WATER FINDS ITS OWN LEVEL HOWSOEVER by LAWRENCE WEINER

Working vacation greetings, collector friends! Since my business is a pleasure—with editions from the likes of LAWRENCE WEINER to announce—it's hard to stay away.

WATER FINDS ITS OWN LEVEL HOWSOEVER is our second edition from LAWRENCE WEINER, a man who lives up to his ALL CAPS expectations. With the ocean a mere few feet away from the living room window, we've been doing a lot of tide-tracking here on the Oregon coast, and I've had ample opportunity to contemplate the "kindred constancy" shared by various bodies of water that I referred to in yesterday's newsletter about Chikara Umihara's new edition. How nice, then, to round out this week with the source of said constancy—namely, water's own-level-seeking ways.

After some fruitless internet scouring, I had a very early morning discussion with my boyfriend about the origin of the expression, and what it really means. He got all science-y on me, talking about the gravitational pull of earth, moon and sun and how water's frictionless particles are at their various mercies. All of which made perfect logical sense, sure, but stands in opposition to the anthropomorphized ocean of my imagination. That ocean is willful and steadfast, always pulling its edges back into itself, ceaselessly SEEKING its own inherent levelness—gravity be damned! It turned into a broader conversation about celestial bodies, symbolism, orbits and rotations, the kind of conversation I hope that Mr. WEINER himself would find quite pleasing, disinclined as he is to provide explanations of his own. As he writes in his statement:

RATHER I PREFER TO PRESENT AN EXISTING FACT AND LET THE JUDGEMENT OF THE RECEIVER REST UPON THAT.

And with that, I'm off for another hike, a birthday celebration and the contented contemplation of tides high and low.

— Jen