We had just replaced our old 1970s furnace and we asked the grizzled man who hauled it out nearly single-handedly, if he could do something to help us keep our basement warm, we wanted to watch movies down here and it got chilly.
Wordlessly, he pointed a finger the size of a hotdog straight up, at a vent.
“Just drill a hole in there, hot air’ll come out,” he explained as to a child.
Fascinatingly, I had unconsciously thought of the ducting and HVAC infrastructure of my home as a near magical source of heat. These things exist, and therefore my house is warm. I thought of them that way, rather than as a complex arrangement of material parts, the activation of which heats air with natural gas, blowing it with a fan through filters and into ducting which distributes the warmed oxygen throughout my house.
I thought of the ducting as almost a painting, an immense word the invocation of which created a desired outcome. I always wondered what other things I understood as paintings of themselves, as almost hideous simplifcations so basic they obscure almost totally.