August - An Archive 10 страница

I was still getting used to this whole process, but not once did I ever think he was foolish for doing what he was doing or even thinking that he could be whole. We all thought we could be whole and we all wanted to be that way. I still wasn't sure if it was ever going to be possible, and I could tell that Hunter was still very aware of that fact. In the end, we both knew that we were very broken people. That didn't make us foolish or failures, though. I had been repeating past conversations with Hunter in my mind in a new light, and realized that he had been telling me, and telling himself, for years before it finally happened. Although we could never put back all the pieces that had been broken in our lives, we couldn't dwell in the losses. We needed to do something and what Hunter was doing was the next step. I could see no fool anywhere in this.

"Can you explain what you mean to me?" I asked, and though he bit his lips, he tried to articulate the things inside of him that conflicted and cut him up, like the Hunter/Gatherer he tried to be.

"I used to think I was kidding myself, that this - being a hunter - was all make-believe and not real. That I should just grow up and start thinking about things in reality, and not this fantasy I had." He grew sad, for a minute, but I only let it stay that minute.

"Art is foolish, though. Art is supposed to be. It's needed for survival, and even you know that," I stated seriously. "What you're doing, in a way, is just another form of art."

He started to sob again, partly induced by pregnancy hormones I was assured, but I worried that I had said something wrong. I went over to him and let him cry into my neck, and he insisted that no, I had done nothing wrong. I had understood him. "You understand so completely, so utterly. Yes. That was what I had always been doing with the collages. I was cutting up reality so I could try and make something new with myself. I was deconstructing all that people told me I was, but I had never tried to rebuild with anything. What I'm doing now, I think, for this show isn't about being whole or being perfectly aligned. Being a hunter, and now Hunter, is something that is so small in the grand scheme of things, but it's important. Even if it is foolish or part fantasy, we all need something like this. I'm making art to rebuild this time around, not to tear it down and deem it useless."

I nodded, giving Hunter another hug before I let him get back to work. I didn't want to say that he was brave, even though he was. It took so much bravery getting out of bed in the morning, still not being quite sure what you were doing with yourself, but doing it anyway. I knew this just didn't apply to the transition he was undertaking, even though that was a huge part of it. But I still had trouble, without someone else there to urge me, getting out of bed and trying to make shit up as I went along. Hunter was still getting used to this idea he had of himself finally being a reality and to his own creative processes being transferred to daily living. It was a hard process, becoming whole, and even I knew that. I thought about what Paul had said about how we could never reach that extreme, but it was always the goal, and tried to mediate my own vision of myself that made me feel whole, even though I knew that I could never obtain it. It would never be perfection, and I had seen the error in perfection from Mikey's story. But I wanted to believe I could put myself back together again and that belief was what fueled my own creative process. While Hunter went through old essays and began to find hints of the person he was and bring them forth, and began to cut up and take down all the walls he had created for himself, I found myself through color and the art world. I found my freedom back in the escape of fantasy, the one which Gerard had first opened the door to. I created through the rest of August and spent my mornings with Gerard. I tried to help him create pieces for the exhibit, knowing that this showcase would be so much better if the element of oppositions was thrown off between Hunter and me, and Gerard was added as a medium in between. The three of us had always made the most sense.

Gerard liked the feeling of paint in his hands still, even if he no longer painted with the same skill. Ever since the paralysis had taken the dexterity of his hand, he had stopped painting and stuck mainly to sketching. It saddened me that he was now shying away from his favorite medium, and I tried to make him remember how good it felt to just fuck stuff up. I told him about Jackson Pollock again, and how he had wanted to express his feelings through his work and not construct them. I told Gerard all of the knowledge that he had given to me, and between us, we began to remake what we could. We began to express ourselves. We had, not paint sex, but dream sex. We would close our eyes and put a glob of paint in our hands and then we would rush it around our fingers. We saw darkness, but we felt something different on our skin. We felt it inside ourselves, and then we placed what we could down on canvas. Our expressions came out senseless and appealing, exactly like the chaotic mess we needed to express our world. But images and consistency still tried to form between little bloody handprints, green globs of goo, and bizarre blue blotting like new aged Rorschach tests.

