At least once a week something happens to save my life.  Usually it has something to do with some scientific discovery or biotech breakthrough that has managed to save, preserve or forestall further damage to some part of the biosphere.  Or some reminder that nature might bounce—or more likely strike—back against all the human pollution, destruction, toxicity, etc.  Sometimes it’s a musical performance that simply destroys me—in a good way.  Sometimes it’s just some fantastically charming dog or cat I happen to fall in love with and I’m reminded that as long as there are such creatures around to help civilize my fellow humans, the world has a chance of remaining a bearable place.

But sometimes it’s just a picture.  I look at a lot of pictures as some of you may have heard.  Movies, television, photography, advertising, design, photo stills from this or that, and oh yeah—fine art.  Paintings, drawings, photos too; pictorial—or abstract—art in various other media.  Forget about the pictorial or the abstract—sometimes you can’t even define what exactly it is.  (Sometimes that’s the best kind of work.  And then sometimes it’s just the most ridiculous bullshit you can’t even believe that you left your apartment to look at.)

And then it happens.  It’s standing (or hanging) right in front of you.  And you just go ohmygoddessthisisitsomebodyjustsolvedtheproblemofhowdoweexist—howdowegoonisthereanypointtoit.  And you howl or laugh or cry or babble something insane or all of the above and just . . . wow.  Thank you for that.  And then move on to the next thing.

Last week was a pretty good week for such moments—or something approaching a state of elation if not perfect illumination.  There was Sean Scully being Sean Scully and all of us thoroughly enjoying that.  There was Dike Blair.  There was Vivian Suter—and no one ever brought anything like that back from Boring—I mean Burning Man.  There was Steve McQueen, whose Sunshine State managed to bring a very dark kind of hope to the land of Sunshine Noir.  (Not to be confused with that mis-nicknamed “Sunshine” State that should now be re-nicknamed the “Skin Cancer State of Emergency” State.)

And then I was suddenly confronted by “Hand Holding Scribble” in Karl Haendel’s Daily Act of Sustained Empathy, his show of large scale drawings in pencil and ink on paper that opened Saturday afternoon at Vielmetter Los Angeles, and it was as if a mystery of the universe was unfolding before me.  First of all, it is a Karl Haendel Scribble—which should be a trademarked thing no different from a Slinky or a Spirograph or a Frisbee or Silly Putty or a Gumby.  (Wait a minute, maybe Gumby is something else.  And then what do we do about Pokey?)  A Karl Haendel Scribble has its own wave or fluid dynamic, geometry, maybe even logic; and this one was of a complexity that took it onto a different plane (okay I’m not talking about the paper), a different sphere or domain, even a different universe.  The universe.  It’s like that piece of star logic, insight, harmony, that you flash on in the course of some bit of problem-solving sitting at your desk or at your job staring at some spreadsheet spelling out your (or someone’s) demise, or just walking into the drug or liquor store thinking the bottle you’re buying is too expensive and should you buy a lottery ticket, too, or vacuuming under the couch and discovering some dead cockroach that looks as if it was around when Cleopatra was crossing the Nile or the Red Sea or the Mediterranean and thinking she’d rather be sitting at home with a hieroglyphic romance.  You dive for a notebook and just start writing notes as fast as you can or maybe you try to hold it in your head until you get back to your apartment.  But then someone comes up to you and asks you what happened to the storyboard, script notes, timeline, flow chart, subpoena, draft judgment, stock quotes, futures contracts that were supposed to be on their desk an hour ago.  Or you’re finally home but here comes the cat and you’re suddenly hungry and what’s in the fridge and oh yeah you have to pee.

Well so there it was and I could just stand there rolling it around in my eyes and head (it was already in someone else’s hand) and it was sort of like watching three or four or even five virtual roulette wheels rolling around or just hovering above someone’s hand, the bouncing ball itself tracing micro-cycloids or roulettes above the spinning wheel.  “Faites vos jeux, mesdames et messieurs.”  I might be in ‘Jackie’s head’ (the character Jeanne Moreau plays in La Baie des Anges)!  Maybe not quite that far gone.  (Oh who am I kidding?)  Or somewhere along the edge of one (or all) of Loie Fuller’s skirts or capes or scarves swirling in every conceivable direction as she danced furiously across a stage.  Or Tonya Harding putting a few Simone Biles leap-into-the-void gymnastic tricks into her next triple axel.  Or the arcs and crazy-eight cross-court dashes Roger Federer or Serena Williams might have to make to lock down the next point.  Or the trace of Leonard Bernstein’s baton conducting a Shostakovich symphony or Strauss tone poem.  Or Gödel’s generalized continuum hypothesis (or something like that), or (getting a bit darker now) his “Loophole.”

And back to the moment.  You’ve barely moved.  Standing stock still, watching this cat’s cradle blow up and out and swirl over this open, flexed, threading, slightly grasping human hand.  Yes I see the place where the line stops (or is it just beginning?), but you can’t prove that and what about Gödel’s incompleteness theorem?  Just.  Breathe.  Take in the rest of the show.

I go home to my apartment.  At the Hôtel de Paris in Monte Carlo.  The waves of the Mediterranean dazzle like a magic carpet of sapphires in the sunset.  ‘Vous ne devez jamais laisser passer la chance—jamais!’