Where is the green box with my photos from the eighties?
Furious, my heart racing, I shine Gary's super-duper killer flashlight—the size and shape of an old car headlight—under the library table and back behind the bookcases temporarily fanned in front of the hall windows like Tarot cards or cold cuts until Gary refinishes the big bedroom. John Updike and Robert Louis Stevenson squeeze together on the dusty shelves like subway riders.
There aren't enough Saturdays for this house, and we fall behind and further behind, until the idea itself has crossed the horizon—out of sight. What was it we were trying to do?
I find the box and open it, but every picture has been scanned and heightened, its story already told.
My narrow self in that black wool coat, bleary-eyed and porcelain in the middle of Avenida Corrientes, exhausted from a night of fucking.
Jose's harrowing close-up of my face at Valley Green Inn, my jaw like a bone filigree.
Our cats and Ikea, my old car, and the shots of me on New York streets—in 1986 we had to go to a travel agent's office in Manhattan to buy plane tickets to Argentina—have all been embroidered with my prose, lovingly recalled.
For I was on a mission, in my late forties—after my mother had gone and released the past from the tyranny of her silence—to tell it all. My life became my art, and I weaved it into web pages and spliced it into so-so-so many videos. I sculpted it into sentences that I read to myself, now and then—so pretty, and so accurate.
I am past talking about the past—sizing it, laying down its audio track, feathering it as I loved to do: blurring the edges, bleeding one nut-brown image into another. I feel empty, no better for having hung my gallery—nothing was achieved. Even poor Jobriath has had his party, and he falls back to sleep on his pillow of vitamins and Brewer's yeast.
Perhaps art has only ever been a way of fighting the stubborn banality of the present time, its refusal to elaborate—its colorless silence. The desire to entertain or impress has left me. Or, maybe, the people that inspired it have gone. Childless, grandchildless, nevertheless I too am forced to turn to the present. But nothing around this house is forming itself into photos, no childhood memories are being made in these rooms. It's time for gardening and bingo.
Like my pouting, adjectiveless mother, we are all the sum and retrieval of our past—stunned, caustic more often than is attractive, covering our ears to irony's perfect end rhymes, living without any resolution to the pointless suffering, turning the corner to sixty, and silent.