Gerard covered his arm in paint one session and then tried to bend it, flex his muscle against the canvas, and show the strength that was still remaining inside of him. We used bright colors to illuminate our minds and our lives for one another. And we barely talked as we did each painting and each fuck-up. Dreams were silent, dreams were full of color, and dreams did not make sense until you reached the end. We seemed to be able to produce a million of these blotted canvases, and I flipped them all around to see if anything came out differently. We were only going to be able to display a handful, so I got Gerard to pick the three that he liked best and we titled them as such. Dream I, Dream II, and Dream III. Then we did some more, this time with our eyes open. We didn't glob the paint or splatter or throw, but we dabbed it lightly in the corners, as if we were insects pollinating it like a flower. We dabbed as if we were snowflakes, and we barely touched it all as if it were wings. I flipped these paintings the other way, counter clockwise, to see if anything would change and then he picked the best three again. We titled them Life I, Life II, and Life III.

I thought we were done, and our whole display for Gerard's section compete, but he motioned for more canvas and began to look at his other wall. He took all seven colors of the rainbow and set them up in front of himself before he began to dip his finger in each one. He did this by himself, crouched on the ground in front of his canvas, as I watched close by. He dragged the red finger all the way down the canvas, took his middle finger into the orange and dragged it all the way down. He did this for each individual color, using a different finger each time. The rainbow stretched lengthwise, the whole width between us, and I moved to the opposite side, so our fingers touched across its path. We titled it The Rainbow.

And then that was it. He was done.

Hunter and I took a lot longer for our own pieces, working right down to the wire. We were barely sleeping anymore, but somehow still managed to go into work every day. Cassandra and Noelle were coming over a lot more in order for Gerard to have someone around. Vivian was bringing dinner and staying as long as she could. She knew that she could not keep carting Gerard to and from her place, no matter how often he requested her presence, but we could keep Vivian in the house. She seemed to relish the attention, relieved that her best friend was still holding out some affection for her. We always left them alone when they were together, but sometimes I could hear laughter spill out from his room.

She had also started to see a professor, she confided with me. They had been exchanging emails through most of the summer months, and though it was still very new, she was really excited. He was an economics professor, and though he sometimes got really boring when he droned on about dividends and was excellent at making assumptions about people, she was handling it well.

"Dead White Men Disease is what I call it," Vivian explained to us. "You read too much dead white men material and then you deal with men and money all day long and you start to believe that that's who inhabits the world and that's what's important in life. But don't worry, I'm showing him around." She was coy and teasing again, enjoying being able to share her art knowledge with another person who would listen. He was a good man, aside from some boring tangents, and treated her exceedingly well. "He's already buying me presents!" Vivian teased, and showed off her new necklace. It was a simple piece, but it brought her so much joy. She had not had this amount of attention in years. Though she was still very busy with this new budding relationship and getting her classes ready for September, she was still here when we needed her to be and still overseeing our show.

I had begun to take pictures again. It was an elating feeling, once I got past the fear. I had been so terrified that since I had not been around it for so long, and so many things had changed, that I would just suck. I nearly dropped the camera the first time I took it out and that seemed to be confirmation to me. See? Even gravity doesn't want me to have this habit!

I stuck it on my desk and tried to walk away from it, and focused only on my old photos for a while, framing them and getting them ready. But when I got to the jazz photos and I saw Hunter before he was Hunter, I knew that I had to pick up the camera again. I wanted to remember those pictures and address them as a wonderful period in our lives, but I also wanted to remember him as he was right then. I also thought of Paloma, vaguely, and knew that there would be so much more in my life that I needed to take photos of. I didn't know if it would ever be my career again, but what I did know was that on days when I was at work and I felt like I was going to die of boredom, I would remember that I had spent time with Gerard that morning, that I was seeing Hunter again that night, and that my camera was always there for me, waiting. Just because I had apparently failed at being a photographer and getting famous, it did not mean I was a failure. Success was the same as failure, after all, I told myself. I felt like I was doing pretty well.

