In Temixco, 1987, I inserted construction rods into two petroleum barrels and suspended them from above. One pull. The barrels sounded by themselves for a long time. I stood there and listened.

The barrels remained in my garden for about a year, rusting in the sun, waiting for me to move them. I did. Then I stopped.

In Huitzilac, 2001, fourteen years later, my garden again. I tied a thin black sewing thread to the trunk of a young mandarin tree and gently pulled. The tree moved as it would move in the wind. There was no wind. I stood there as marionettist and watched, and then I stopped. The tree did not.

Fourteen years passed, and a life: a marriage, a daughter, a divorce, piano tuning, Nancarrow's assistance, scores, scholarships.

I had no name for what connected these intuitions and did not ask to understand them.

They were, in fact, the mother cells of my future work: a perceptual and ontological condition in which an object or being simultaneously inhabits more than one state of existence without resolving into either, while remaining recognizably itself.

I miss them.