility that my dreams were not singular, not even unusual; that there were countless other people out there who wanted precisely the same as I did, with equal force, and they put equal effort into achieving it. And they stood equal chance. ... But I had not once considered that I might also be somebody else's better version of themselves. ... Maybe it would not be particularly helpful for her to learn that there are many much better versions even than me. That the world is rifting at the seams with Caitrionas and Frankies. They are jotting notes in cafés and making beautiful speeches and wearing summer scarves. (192)
• Sometimes things happen that give me cause to believe I no longer exist. Car park barriers which do not lift when I drive towards them, automatic doors which do not open automatically as I approach. Maybe that's all this is. (193)
• I know with unqualified certainty that I want to die. But I also know with equivalent certainty that I won't do anything about it. That I will only remain here and wait for death to indulge me. (198)

8 - hare

• My pipes are made of lead, he says, and so, every day, I am drinking it. But how can I not have noticed that I'm being poisoned? Because it will take years and years, the expert says, before all this lead I drink actually begins to harm me. It is building in my blood, but only very slowly. And so, of course, I did know this after all: that I am, slowly, being killed. (203)
• Did it do me any good, early in life, to believe so many things which were not true? Or did it damage me? Pouring a foundation of disappointment, of uncertainty. (206)
• In this country where the sun shines so infrequently, I find it strange that most reasonable people remain so fussy. That they leave with the arrival of the first cloud, thinking they'll return on a sunnier day which is unlikely to ever come. That they expect so much from life and will not compromise. (206)
• I close my eyes and wish I'd stayed there on the shore's edge in front of the wide openness. And dug all my holes into one, and given myself a pirate's burial. (209)
• What bothered me was all of the time he wasted by drumming, and all the time I wasted by listening to him drum, by taking pleasure in it, for pleasure is almost always a waste of time. (210)
• When I first arrived here, it was morning, and my grandmother's bungalow shimmered with healing potential. It wasn't until after the sun set on my first night that I noticed the signs of decrepitude, as if, in daylight, weathered objects are inexplicably repaired: fissures resealed, colours reconstituted. All afternoon I'd been distracted by the process and possibility of the move. It wasn't until my belongings had been put away that I'd looked -- really looked -- and registered: the mould on the weighing scales scoop, the chopping board, the table legs. The webs in the window frames so thick you could have called them hammocks and cradled kittens there. The stench of abandonment. (210)
• I need you at this moment, more than I ever did when you were alive, I implore my gone grandmother. If you come now I promise I won't ever ask again. And I remember that this is something I used to say to God, back when I thought there might still be a chance he existed. And my grandmother doesn't come, just like God didn't. (212)
• Sometimes, when I am not gazing at the grass stalks, I gaze at the dip in the garden step and contemplate all the footfalls it took to wear, and I find my grandmother in that dip. Or I gaze at the same spot in the sky: I wait for something to pass through it. (213)
• Like all the best games, it was pointless and difficult. / Like all the best games, it was about pretending to fly. (215)
• Our toys were sixteen or seventeen; only the very eldest were in their early twenties, because, apparently, I didn't envision anything of particular interest in life beyond twenty-five. And now I am a greater age than any of the toys were allowed to reach, older than I even cared to imagine as a child. (218)
• 'It's time to let this go,' she said. She meant: it's time to postpone -- if not entirely abandon -- my burden of unrealistic ambition. To start churning the intellect I have left into simply feeling better; to make this my highest goal. It's time to accept that I am average, and to stop making this acceptance of my averageness into a bereavement. (219)
• I try to focus on the nothings. The air -- all of this air I fought so hard to take in as a newborn and have spent every moment since completely ignoring. Now I notice the scuffing of the inside of my clothes against the outside of my skin. How can it be that I have worn clothes every day of my life and never noticed this sensation? It feels as if the labels at my hip and collar are scratting flesh away to bone, as if the elastic band of my pants is sawing a slit towards my organs. And now I notice the trembling. Not just my right leg, but everywhere. Very slight but irrepressible. Have I always trembled? I can't remember. Was I born breached and blue, and trembling? (220)
• In the morning, they are all still here; the under-appreciated nothings. Pulsing, bleating, blaring, swirling. Once in a doctor's waiting room I overheard two old women talking about the irritation of how, when they have their hearing aids switched up to full volume, it results in an unsettling din of white noise. Water hissing through pipes, mice twitching in their sleep, the whirr of light fixtures. Now I recognise what the old women were talking about, the deafening silence. / This morning, I see the lead in my glass tumbler. A slim, bright glint, a silverfish. I feel it collecting in my blood, papercutting the lining of my veins. (222)
• What is it about crying? As if my body believes that squeezing all its salt out might somehow quell the sadness. As if sadness is a parasite which suckles on sodium chloride.
• I stay up late and watch a foreign film on the Irish language channel. It is spoken in Hungarian, subtitled in Irish. I can't understand either, but I still have all the little gestures and noises and faces people make in order to express themselves; I still understand the film, enough. How prosaic words are, I realise, how insufficient. (224)

