Walks with Lucy
fall 2008 | book | 4" x 3.5"

The book Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman is a collection of imagined dreams--each night a young Albert Einstein dreams of different worlds, all with a different systems of time. One dream depicts a world in which there are two types of time: mechanical and body. When I read this story I saw a parallel to a personal narrative of my own. The characters: my dog Lucy and myself. I rely on my trusty alarm clock to rouse me from sleep each morning. I rush everywhere, racing against the digital numbers strapped to my wrist. Meanwhile, Lucy is content to spend her time as she pleases, as her mood and desire dictate.

I enjoy this shared time, but often my priority is to get from point A back to point A as quickly as possible. When I walk alone, I take the direct route—to quote Einstein’s Dreams: precisely by the clock. But Lucy barrels down the apartment stairs and races outside. And then, without warning, she pauses. Wherever her senses desire an extended moment she stops. And then starts again. This is the story of our walks—the intersection of mechanical time and body time. Two philosophies literally tethered by a striped canvas leash.

The inspiration for the final form of this book comes from Lucy herself. Like a passage from Einstein’s Dreams: she “squirms and wriggles like a bluefish in a bay,” she makes up her mind as she goes along. The tension between the two perceptions of time is manifested through the interaction between the two strings, the two paths, alternating the control of the shared duration. Walks With Lucy expresses the competitive relationship between our two time systems in a single narrative object, and employing abstraction and physical material to satisfy both fact and feeling.