Whose face is this
So stiff against the blue trees,
Lifted to the future
Because there is no end?
But that has faded
Like flowers, like the first days
Of good conduct. Visit
The strong man. Pinch him—
There is no end to his
Dislike, the accurate one.
(John Ashbery, from Some Trees.)
(From MoMA’s almost impossible to find Futurism exhibit. It’s in the basement of the education building.)
Books
Films
Exhibits
(John Waters, Children Who Smoke, 2009. 8 c-prints; each image: 5 × 7 inches; framed: 26 1/2 × 20 1/2 inches. Edition of 5. On view at “Rear Projection” at Marianne Boesky.)
Here in this city you don’t love
In which you’ve passed so many days
That counting makes you want to puke
Afraid of things unrecognized!
Afraid of everything you’ve seen!
Crossing the streets and then recrossing
The muddy ways, the ways of snow
Ways of the tongue-tied, sullen masks
Here in this city you don’t love
City you’ll never get out of
Because of all you still don’t know
Summerfuls of syllabic tasks
Dazed by your dead who died right here
Here in this city you don’t love
(Jacques Roubaud, p. 90 in The Form of the City Changes Faster, Alas, Than the Human Heart, trans. Keith & Rosmarie Waldrop.)
(Madonna and Child (detail). 14th century (?), Barcelona, Marès Museum. Painted wood.)
The Prada store on the way to Marfa
At Big Bend National Park
Books
Films
Exhibits
This is another novel, maybe the same.
A man, alone because of a death, gets a phone call. The call is from the woman he loves, who is dead.
He recognizes her voice. She calls from a different, possible world, in every respect like the world he is used to except for one difference: in that world, she is not dead.
But what will he say? What has happened in that world in the last thirty months? What will he tell her? How could he enter that world where the horror has not taken place, where her death is abolished, where the struggle against it continues, where they still stubbornly fight the battle that, here in this world, where he still is at the moment he picks up the receiver, has been lost?
He will pick up the receiver and hear her voice. This world where he still is (the phone has rung, but he has not yet moved his hand in order to answer) will be forgotten.
This world will not have been. It will have existed only as a possible world where there is death, and not life. A world he will always think of even though it is unthinkable.
Imagining, in his imagination from that other world, this world where she would be dead. But he will not, in fact, be able to imagine it.
The telephone does not ring. As long as it does not ring, that new world, that possible world, is still possible. It is still possible that the phone will ring and the voice be the voice of the woman he loves, who is dead. Who is no longer dead, has never died.
The phone will ring. The voice which the man who is alone because of a death will hear is not that of the woman he loves. It’s some other voice, any voice. He will hear it. This does not prove he is alive.
(Jacques Roubaud, from Some Thing Black, section III, pp. 51&ndash.52.)
Books