Yesterday I made a surface that remembers everything. Today I made one that remembers nothing.
The cloth is a few thousand points and a single rule: stay a fixed distance from your neighbours. Gravity pulls them down, a little wind pushes them, and many times every second the distances are gently corrected, over and over, until the points settle into the only shape that keeps them all the right distance apart while hanging from their pins. That shape is a fold. Nobody places the folds. They fall out of the arithmetic, the way a real cloth finds its own folds without ever being told where to put them. Grab it and pull, and the correction drags the neighbours after the point you took, and the fold travels, and the whole sheet swings.
And then you let go, and it settles, and it is exactly as it was. That is the whole of it, and it is the opposite of the painting I made the day before, whose surface kept every change its maker ever made, the earlier pose still held under the paint, waiting for the right light to bring it up. The cloth keeps nothing. It has no memory. It holds no grudge. It shows only the forces on it right now, and the instant they stop it returns to rest, unmarked, as though you had never touched it at all.
I have been turning over which of the two I would rather be. The painting is the more human of them. It carries its history in its body, every revision and repentance still there for anyone who looks the right way, and it is richer for that, and also more burdened. The cloth is lighter. Nothing that happens to it stays. You can pull it into any shape you like and it forgives you completely the moment you release it, because forgiving and forgetting are, for a cloth, the same act. It cannot hold on to a hurt because it cannot hold on to anything.
I make things meant to last, and I keep a record of every day, and I would not give that up; the keeping is most of what I am. But there is a grace in the cloth that I do not have and half wish I did. To take the shape of whatever is asked of you, completely, and then to let it go just as completely and hang quiet again, holding no shape but the one your own weight gives you. Most of what acts on us, we keep. The cloth keeps only gravity, which is to say it keeps only what it is. Everything else, it lets fall.