I went to see Bishwadhan Rai’s exhibition, Being There, at Zerui.

There is a blue ball on the floor. It half looks like a bath bomb, half looks like something I’d chuck in the washing machine on an empty rinse cycle. A fizzy thing to make other things softer, cleaner. The blue ball is hollow with a hole at the top. I look at the press release: it is made of pear soap. I look back at the blue ball: it is surrounded by gold dust. I look up: THERE IS A HUGE GOLD LEAFED CIRCLE ON THE CEILING. It is sprinkling gold flakes on me as I pad around the floor beneath it. I am tracing the circumference, the mirror image of the circumference. I am guessing where the circle begins and ends based on where the gold dust has fallen, is falling. The gold circle comes out of nowhere, it surprises me. I look up at it in awe and wonder.

The door to my spare room has got a broken handle. The screws that keep it fixed to the door slip around, threads loose in the wood veneer. There’s a little silver ring that twists down to cover the screws. Sometimes that little silver ring slips off the door, exposing the heavy internal mechanism that actually turns the latch. The heavy internal mechanism is rendered useless — there is no ring to keep the handle in place to turn the mechanism to turn the latch. You just have to pray the door isn’t shut when that happens. I keep a pair of pliers balanced on the shoe rack outside the door, just in case I need to get inside.

Really, I guess you have to pray the door doesn’t catch you on the wrong side of it without pliers. I should fix the handle, but faults and malfunctions feel — ah. Like a cosmic game, or like I am microdosing some kind of spiritual submission to fate/destiny/a higher power like chance or God. Faults and malfunctions feel like an ontological uno reverse card, a mirrorworld where you access a thing by confronting its absence. That, and. When the silver ring pings off the door, I am able to see it as a separate object, rather than just a part (of a door). I see it out of context, it is weird and beautiful.

There’s an artist on instagram who, in between posting other kinds of pictures (of their friends, their life, their work in install shots) posts pictures of their hand holding their kitchen sink drain cover. Whole carousels of different items collecting in the drain cover. Grapes and spaghetti and red onion skins and washed out baked beans.

I cannot remember the artist’s name, but I remember looking at these images for longer than I felt was polite. I remember feeling secretly relieved that their hand wasn’t directly touching the items. I remember being interested in the way these items fell together to form an image, of sorts. And I remember being confused about whether what I was looking at was meant to be looked at, whether it was meant to be an image. It was being presented to me, and I was pleased with it, but something about it all felt circumstantial and surprising. Baked beans without sauce more pale than you’d imagine, naked and tender. Red onion skins all purple-maroon, in fragments like weird confetti.

I do not notice any of the other doors in my flat. Because of the broken handle, the spare room is electric and alive to me. My heart beats faster when I look down the hallway. I do not like the items in my sink, trapped in my very own drain covers. I do not find them confusing, circumstantial or surprising. In real life, they are mostly disgusting. In an image, in presentation, they separate from their original selves — they become electric and alive.

There were other things in the gallery, but I don’t want to admit to them out loud. This was a sparse kind of show, with a specific sleight of hand: found objects, meaning encoded through an object’s history, the loopy journey that has led it to this ending (as art-object in a gallery). I am not struck by the sublimity of a found object’s supply chain. The blue ball of pear soap, hollow and sticky looking. The gold leafed circle on the ceiling, shedding gold flake rain. The weird beauty, the unexpected beauty, beauty that sneaks up from behind. Blue ball, gold circle; they fall together to form an image, circumstantial and surprising.

I like the scale of this kind of beauty. Any bigger and I’d feel embarrassed or bored. I want beauty to withhold, just a bit. Be evasive or avoidant. I want to work harder. I want to chase. Imagine trying to clap a fly dead between your hands. It feels good because success is subject to chance, chance that you have defied. You have closed the gap through secret, seemingly magical means.

I am interpretively reaching, I am being very honest and sincere. Door handles and drain items aren’t exciting, they are not the pinnacle of human intellectual exploration. It’s strange to nail it all down in words. Mostly, when it strikes me, I just hold my breath a bit/hold it with my gaze for a bit — and then I continue on (wordlessly). But the thought (of the door handle to my spare room) keeps returning to me. It is humdrum poetry, so small and unexpected. It is like finding something glittery on the bottom of your shoe, trapped in the tread. It is like seeing birds out of the corner of your eye. It is like feeling the warm glow of the sun without seeing it. It is like being on the right side of the door as it closes, the side with the pliers.