Returning home to a community-less shell, I became convinced yet again--just in case I still could have been making it before--that Northeasterners have no capacity for environmental awareness. Standing in the bookstore this evening, seven or eight people passed in front of me while I was searching for books without any utterance even close to "excuse me" or "pardon." Out on the street, I dodged them walking in the other direction, and halted my step when they merged in front of me. Of course, I'm a victim too. I don't really know where I am; only that I stepped from a plane sometime around three desensitized by the last four weeks and the last four hours. It was through a blanket of clouds that the midwestern landscape faded into white and greyness, just as it was through a blanket of clouds that it emerged back in December. That was four weeks ago. Four hours before I worked my way through a jetway maze and into the low-slung concourse at Logan, a story six years long was still unwinding in a web of obscure plot mutations, hop-scotch settings like in dreams, tangential contrails of subject matter that emerge and disipate and re-emerge, and the intangible gut-wrenches of memory. I wrote four hours before that we were in a time that moved like tectonic plates, inches by inches. This referred to a community that existed when the great storyteller of human tragicomedy began to weave this tall-tale. All that is left is to nod and offer stupified congratulations--hallow, without both sentiment and comprehension. This is not a gesture of dwelling on and on or suddenly snuffed-out hopes; instead it is the flash of green that lore claims is emitted with the last of the sun when it ducks under the horizon; or the subtle and temporary slip of a major seventh that renders a chord ambiguous and solidly unsure; or the long exhaulation after holding your breath. In other words, the end of the story isn't about the antagonist (towards whom the epic turns to make her the protagonist), nor is it about the retrieval of dead hopes or haunting nostalgia. Instead, it is simply about the passage of time, and the recognition that it has run out for this story. All stories require testament; they require the witnessing of their treads; they require vigil, and they require the passing of the last drip of wax that falls onto the landscape, and the terazzo floor, and the microscopic drip of ink that pen upon a pad the last words of the story: "what was it that made you hold on in the face of such despising?" This is what I have come to call the melancholy of the unrequitted will. In the end, nobody can be sure it's anything more than just the weaving and unweaving of two opposing, stubborn fictions.
Chanson d'installation: Red House Painters, Revelation Big Sur, and Grandaddy, Underneath the Weeping Willow
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