Before we went inside, Jonas asked if he could have a hot dog. My four year-old doesn’t eat much, so when he actually asks for food, i generally comply. Hot dogs remind him of his maternal grandmother, who treated him to his first city dog in Zucatti Park a few days before Occupy Wall Street began, and i had that tiny constellation blinking in the back of my mind as we walked through the grand carpeted majesty of the Armory’s entryway. Mom. Guilty pleasures. Actual stabs at the transformation of everyday life. He had a lingering cough and i’d kept him home from school, but i knew this would be my only chance to take him to see “the Swings,” so our little adventure felt like hooky. After a strange season of devastating weather, illegible violence, and a tiny personal decision to just go ahead and be disappointed about some things–which seems to be about as close as i can get to real mourning, we were in the market for a little amusement. And because in this department it truly can deliver, sometimes living in New York really gets to matter.

Ann Hamilton called her installation at the armory “the event of a thread,” taking the phrase from an Encyclopedia Brittanica entry that noticed: “all weaving traces back to ‘the event of a thread’.” An event can be an outcome, something that is happening, something that occurs in a certain place at a particular interval of time, or an occurrence sharply localized at a single point in space and instant of time. The contrast between the single event of a stitch and the massive set of events it took to produce the gigantic white curtain that moves up and down from the weight of the swings and the many concomitant events that are necessary for the action of the swings to lift and sway the curtain function both as a graceful spectacle and a provocative metaphor. Add to this the playful, serene experience of quietly moving back and forth on a single swing in a room full of other adults and children also taking part in Hamilton’s event, and you have a complicated model for (pick one, pick all) language, signification, intimacy, trust.

The wooden seats were unusually supportive–easily allowing enough room for two adults, with a surprisingly long span. The room was quiet, except for voices coming from wrinkly brown bags scattered throughout the room with little speakers packed inside. Voices reading from Plato, Emerson, Darwin, and William James, among others, mumbled out of the sacks and throughout the room. The wires and pulleys linking the swings and the curtain created a strange din that softly wrapped around the space, compacting the soaring movements inside.

From across a bar, i once ran my fingers through the air in a cutting gesture to indicate to the person on the other side that the attachment we seemed to have to each other had to stop. The motion suggested a cut, but it was really a concession. No more like this. No, no more like that. As if to enunciate the impact of our agreement, almost immediately afterward my stool slipped right out from under me, and there i was, flat on the floor. Gesture? Check. Agreement? Check. Tangible change? Check. The untying of a knot.

Sitting with Jonas on our swings, (we tried almost all of them, and the effect was largely the same, although some were faster and more easily pulled by the curtain than others), i found myself wrapped in a gigantic matrix of emotion. As usual, he held his own tiny blanket–“B”–who goes everywhere with us, and it hit me that i might actually be ready for my own transitional object. i liked swinging as much as ever, but i was about to try something new with all of this rigging. I’d recently let someone tuck me in soft and close, and as we safely rocked back and forth, i realized that i really didn’t mind.