I don’t want to paint anymore.

I want to go to a big gallery or a museum. It doesn’t even need a roof anymore—I would go to a courtyard at this point.

Not a nice one, necessarily; it can have one end open to a field of that grass that precedes that kind of boring line of trees that screens an exurban stretch of one-car-per-three-minutes interstate.

It can have the interstate, even, if it’s just not too many cars too often.

I just need weather warm enough that I don’t have to move around to keep warm. It can be gray, I’m alright with that and even alright with the other three sides of the courtyard having institutional baked-brick facades, like a junior high.

I won’t need a bench and I don’t even mind the courtyard having other visitors, as long as they didn’t ask why I was laying on my back in my fall coat on concrete flagstones that have that awful sesame-candy texture and the big gaps between. Just as long as they walked at a respectful distance and assumed I was eccentric. It would be nice if there weren’t ants.

I’m okay with the courtyard having one of those metal sculptures, like the frame inside a globe finished wrong or not finished, with some of the welds sanded down into silver all scrabbly. Where just by looking at the texture of the steel you can hear the iron squawk of someone installing it who doesn’t care.

I’d also let there be one of those late-Surrealist things that’s like a little over man-height with a man-face implied or half-carved at the top like a humorless chess piece, with those lidded deathmask-eyes.

Even one of those mosaics where everyone looks like earthenware and has robes—yes I am saying I would even look at Byzantine art at this point.

I don’t want to be presumptuous, in these desperate days, where push and shove have come together. When people are dying. When all-else did fail.

But… if I am allowed requests:

Something all-yellow would be nice. Like a nice Yayoi-Kusama-yellow. To put that cartoon-light up against the paleness of the real sun and sunlight. A lemony-candy-colored thing to see would be nice. If you could.

A St. George painting from the Middle Ages or northern Renaissance, with a real slippery-looking dragon, darker and more detailed than the rest of the picture. I like to look at St. George’s face as he slays it, and contemplate his expression. I’ve always liked that. Princess optional.

Something very mechanical, where I can see the little parts. They don’t have to move.

Something involving lots of details or angles from which to view it—where you have to look at it for a long time to feel sure you took it all in.

If possible I would like to avoid anything that looked or felt chalky or featured a newspaper photo with some clear or blurry newsprint text. I think each newspapery or chalky thing would count as an anti-thing which needed a new extra good thing to counterbalance it.

But I’m not entirely sure, at this point, that I’d need to see anything good there at all. Just: a lot. Or, okay, even, just five things. Five things in a bad courtyard would be okay.

I just want to lie there, somewhere, listening to the sky noise in a forgettable mid-day (maybe hear the overhead crackle of a passenger jet once in a while), someplace that might tolerably be described as “far away” from familiar places, feeling my nerves un-knot and open out into awareness of the knowledge that I am surrounded by persistent, physical human endeavors, undertaken by other, now-absent lone consciousnesses who had the intent of inventing for the world something not broadcasting 24-7 that I needed them or they needed me.

I wouldn’t need more than half an hour, I don’t think. Just to bathe in the luxury of being not-quite-alone but still not messaged-at.

I’m afraid liking art is a little selfish: to want to be in the presence of the content of the human without the pressing need and mutual obligation the presence of the real human must imply. Just for a bit. It’s been so long.

Just give me the minimum. A cafeteria roll, an overpriced flask of vitamin water, some other distant and ostensible art lover with a leather bracelet going “Hmm!” and nodding at their partner or spouse. A guard or dealer who can only look as if they are stoically suppressing physical pain at the sight of having to allow non-collectors near the work. A bored desk assistant in a custom-built pressure-treated wood cubicle whose surveilling head conceals plans about after-work drinking, lazily generous takes on this month’s Things, or both.

Just one more time before I die I want to just be near something that was arguably trying, near objects unnecessary and at least semi-mysterious.