The art of long silky threads.
Rooftop views in Pushkar, Rajasthan, India. January 2021.
A long silky thread is glorious in the afternoon sun across the sidewalk. It is finer than a shaft of sunlight, sunnier than the sun. People walk across it and just when I think it broke, I see it floating again, as if a new one was shot as soon as the last one was torn away.
Wikipedia says:
A dragline silk’s tensile strength is comparable to that of high-grade alloy steel (450−2000 MPa). The combination of strength and ductility gives dragline silks a very high toughness (or, work to fracture), which equals that of commercial polyaramid (aromatic nylon) filaments, which themselves are benchmarks of modern polymer fibre technology.
People who walk across it all have varying degrees of blindness that is not physical. They walk across this lustrous work of art and step on it, like critics. And the artist continuously remakes the art. No one knows why.
It’s never easy being an artist, it cannot be: this is a precondition. Your talents are nothing. You must persevere every day so that what you create does not come to an end without ever beginning. For there is no beginning in art, only an end. Art or no art.