(as in if)
by Else
In Albany, there is a remarkable place called the Empire State Plaza. It is an enormous white marble elephant, a colossal vanity project by former governor Rockefeller.
It is a place which, in true 1960s fashion, takes every effort to avoid showing meaning. Every building is stark and plain. There are dozens of works of art, inside and out, and, with the exception of a big “I ❤️ NY” sign and a well-hidden landscape of the plaza itself, every last piece is abstract. The artworks express their color or form or material, but never meaning.
It is so much artistic and architectural white noise, which makes it a perfect place to hunt Giraffes. Whatever meaning you find looking at the place is almost certain to be a reflection of yourself more than the artist. Ellsworth Kelly’s “Yellow Blue” has nothing to do with Ukraine, what makes me think it does? The untitled Mark Rothko is nothing but some blue-greens, so why do I see a portal to the Nether, and what spirit lies beyond in the reflection in the glass of Franz Kline’s “Charcoal Black and Tan”? Given the title, Claes Oldenburg’s “Geometric Mouse, Variation I” may intentionally be Mickey, but why are his eyes on chains, and why do I feel an urge to move them?
A while back, a friend of mine wrote a Tumblr bot. The bot would periodically take a random picture from Wikimedia Commons, run it through Microsoft’s image recognition system, and post the result. The result was often humorously wrong.
One of the things it often hallucinated was giraffes. The images it saw giraffes in usually had some strong vertical element, but there was something else at play, too. People think giraffes are cool and take lots of pictures of them, therefore the dataset Microsoft trained its recognition off of had lots of giraffes, therefore the system was primed to see giraffes in everything.
Computer systems do this a lot. Biases in input become biases in output. Humans do it too. Sometimes it’s on purpose; cops are taught to look for threats, and they find them. Sometimes it’s by accident, like my associations on the Plaza. Sometimes it’s traumatic; something that was there when it happened becomes associated to the memory.
In my mind, there are things that bring out the Giraffes. Trauma triggers are the most straightforward and understood. But they can also be found in the ambiguous. Smell, the vaguest of senses, seems to be an especially productive breeding ground for Giraffes. I hear them in the patter of a gentle rain, the answers blowin’ in the wind. I see them in the stars, but also beneath the stars, in the unbelievable brightness of a new moon.
Giraffes can be unsettling. They reveal what is on my mind, even (or perhaps especially) if it’s something I am trying to ignore. They are hard to communicate to others, especially without a shared Tamarian for their origins. But they are only unsettling because I am unsettled. A trap I sometimes fall into is becoming unsettled merely by seeing them, making them all the more unsettling. But with this metaphor, I rationalize them into something neutral, or even positive! Isn’t it beautiful to find meaning in the world? I say so, at least so long as the world is one of beauty.
On a recent visit to the plaza, I found a corner I previously hadn’t explored, under the Corning Tower (where the aforementioned Rothko can be found). As I approached Helen Frankenthaler’s “Capri” with no foreknowledge, I saw Jesus’s tomb. A sign next to the painting told me it, and several others, had been vandalized in 1985. When I got home I looked up the incident, and found the vandal was trying to express that Reagan was the antichrist. I don’t condone the destruction, but can I see where he got that Giraffe? Personally, if I try to calculate the number of the Beast, the result I get is negative two.
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