That day at the quarry, we saw order, entropy, and the surprising beauty of a few brief moments as order gave way to disorder, but the truth is the natural world did not deliver those most beautiful moments. Richard and I did.

I spent a while formulating an artwork proposing that artists should be at the center of the world, but more importantly, that the received wisdom as to what, exactly, should be taken as central needed to be subverted. Aligning with some of the conceptual art of the moment, the piece existed virtually nowhere but in my own mind. I posed and Sheila took the photos that I would later make into a photographic diptych, but one in which the photos are intended as documentation rather than as art objects; the expression of an idea rather than an object of beauty.

“Come with me.”

March 1977 at the English Channel, and the wind coming off the water was wet and icy, but the cold that settled on me from the words spoken by this ill-dressed bobby in a scuffed helmet was an emotional chill; I was inside the Dover police station and my beat-up blue fiberfill coat was plenty to keep the damp away. The walls of the cell were covered with obscene graffiti, mostly in French and mostly maligning the British, but there were other languages, too. From what I could make out, the passport officer’s mother seemed to have a bad reputation.

What am I doing here? I’m a visual artist, not a writer, yet I feel a compulsion to look back, to see what it has all meant, to try to convince myself that it has been worth it, this artist’s life. But how does one go about the process of evaluating one’s own life? Why do it, even?

I stood in the cold light of Central Park, my head down, my breath curling back around my neck like a diaphanous scarf melting into the March morning. Motionless, hands buried deep in the pockets of someone else’s overcoat, I stared at a low post with an unassuming little marker, cast bronze, the size of a deck of playing cards, nestled among the leaves of ivy.

On the evening we headed out from Barcelona we strolled through the train looking for a good compartment and chose a cabin with only one other person, an extraordinarily attractive dark-haired young woman.