I began to take more pictures of Hunter, though he was resistant at first. He felt like nothing matched, but I told him that was okay. That was the beauty and the truth of it. I knew he was pregnant, and that that statement made perfect sense. I wanted to have photos that documented this transition for ourselves and so we could look back and remember our lives the way we had created them. Half the challenge of art was creating our own reality, and in the last few days leading up to the show, everything became a project. Everything became art. Vivian was learning how to cook vegan and we gave her tips whenever she came to us with questions. She had been dropping off knitting for Paloma, and she was stepping inside and marveling at all the work we had done. Art lined both of our bedrooms and more often than not, old magazine pieces and glue or negatives and film canisters were displayed haphazardly on the kitchen table as she set foot in the door.

"I like this," Vivian stated seriously, dropping off a casserole in the only space available. She wasn't referring to any particular piece, but to us. "You two have always been good together. But adding collaborative art and creative projects to a relationship that is already flourishing is huge. I can't imagine how strong this will become."

We both smiled and exchanged glances from where we were in the room, before Vivian began to tell us more about Walter, and all that she was learning from him, now, too.

I also branched away from photography in those last few days. As much as I wanted to keep it as my art, my sole purpose and the passion that got me through the day, I also knew that there was so much more out there. If Vivian was learning about the ascent of money and how it could be tied with the history of art, I knew there was nothing that could ever be insignificant as a pursuit. I tried Hunter's cut ups, though I could never find as much meaning as he did. I went back through old notes and journals, but nothing jumped out at me.

"Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it's the act of taking it apart that helps you to make sense of it again," he explained. He had had begun to work on mobiles, now, where half of his notebooks from school became eviscerated and turned into animals. It was so delicate and so grotesque and huge that I didn't know how I could compete with an imagination like that. Even Gerard's abstract paintings seemed to be infused with a lot more variety that I even thought possible. I would find myself staring at each of them, trying to pick out what I saw like a Where's Waldo? picture. Only each time I found something, it wasn’t always static. It seemed to shift, permeate over the entire canvas, and be new again each morning when I looked.

The last night we all had together, before the show, I thought I was done with my work. Alexa had come over with food that night - a lasagna that she had made with vegan fake cheese and that Hunter could not stop complementing - and she had been telling me more about The Tower of Babel. Vivian was upstairs with Gerard, and Cassandra and Noelle had stopped by earlier to hang out for awhile. It was one of the last lazy nights of August and we were trying to soak it up as much as possible. Even with our premise of relaxation and good conversation, both Hunter and I could not let our minds rest. Hunter had begun to take notes on the myth, to see if he could further one of his mobiles. For this work, he had hung each piece of language that we had placed into our wall during the night of the party, plus more. He hunted down everyone who had spoken that night, and tried to remember what Gerard had said. He had been translating and transcribing, and it seemed to make him feel at home. He colored each brick of the wall and wrote all he could down. But he wanted more, and his mind was still there as he took notes furiously while Alexa began telling us even more about the flood, the exodus, and the apocalypse that would eventually happen. She had told me that the tower imagery appears everywhere as man's greatest ascent.

"The ivory tower is an especially loaded symbol between those academia types who lock themselves up and off from the world, and never come down again. By doing this, they think they're in touch with humanity because they are learning the ascribed virtues, but they have the same dead white men syndrome that Vivian told me about. Damn," Alexa said, turning to see if Vivian was still in the room or if she had gone upstairs to finish her visit with Gerard. Not seeing her around, Alexa fixed her attention back to us. "I love that term. It fits perfectly. There is still a lot of work to be done. Even the tower that was built by the people in the story, it was done out of hubris. They thought they were Godlike. But as soon as you get up to the top of the tower and you realize He's not there, then what do you do? All you have is one another. It shouldn't matter who they were building the tower to, but the fact that they were building it together. Eventually all big ideas like that become too huge, too far apart from the basic necessitates of life, and they must fall. Even the disorientation of not being able to speak the same language again can be a good thing. As much as we want to all stay the same as one another, what are you going to learn then? It's no fun that way."

