The Hardened Part
A Project by Aaron Noble
Upstairs bedroom, 47 Clarion Alley, San Francisco, California
December 18, 1996

This is confirm my imagined participation in your retrospective on the 26th - rather, this is the act itself or at least the artifact, tricky to distinguish. The hardened part.

It's Sunday. At two minutes to noon I go into my room, careful not to look directly at the object. Viewing position is awkward. I end up kneeling on the bed but erect from the knees up, not resting on my haunches. L-shaped. My eye level is near the bottom of the painting. Breeze through the window.

I begin looking. Inevitably I think of Raegan Kelly and get stuck there a while. Then I think of trains, freight trains, then passenger trains in Europe, a dream film that's a composite of Shoah, Pierrot Le Fou and The State of Things then back even further to a state of solitary movie-going that preceded all this, and the word "promise" seems horribly poignant and seems to refer only to the past and only to places other than here.

I break the connection at 14 minutes, 40 seconds.