765: “And if I could go back in time I’d clip the chain in a heartbeat and never care a minute that the picture was never painted.” The Goldfinch

I was walking down the street the other day, thinking about a dream I’d had the night before, and I had enough of its parts to be able to just kind of press into it and let it leak into my day. The narrative was long and epic. There was a real rock star and an alien flower–something like a hybrid blend of a bonsai plum and a red begonia–on an ex-lover’s nightstand in a difficult room, and quiet, tactile emotions. One sequence had preoccupied me, and when I got home I tried to write it down. I still had the scene, but the description came out rambling and absurd.

In one of the first film classes I took in grad school, I wrote a term paper on a film that used narrative devices i didn’t have the vocabulary to fluently describe yet. Embarrassed by what i’d come up with, I dreaded getting the paper back; however, my professor was excited to read about this film he hadn’t seen, and encouraged me to struggle with my descriptions, assuring me this was an exciting and necessary step in learning how to read and discuss film. I was shocked by his response, coming from someone who had not only watched and written about countless films but also made and taught them. This person who I had initially typecast as a classic egghead wound up being a kind and strikingly committed teacher.

The question, again, is representation. How do i turn that picture in my head into something i can share with someone else? How does anyone go about performing these tiny translations from idea to object? Even now, with the flowers, the question is the same but the window of transposition is so much smaller, and the people i work with give me similar advice: it’s good to work with other people and learn technique, but the only way you’ll discover your own style is just to mess around on your own. The flowers. In order to try and start figuring this out, I made the classic American move: i took a road trip.

I wound up in Philly, a place I’d only been once before, wandering around my best friend’s basement. She and her Mom picked me up from the bus station and we drank coffee all day and made piles of her old things and took pictures. We bought a few flowers, cut a few more out of rambling yards. We went to a museum for mourning art in the middle of a cemetery. The drives across town were long and the lawns were green and the glass in the windows in the houses we passed was thick and wavy and cracked. Most of the neighborhoods we moved through were poor, and i kept imagining i had drifted into another city much farther south. i sorted through each one of her velvet-lined jewelry boxes and the old refrigerator filled with glassware and tchotchkes. i went through piles of tattered fur and hole-stretched mousseline and perfectly preserved chiffon and every color of opera length gloves and stared at the black felt we’d tacked to the wall and tried to think about what i was thinking about but i didn’t need to because i knew i was trying to give shape to a loss i can’t ever seem to part with. So I went out back and snipped a few tiny wild strawberries growing somehow through the cracks of the cemented floor of her back yard and came back in and added them to the still life we’d been compiling. i found that my “arrangement” required many ingredients not made of flowers at all. As a larger indication of what I think my work is made up of, it was perfect. A suggestion of possibility rather than discreet proof or replicable samples.