When I tell people I exercise for my art, as my art, they often react with poorly hidden disgust. It’s as if I’ve immediately become the embodiment of all things body negative, as if doing something that mundane and calling it art makes me a fraud, as if the data I’m collecting isn’t actually important or beautiful or significant. I once read about the person held for the longest amount of time in captivity in Iran, he was blonde and perhaps a journalist or activist of some kind. At the time of the interview he’d recently been released and was asked about his time in captivity. He told the journalist that he’d do a certain amount of set exercises every day, and I think it struck me so because the number was so ridiculously specific and un-round: 427 push-ups or something like that. It made me think that to device an exercise routine for oneself that is meant to be completed within the space of a cell, within the bounds of solitary confinement, is a very special thing to do.
There is very little I understand about the theory of relativity except for the fact that it makes time speed up when you are anxious about something, and that it makes family reunions feel very, very long. A friend once gave me a short novel in which the main character, a young woman, talks about doing something new every day. This, she says, expands our memory and makes it larger. Makes us remember more of the routine things that we do everyday, too. I want to see what my time looks like when I do the same every day, when these twenty minutes or so continuously make new copies of themselves: will I remember more? Less? I do not usually like to measure myself but I need routines and this is the most extreme and yet mild version I could think of.
A scientific study: one constant in a changing environment. When I say I am doing research and people ask for what and I say I just do the same exercises every single day, well, six days a week (to allow for one day of restitution) and they say okay what are you measuring and I say I just film myself and they say oh okay. They aren’t disgusted or opposed to me, just disappointed or blank in the way you are when you receive meaningless information in place of meaningful information and your brain simply stores it away as Unimportant - Uncategorized. I am sorry I have given you nothing although I do tell you, breathlessly because I want to mend things, want to mend what’s broken, that it’s about routines and my own limits and can I do this for the rest of my life? You still look at me sidewaysly.