After yesterday's reading still enough afternoon light on the buildings for photos so I went back to the place off Chambers Street I've been taking in a bit at a time and walked around the yard trying to see it. Brick, iron doors, heaps in dark rooms buried in heaps. And whole walls missing and sky coming through. Such places lose their names, or have no names, or if they do have names they belong to the neighborhood kids who go there, I know, having had many places like this among mine ruins. Like this: beyond recognition. What did it do? What was it made for? Who was its maker?
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Through the camera at a rusted door in the yard, looking, walking closer. Took the camera from my eye to see the light light up the orange-yellow insulation swelling through like an organ where the brick fell off. Glanced towards another door, a doorless doorway, really, and saw a wall inside swathed in red paint, what wall I could see from where I stood.
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from the Annunciation notebook, May 4, 2003, Ithaca, NY, 7:45 a.m.
We made bricks from red construction paper, peppered them with black crayon dots and outlined their edges before gluing them onto the cardboard hull, our fireplace. I would be the best of brick makers, the most industrious, the most artful. But it's true Dina's bricks were more even than mine and better for building.***
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And something else. The names belong to those who don't belong there. Let's go to the old gym, to the old waterpump station, the old swinging bridge. Old as signifying placeholder for no longer and going there a stand in for to where things fall apart. Rage in that.
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I was terrified in that room. Well, but why? (What did it do? What was it made for? Who was its maker?) The prankish handprint dotting the i. Two fingerprints inside the o like eyes and a line from each, tears or a grin, could be. But both hands and arms dipped to the elbows in red housepaint. The ceiling splattered in red paint. Who left the place as painted as the place, and likely in the dark when people working nearby--around the corner--are home for the day. Who was intent.
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Who wrote in small hands across the walls and the toilet stall doors SHE SHALL ALWAYS REMAIN UNFORGIVEN and inside the stalls beside the toilets HELP ME and HELP ME once in each stall on the right hand side where the light from the first room entry makes it just visible in broad day. I squared my handprint against who's handprint (I dotting the i) and they matched, size and shape. Two rooms, two sinks, two toilets, two doorways, two stalls, two hands, two views between the camera and me. Me and it. The doubling shook me until I recognized a third. SHE not me. Third person, not first. And the obvious thing sank in. Incidentally it happens that.
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