A Place I Once Stood

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Listening Forest, "Pulse Forest", 2022, Bentonville Arkansas / United States. Photo by Emily Riegel.

Looking out from the top floor windows of the hospital perched at a hilltop, the 180-degree view of the city around and below, feeling like a watcher over something still and resting. Not quite knowing what it might feel like to be God, but also feeling like something separate from the humanity below.

Thinking this, while looking out those windows, one fragile human believing in the possibility of helping other fragile humans in the beds in the rooms of this same building, can only happen in that strange space of darkness sometime in the haunting hour before a hint of light appears to the east. Can only happen when the white coat has been optimistically placed on the hook on the back of the call room door, and with it the weight of the stuffed pockets, heavy with cold metal instruments and tattered papers and dried out pens. The physical sensation of lightness allowing a deeper breath and the chance for the mind to wander.

Staring down, feeling the vulnerability of all the people out there. All the people asleep in their beds, next to someone, or alone. The mothers and the fathers, the children and the babies, the idea that humanity chooses a time to make a treaty with the world around it, to trust that they will be safe and the threats of the world will pause until the morning.

Watching this from a hospital, a building full of people desperately wishing for sleep and being denied it by every noise from the hallway, every beep from a monitors, every ache and pain and drench of fever. A building full of people unaware of the depth of their unconsciousness, sunk into a state they cannot pull up from, people around them begging for eyes to open, for a squeeze of a hand, for a much-craved sign of being, still, there. A building where within one moment or another a life is beginning, and a life is ending.

Seeing the occasional car making its way along the highway in the distance, the traffic lights on the city streets just below changing for no one. Green. Yellow. Red. An arrow that no one will yield to. Controlling non-existent traffic, beckoning the pedestrians now asleep in their beds, to cross an abandoned street. The reminders of how the world keeps going, automated and unaffected by whether or not a human is there, needing it, waiting for it. The systems created to function without the creator’s involvement. The way the heart beats or breath is drawn whether asked to or not. The way the heart stops beating or the breath fails to draw even when begged not to.

Wondering, looking out from those windows, if it even matters. Does it matter if that call is returned?

Does it matter if the lab value is noticed and change to fluids or electrolytes or antibiotics ordered.

Does it matter if the delivery is attended and the baby immediately wrapped in blankets and dried off and assessed for vitality and the time on the clock called out to assign a time of birth, a moment to declare that a life began.

Does it matter if the flat line is noticed and a stethoscope placed on the still chest, the presumed silence of the heart verified and the time on the clock called out to assign a time of death, a moment to declare a life ended.

Won’t it all go on anyway, for the most part, sleeping and the waking, the living and the surviving. The existing. The dying.

That is, though, the audacity of this building, this and every hospital. The reason for existence – to defy the hand of god. Or to be an instrument of it. On any given day or night at any given moment the answer could be either, or both.

This particular hospital, its architecture itself showing an audacity to defy as it dares to perch atop a hillside, an impossible amount of glass rising hundreds of feet higher. From a distance, almost invisible with reflections of sky and clouds. The shell of glass a taunt at the acts of god that form from those skies and those clouds – a glass tower built in tornado alley. Disregarding the threat of wind and assuming its strength against it.

Is there anything more indicative of human conceit. Anything more of a dare to a higher power that might be merciful, but throughout these tornado and flood water threatened places, is often seen as a vengeful, temperamental being looking for an excuse to wipe us all out. A god called on to justify human cruelty toward the most vulnerable. Whose mercy is said to be reserved only for those who earn it, not for the least among mankind. And here we have the most vulnerable in this glass house, unable to earn or beg for mercy.

Standing on this brink of darkness before daylight, six storeys and a daunting hill above the twinkling lights and behind the glass that silences it all-

Doubting the calling. Doubting the skill and the knowledge and the training. Doubting the hours sacrificed in a kind of worship of the theories and the research and the teaching. Doubting the reasons and the effort and the purpose. Doubting the point of the sleepless nights and the anxious days. Doubting the courage to assume any power in the face of the inevitable dark night tugging at every corner and every life.

Until.

Jumping at the sound of the beep from the pager resting on the hip, the vibration of it on the hip bone, these thoughts diminish. A call must be returned, a question must be answered, a plan must be derived. The white coat is lifted from the hook and with it the instruments of defiance against or tools of god’s plan, the weight of not being sure which they are or if we can ever know, and deciding to set aside any doubts as soon as the darkness of the call room is left and the brightness of the hallway, the beeping of the monitors, the humming of the machines of life continuing on, an audacity in the darkness of the sleeping world.

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About the photograph:

The photo of “Pulse Forest,” an installation by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, was taken in October 2022. This installation was part of a ;arger exhibit at Crystal Bridges in Bentonville, Arkansas called Listening Forest described as an “immersive exhibition [that] includes eight installations that can only be activated with your participation.” This particular piece featured 3,000 lightbulbs scattered throughout a section of the forest, and a participant could activate one of the lightulb’s pulsations to match one’s own heartbeat. The caveat? It would eliminate the a pulse of a prior participant. Definitely a piece of art that made one ponder a variety of existential questions.

The video below shows the pulsing of the lights.