The In-Between

Everybody loves an arrival. Somebody loses the weight, and after twelve weeks of work there is a photograph, and everyone says congratulations. Somebody stops drinking and gets the one-year chip. Somebody finishes the degree, the house, the film. People cheer for arrivals. Nobody cheers for the middle. When you rearrange a life across continents, it doesn’t fit into twelve weeks. It takes six months, a year, two, and nobody tells you where the start was or where the finish will be. The middle is boxes you don’t unpack because you’ll only pack them again. A rented room that isn’t yours. Your things somewhere else, nothing familiar to put your hand on in the dark. New noises at night that you haven’t learned yet, and that keep you awake until you do. It is irritation without a target. It is waking up and asking whether the plan was ever any good, whether you are too old for it, whether the money holds.

The middle has no markers. You never know whether you are at the high or the low. You don’t know the place was good until you live in a worse one. You don’t know what a paycheck was until the month it doesn’t come. You don’t know a friend lived around the corner until you are in a city where you know nobody. The days don’t label themselves while they happen. By the time you could call something an arrival, you have rearranged everything a hundred times over, and you are already living in it. Nobody rings a bell. People say congratulations, and they mean it, and they have no idea what it cost. That is the strange thing about an arrival. You paid for it in the middle.

Some of what you pay isn’t money or sleep. It’s people. Your kids live on one continent. Your parents live on another. Some of your friends are here and some are over there, and every phone call crosses a time zone. So where is home? Where is the center, the main thing, the fixed point everything else turns around? Friends have stopped guessing. When they call, the first question is where I am this time. I’ve started saying I’m a citizen of the world, and I mean it. If a place makes you happy, stay. But if you’re a wanderer, it’s all right to belong to the world instead of one house, one city, one continent. Every week is a balance between the people you love and the hours you have. Who you spend time with. Who you give your time to. Who you stop giving it to. You can pack a room into boxes in an afternoon. You can’t pack that. It stays open, and you live inside it, and you keep asking what the north star of a life like that is supposed to be.

As an artist, I am in the middle again. I have been here before. I just didn’t know it at the time. In 2019 I drove to Murnau am Staffelsee because I wanted to stand where Franz Marc painted his blue horses. That was the whole plan. Then Vienna for Klimt, Bleiburg in Carinthia for Kiki Kogelnik, and in 2020 New York, to look at the Woman in Gold. I wasn’t building anything. I was looking, and the looking turned into paintings, and the paintings turned into a book I never set out to make. Years of in-between before any of it had a name. Nobody handed me a map. I only knew which way to walk.

It has been a while since the last entry. There was no signal on the ship, so when I got back from Svalbard I wrote the whole voyage down and put out a new entry every three to five days. Then I went quiet. Not because there was nothing to say. Coming back takes longer than going. You sort the footage, you sort yourself, you do the work nobody sees. I painted less than I wanted to. I am learning that this is part of it too, and I am not good at it yet.

The name those paintings carried is retiring. RMK is done, and I am closing it on purpose. The book is still there as a digital edition, if you haven’t read it yet. A handful of the paintings are still here in the Bay Area, framed, for now. Eventually they get rolled into tubes. RMK retires. I don’t.

What comes next has a name a lot of people will know. My new project is called Nordstern. North Star, in German. Sailors steered by it because it stayed put while everything else in the sky turned. It never told them where they would land. Only which way was north.

Svalbard told me which way. On the twelfth day, in Fuglefjorden, fog down on the tops and the water like glass, I watched a wall of ice come apart for four and a half hours. Thunder the whole time. It took me weeks to find words for it, and when they came, on a walk with nothing in front of me, they were these: I saw the end of the movie. Something in me changed its order of business after that. Not only what I want to make. What I think deserves the time. Back in Entry 031 I wrote about Game of Thrones, eight seasons of the great houses fighting over a chair while the Night King came down from the north. We are still living in that show. The wars, the bickering, the lines we draw between races and genders and religions, fed by tech bros, by social media built to keep us angry, by news cycles that make their money playing us against each other. And behind all of it, something that doesn’t care who wins the argument. Not a king made of ice. The ice leaving. Believe in it or don’t, it is coming for all of us, in whatever shape it picks. Summers too hot to sleep through. Water in the streets. Storms that used to come once in a lifetime, coming every year. In that fjord I saw the power of it, the sadness, and a beauty you can’t think about for long before your eyes go. That is why the North gets all of my attention now. It is the last stand.

Nordstern will be a logbook of the North in paint, photographs and film. Svalbard, Iceland, the Nordic countries, wherever north leads. The paintings will work the other way around from before: one original in oil, then archival prints, so a piece of it doesn’t have to cost what an original does. The site is live now at nordstern.art, and this blog has moved there with it.

Ghosts of the Ice isn’t finished. The frames are still being built, and I’m trying smaller ones, because the big ones are hard to build and harder to travel with. The pigment does not give itself up easily. I may end up with a prototype I carry from room to room for years. I may not. I don’t know yet.

This month there are two talks. On November 4 I gave the first one, Creating a More Resilient Art Business, at the Marin Small Business Development Center, and it turned into a good conversation. On November 16 I’m at Oberlin College and Conservatory in Ohio with a talk called The Long Way Around, which is the only way I’ve ever gone anywhere. It’s about the unconventional road I took as a creative and an artist.

Then three residencies, confirmed. The Spitsbergen Artists Center in Longyearbyen, back in the place I left in July, in a season I haven’t seen. Hollufgård, workshops for art and craft at the edge of Odense. And Brechts Hus in Svendborg, the house where Bertolt Brecht lived in exile. I’ll work on the documentaries and sketch. What comes out of it, I can’t tell you. Murnau didn’t tell me it would be a book either.

Until then it’s the quiet part. Planning, sketching, finishing the site, an outline for the documentary. Nothing gets rushed. There is a German word for this stretch, spannend. It means exciting, and it means suspenseful, and here it means both.

So this is the in-between. A direction, a few first steps, some boxes I haven’t opened. The shape won’t wait for me to arrive anyway. It forms while I’m in the middle of it. A workshop in Odense, the water below a house in Svendborg, the smell of a place before I know its name, someone at the next table working in a medium I’ve never touched, an artist I’ve never heard of who solved my problem long before I had it. I’ll take all of it. Everything comes from everything. Nobody cheers for this part, and that’s all right. By the time there is something to cheer for, I’ll already be standing inside it, and I’ll know what it cost me.