This Saturday, June 28, the gallery is holding a Closing Reception for Prima Jalichandra-Sakuntabhai, 174 / Neung Jed Si - A Short History of Thailand. The Reception is 4pm - 7pm. The gallery is also open during regular hours on Saturday, starting at Noon. (Prima has already left Los Angeles, but we will celebrate in their absence--which only seems all the more fitting for this work as it circulates through generations of separated lovers and distanced connections.) _ _ << On the other side of the world, my father ruminates on the origins of love, amongst ruins of Ancient Greece. The Mediterranean glimmers behind him. If he were to regain what he has lost, he must undertake a journey to the Underworld. The last image of her he has, is when she turned her glance back towards him, with a large smile on her face. A Eurydice taunting her Orpheus. “Aidōs (‘shamefastedness’) is a sort of voltage of decorum discharged between two people approaching one another for the crisis of human contact.... The proverbial residence of aidōs upon sensitive eyelids is a way of saying that aidōs exploits the power of the glance by withholding it…” No one survives the direct eye contact with love, and so, Love flees Blinded by grief, he is “an amnesiac traveler, a wanderer who desires to fathom and abide the multi-dimensional depths of oneself and the world. In this sense, truth, as the wisdom of the path, is the same as being, as traveling upon the path, of remembering the truth of being from out of a fog of oblivion, the intoxication of the waters of Lethe. Remembrance is drinking from the river of Mnemosyne. And yet, it is strangely the fog of forgetfulness, which clears a space for novel disclosures, embodiments, for an expansion of wisdom arising amid an attempt to become the All.” >> …. Immediately before the beginning to say the words above, the narration says: “To protect their intimacy, I will not transcribe the contents of the letter. Instead, I will interpret them with other stories.” Immediately, any gaze except for any other’s is averted to a displaced place of a mythological origin: before, away, under, elsewhere.... Outside (but right here in front of me.) Before I start looking, I look away. My eyelids lower, my head tilts downward, my faces flush. αἰδοῦμαι ὀφθῆναι, “I am ashamed to be seen.” αἰδοῦμαι ὁρᾶν, “I am ashamed to see” αἰδώς, the contents of these letters are interpreted with other stories, aidōs, ‘shamefastedness.’ To protect their intimacy. To save (them from) their isolation. After all, “[i]sn’t the letter the very symbol of loneliness? The Writer. Alone at his writing desk. The farewell letter. The love letter. The yellow envelope one sticks down and entrusts to its fate. Letters aren't written to relieve loneliness, but to seal it” (Roland Barthes, cited in 174 / Neung Jed Si – A Short History of Thailand). Aidōs, the bittersweet. Rendered from these split origins—rivers, letters, lovers—a sym/bol is something, someone, somewhere split in half (in order to be put back together); something that could only be identified once it was re-joined and read-together with its lost part. The sign, plucked from the division of the halved signifier, only displays the significance (the meaning) of some signified once the object’s splits are coupled and yields a legible token—as an identifiable signal. The indistinction or illegibility caused by the separation forms a private language spoken through and by the object itself (not the lovers): hidden on the body and kept as a secret, recognizable only by another who also carries the (part of the) symbol. As “a species of a symbol,” a metaphor takes-place between the topological and the tropological—along the dis/connections of a place as a position and a place as an image or a motif. This is most evident when something like a symbol articulates a kind of geographical correspondence between amorphous land and mapped, named, territory. In other words, ‘symbol’ starts acting symbolic once it becomes unstable as an allegory, a re-placement, (of itself): once the distanced parts can be substituted and swapped, and each time appear different despite their repetitions. For example, the verb συμβάλλω (symballō), related to συμβολή, appears in Herodotus' works to describe the act of comparing or inferring, often in geographical contexts. Herodotus uses συμβάλλω when comparing the Nile's delta to those of other rivers, highlighting a metaphorical "bringing together" of ideas or observations. There, Herodotus uses variations of sym- and -bol to designate material as well as conceptual ‘confluences’ or transfers. So, then, a lover is a species of a symbol? “A metaphor is a species of a symbol. So is a lover.” And so is a river. (After all, a river is recursive.) Or maybe each of these is a species of a river? But a river is also a literal, a littoral feature, trait, or object that is defined by material limits and physical movement. So maybe each of these words is a species of a trait, an object, a material, a body. So, maybe, a symbol is a species of a lover. After all, they fall in love before they mark it. Before they divide themselves like a river divides lands’ ends exactly where they are coupled…. Where the writhing of a body is indistinguishable from the writing of a letter from the Αἰδώς (Aidōs), the “shamefastedness,” of staring at the surface of a river (as if it shows me somewhere else, someone else). (Finisterre.) Is a symbol a species of a letter? Is a letter a species of a lover? Or, is a Letter, these letters, a species of a river—something that passes between lands’ ends (midstream)? __ {The passage cited at the beginning of this text is a transcribed excerpt of audio: narration by Prima Jalichandra-Sakuntabhai; sound composition “Seine / San Saep / Voice of Water” (2025) by Louis Fontenot, with vocalists Ilse Griffin, Michael Llyod and Molly O’Connor. See: Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet. Princeton University Press, 1986; James Lutche, Pythagoras and the Doctrine of Transmigration: Wandering Souls. Bloomsbury 2009. For the citations and amplifications referenced in the following fragments (written by z.b.) see also, Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983); Hollmann, Alexander. 2011. The Master of Signs: Signs and the Interpretation of Signs in Herodotus' Histories. Hellenic Studies Series 48. Washington, DC: The Center for Hellenic Studies.} ____ Image: Installation view/ Evening. Positioned at gallery-center. Oriented diagonally toward “Rivers” (2025) “My Father Ruminates on the Origin of Love” (2025). A ruin’s dorsal, the ‘behind’ of “Pomped Portal” (2025) stuccoed facade is visible on my left, while fragments of ruins are scattered throughout the central space of this middled place. A blue light waters the central way, while a yellow light coyly flushes the fresco on the wall with its sunny gleam, warming the coral-colored ruin on the periphery.