Catalog
We came to the house and opened the door. The ground was cement and the door was a heavy reddish-brown wood. There were tiny words carved on that part of the door which scraped along the ground—giving clues to visitors, the future, and a tilting brashness for those who were aware. Those who wore eyes and were involved in the works of new historians who rely on the subtle messages of newsmen and other apostles. Inside this first room are the remnants of meals which are designed specifically for the kings of countries where alphabets have become modular. And the somber jesters who adorn them. The words worn by these few are sewn directly into the skins of the jesters and are embroidered with numbers from 4 to 12. With the number 8 appearing only on the soles of their feet. The kings at these dinners must wear bathing suits of thick fatty seal skin, for warmth and durability. And also, any kind of crown at all. A nod toward the humor of costuming—symbolism of immersion. In this way there is both order and a sense of ritual, as well as certain elements of individual desires expressed. All this we could see as if we had entered the room yesterday at a particularly festive point in the evening. The kings and their men at ease. It is this question of ease which is hovering in the air of this first room. The heretic ordering of letters which disallows its assent. These kings to whom power had been handed and their eternal disease at the prospect of greatness. A contrast between lives offered and lives chosen. It was precisely this dis-ease from which the kings had been excused and the evening, knowing the rarity of such shelter stretched itself so it never was night and the summer sun inched back and forth over itself at the very brink of the long flat edge of the world which shattered with whistles and news from the south. Oh, if it were only a solitary whistle we would not pay it any mind but it came in an immense trunk and though one could never hope to see the bottom of such a large paper trunk it was filled to every crack and corner with the evenings limbs. This should show you how quiet we could be. A girl holds a photo of herself for a photo in which she may make the sweetest face imaginable. A boy who knows her may make small monkey noises and dance around in circles to try to distract her. That is the difficult part. All the parents who know these children rush to protect their own soft babes who wail in playgrounds and empty classrooms in an effort to feel involved in each other’s younger years. Even children know these moments will remain etched on the bottoms of doors, those parts which scrape along cement floors and wear thinner and thinner with every opening until the door is merely a thin string which is carelessly swept aside upon entering the dens of kings and scarred jesters whose own childhoods smelled of poorly timed jokes and Isaaic sacrifices. In this way the very corners of rooms are named and praised. They are treated with respect and granted the income of personality and ownership. They have a holding blossom and like good Bishop Haddo are not without the flaws which mark one’s existence complex. In the photo the girl is given a tiny bouquet as a prop. She holds it with two small fingers and flinches awkwardly at the bulb which smacks her thin grey eyes. She is unaccustomed to the momentary blindness. Her photo declares her evident dismay and when, many years later, she is asked to remember this day she remembers only its ease. It was the easiest day and went away unbidden. And with little remorse. It would cause no more than a small sigh from a baker and her husband, a morose geologist who most every day wore a thin red pullover with a tiny pheasant embroidered on one sleeve. This very day, the day of the small sigh, the ease and the photo, the geologist read an article in a science magazine to which he had received a subscription as a gift from a brother in a small Midwestern city. The article highlighted new theories on cancer. At dinner the geologist told his wife that some scientists believed that cancer cells were those cells that refused to die at the time when they had been genetically programmed to do so. And therefore began mutating rebelliously—to which his wife, one small bite of pie afork, replied “how symbolic,” unknowingly infuriating her husband whose envy of his wife was a ceaseless and sorrowful two-step timed by our children’s wailing empty classrooms, though they had never been expected to garner much knowledge. In the photo the girl is small—hands twisted like secret messages to be referred to later—mused over in adulthood—that is the way one can hold time. And this is a key element of time travel. Like a winding staircase you may climb to the open doors of other people’s homes; this is a clue. The second clue sits at this very moment in the next room we were to enter on that autumnal day. This room, unburdened by royalty, held the bed of a famous revolutionary of whom you have all heard. In 1901 he had been indicted for treason and was sentenced to death by a jury, oddly swayed by the testimony of one robust woman who claimed to have been in love once herself with a similarly famous traitor. This woman drew for the court many pointed parallels between the two men, such as their statures and patterns of speech. This story, so common to us all now, was not known at the time by the man who slept for many years in the sturdy unadorned bed. However, the bed remained and one could, if they turned their head and shifted their eyes at precisely the right angle and moment, catch a lingering glimpse of these patterns. These antiquated parallels, the harmonics of such intonations. The man was executed that very year and it was not until several years later that the star witness became sallow and guilt ridden. In the photo, the girl, lit from behind, is completely in shadow. A mysteriously shaped Occidentalism. Beside her in a grassy patch lay a weathered scrap of paper. Perhaps a letter or advertisement upon which, with close examination, one could make out, in blue, the letters N-U-A-L. The third room was painted in deep greens and blues—not a spot was left untouched by these colors and here and there we would pass the very shirt sleeves we would have worn had we gone with the Russian neighbors to the seashore last spring. This room was very large, so large as to have contained us for many years in its course oceanic tide. As a phrase or story, haltingly translated from a dead language, may bring about centuries of insurrection and hope. I cannot dismiss such frivolity though as I speak I may cringe at the merest hint of poetic meandering. But it is important, though perhaps obvious to you, who have studied these spaces for so many years, that I relay to you these ungarnered truths despite their wispy falterings. It is unclear to me now your own involvement in these passing months, as though we were ladies only just realizing that our loveliest gowns are torn and frayed mats—folded and stamped and mailed from Indonesian villages. But such is the luck of modernity. We are not ladies and our attention to pauses was inauspiciously linked with the words that had flanked them. In this room there was consternation, mercurial doubt and a hissing white noise. In the photo the girl wears a mask of her mother. Behind the mask she grimaces and laughs at the secret of this one photograph taken in her bedroom. You can see the part of the wall paper which is raised and felt-like beside her fingers and forms the outline of a decorative, pink basket.
Stephanie Barber
Stephanie Barber's these here separated to see how they standing alone or the soundtracks to six films by stephanie barber