In keeping with many years past, the long Thanksgiving weekend began in brightness and joy and ended in the silent despair of a world suddendly winter. The moist fallow landscape that streams by the car window hits you with the first realizations that it is the season for surviving. It is in these conditions that the Thanksgiving holiday assures to nudge our memory with the recollections of past injustices. In the celebration of family, tradition, bounty, and all of the other things programmed into the last Thursday of November, we are inevitably faced like no other time of the year to both recognize and then posit the absense of these things, and those times in our lives that we have underminded the modest justice that Thanksgiving typies through the warmth of all the familiar things that suddenly surround us for these four days. I would be not only a liar but a hypocrite and insensate if I did not acknowledge the wholeness of memory and the good that it contains by ignoring its scabs. Since Thanksgiving is itself a time a humble but profound subtlety, so are the the inchoate memories of past injustice. They are not black slashes in the flesh of recollection but rather grey areas that are simultaneously determinant and inchoate. Here are the memories of how we couldn't help to be, of what we were not aware of, of what we did not know and did not think to know. They are the grey areas of humanity's innocent guilt. They are discreet moments that in retrospect speak of much wider narratives in the courses of our lives. This is the melancholy of the season--that we can in the same course of time come to know how we have denied each other and come to know with whose companionship we might come to resolution and resolve about the inevitable injustices that haunt the vividly ephemeral past. These memories are indeed ghosts. They exist in the substance of spaces and phenomena but ultimately dwell in the annals of recollection. They enter the ranks of myth and lore, and find gentle abode somewhere in the mind's sense of justice and compassion, its disposition for reconciliation and worth, dignity and collectivity. Driving through the rainy farmscapes of the midwest yesterday, the ghosts of recollection rode with me, appearing in every grove of trees, every reflection on the slick concrete, every foggy horizon, every eave of every barn that stood sentry to the sacred passage of time and place that is leaving one's essential conception of home. The rooms and the spaces of the innocent, guilty past spread out from their places of origin and traveled with me, tethered behind my eyes and the tailgate of the car as it sped future-ward as I thought of where we were moving but wondered why. I am guilty of compassionlessness, and I am guilty of denying my brother and my sister, of refusing embrace, or ridicule, of disparaging, of rage, of indignity, and of neglecting the outstretched hand, be it my own or another's. But before me is only and the judge of memory, and the appraiser of the asubstantive narrative, presiding over the moments of the ephemeral past suddenly reborn in the tangible present. The tangible present and the rainy, foggy future that always seems to rest at the horizon of the last day of Thanksgiving.
Chanson d'installation: Damien Jurado, Medication
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