9 - hedgehog

• 'God is in everything,' the priest told us at mass when I was a child. And so I used to check in my pencil-case and coat pockets, under the bed, over the hedges, for God. (230)
• How is it that we are born able to swim, but as we grow and subsume a glut of conventional wisdom, we forget, and have to learn again? (238)
• That wave was the onset of consciousness. The moment it broke the moment at which I realised I was not indestructible, that the world was filled with forces separate to me, hostile to me, horrifyingly beyond my control. ... Innate flexibility fades; muscles seize up. How many more small injustices of adulthood are still to be discovered? (238)
• Works about Weightlessness, I test myself: Piero Manzoni, Artist's Breath, 1960. A series of inflated balloons fixed to wooden stands. And as if he somehow knew his breaths were numbered, Manzoni died young. (238-9)
• And yet, here I am. Perceiving everything that is wonderful to be proportionately difficult; everything that is possible an elaborate battle to achieve. My happy life was never enough for me. I always considered my time to be more precious than that of other people and almost every routine pursuit -- equitable employment, domestic chores, friendship -- unworthy of it. Now I see how this rebellion against ordinary happiness is the greatest vanity of them all. (239)
• I stare at the wax and tell myself: I will be good and grateful from now on. I will stop with all this dying. (244)
• Hedgehogs aren't supposed to die in summer. They have such little time already. Their whole year is only two seasons long, and so they have to squeeze everything they need to do into the warmish months. They aren't supposed to die in summer when they are at their most awake, when there's so much to attend to. And especially now, in August, when they've very nearly made it through to the end of another hedgehog year. They are supposed to die in winter, in their sleep. Winter is supposed to carry off the old and weakly hedgehogs. Peacefully, painlessly. / Now I know: for every whale which survives a stranding, there is a hedgehog that never makes it back to hibernation. (246)
• Works about Sailing Off, I test myself: Antti Laitinen, Bark Boat, 2010. The ark collected from the floor of a Finnish forest. The boat not a toy, but life-size. And then the artist climbed into the life-size bark boat, and sailed across the Baltic Sea. A childhood fantasy made true. (254)
• A children's clothes shop attached to an undertaker's and run by the undertaker's wife; as if being fitted for new shirts and skirts wasn't morbid enough already. I couldn't have felt more wretched if I was being measured for a coffin. (258)
• Works about Lower, Slower Vies, I test myself: Richard Long, A Line Made by Walking, 1967. A short, straight track worn by footsteps back and forth through an expanse of grass. Long doesn't like to interfere with the landscapes through which he walks, but sometimes he builds sculptures from materials supplied by chance. Then he leaves them behind to fall apart. He specialises in barely-there art. Pieces which take up as little space in the world as possible. And which do as little damage. (261)
• Standing in front of the bakery counter, I am studying a triangular bread-roll with sesame and sunflower seeds on top, grains of millet like bright pollen specks. Yes, these are the ones I like; the abstract expressionism of bread. I am not wheat-intolerant; I never was. And I like my salt sea, my pepper black and coarse, my honey pale and set, my lentils green and whole -- I cannot understand why anyone ever thought that splitting every individual one might make them more marketable. (268)

10 - badger

• Works about Comradeship, I test myself: Roman Ondák, Good Feelings in Good Times, 2003. Outside the Kölnischer Kunstverein in Cologne, the artist organised a queue. At the front stood people who understood that the queue was a sham, who were in on the sham queue. But soon, they were joined by other people, by a small crowd willing to queue without knowing what they were queueing for, who trusted absolutely in the uncontextualised conviction of total strangers, or perhaps, who simply craved the solidarity of temporarily standing in close proximity to other humans. (277)
• The presenter explains how the corncrake we can hear is a male who has flown all the way from Africa, looking for a mate. He stays up very late, listening. ... They are almost extinct, he explains. Because of the intensity of modern farming practices. Because at the same time of year the female lays her eggs, the farmer cuts his hay and the nests are destroyed. The male is calling, the presenter says, because he can't see through the long grass; because he doesn't know that there aren't any females left to hear. (278-9)
• This is something I was beginning to notice about every brilliant and sharp person I'd met while working in the gallery: there always came a point in the conversation at which something about them dulled and blunted, at which they became no more or less fascinating, really, than Jess or Jink or Jane or Dad; than my grandmother had been, and my mother is. It was during this particular conversation that I started to understand that everybody's pursuits are essentially useless, and that what I was trying to do with my life was probably perfectly useless too. (281)
• How magnanimous of my killed creatures, to simply disappear. (282)
• I could not bear to witness -- to remember -- my grandmother as a body, but not a being. (284)
• The artist set out a table, and on the table, a collection of objects. Items like soap and lipstick, bread and honey, a scalpel and a nail gun. Then she invited the audience to use them on her body however they wished, and stood. Motionless, compliant. As she was unclothed, caressed, clouted, cut. What was the artist trying, without speaking, to say? You can do what you want to my body; my body is not me. (284-5)
  • real talk, i looked up the art and holy shit it actually happened, that has got to be the most powerful art piece i've ever heard of....
• The road ahead is lined with strange structures. Some of them are definitely public sculptures, but with others, I'm not so sure. A billboard displaying torn and stapled paper fragments: art? Concrete steps up a grassy verge leading to nowhere: art? / I think: art is everywhere. I think: art is every inexplicable thing. (292)
• It was what made me feel so suddenly and inexplicably bad; the source from which the huge and crushing sorrow rose. Not the penguin in Encounters at the End of the World, the DVD I watched that evening, which struck the bottom of the deposit box with a hollow, rebarbative clonk when I returned it the following day. I have only wanted to believe it was the deranged penguin because this is a better reason for being inconsolable, a so-much-more interesting and complicated and quixotic thing to be disturbed by than the banal reality. Than attack, rape, murder. I have only wanted to believe it was the deranged penguin so I can consequently believe it is possible for me to be driven mad by concern for some creature other than myself. (295)
• Works about Trees, I test myself, the final test, I promise. Joseph Beuys, 7000 Oaks. The first planted in Kassel in 1982. The mission to plant seven thousand, each coupled with a basalt standing stone, four foot high. A symbolic beginning, predetermined to continue through time, across continents. And so it did, does. Italy, America, England, Ireland, Norway, Australia. After Beuys had stopped planting them for himself, after he died. / The oaks which grow. The stones which don't. / Art, and sadness, which last forever. (301)