She smiled when she was done and nudged Hunter playfully. Out of all the people we had told about Hunter's transition outside of our little triangle, Alexa had been the best. Vivian was okay with it, though some days she didn't understand "what the big deal was," she did her absolute best to make the switch with language. Pronouns and names were we had the most trouble, and even I knew that was superfluous at the end of the day. It was important for the outside world to take Hunter seriously as this new person, but we all knew, Vivian and Cassandra, and Noelle and Mikey, that Hunter was the same exact person he had been two weeks ago.
"Just... more enlightened, perhaps," Vivian had suggested, hearing the tail end of the conversation as she was about to go. Hunter scrunched his face up, and Alexa jumped with another suggestion.

"It's not exactly a revelatory 'aha, I'm right!' moment. It's a next stage of development. Even though not everyone is going to go through a gender-change, we all go through deep changes. This is one of many that can happen. Hunter is just doing what's next. He's more aware of the next step than he was two weeks ago, but that's really all that's changed. Clarity and interpretation. Am I doing an okay job?" Alexa asked, and all Hunter could do was nod.

The two of them had grown so much closer since all of this began. Not only was Alexa there to hear pregnancy worries before he was due to give birth, she was able to grasp the concept of gender and shifting it without much aid at all. She had read "everything" after all, and myths were permeated with figures who were one and then the other, or both at the same time. This was nothing new; it had merely become repressed in this society and seen as a negative attribute. Apparently when Hunter had first told her the day after, she had actually yelled "Like Tireisas!" as her response and then thrown him into a hug. Although Hunter had said yes, kind of like that, he also gave her better words to use outside of metaphor and more books to read. Alexa had read them in two days, and was now well versed in gender theory and was spotting more holes in our language than I was. She and Hunter had now reached a level of understanding that I knew was out of my own comprehension. I didn't have to have those long conversations with him, though, to have him know that I loved him no matter what. He could just be with me and without explanation, without words, and we would understand one another. I tried to let him know that, and for someone like Hunter who spent so much of his time fighting with words, the silence that we were able to keep comfortably mattered the most.

When Alexa left that night, I kept telling stories of myth, most of which I had learned from her. I took Hunter through the life stages of the Tarot cards from The Fool to The World, down the hallways of memories, and I reminded him of the story Alex had told us, about Alexander the great and how he had conquered the world before he was thirty-three.

"I know we're only twenty-six," I had told him, "but I still think we did a good job, wouldn't you say?"

He nodded, and he knew. Alexa had filled out lives with myth, but she also knew all about the ivory tower. She also knew all of the theory and the myth that she had spent so much time building up for us, and now she was a fan of crumbling. I repeated her words inside my head, well after she had left and we put her leftovers away, some new idea forming inside of me. I knew what she was talking about, I knew it all. My experience with The Professor had finally been validated. Alexa knew the ivory tower, and she knew the importance of learning. But you didn't build yourself away from people. Even Gerard, at the end of the day, knew that as well. He had promised nothing to anyone, and holed himself away, but he had let me inside. He had destroyed his own tower. And he had gotten everything in the process.

I looked around our kitchen, at the dishes and the cups we had just drunk from, to our art still hiding under oven mitts and on top of counters. I thought of everyone here, in our house, in our lives, inside our archive, and how they were here because of him. They were here because they loved him and because he actually loved us back. Gerard destroyed himself so he could have all of this, and in return, he got everything back, and so much more. He held every single one of us together, and so, in return, we held him up. We would never forget him, and Alexa's words echoed in my ear all night. I was not done, I told myself. No, not yet.

When Hunter went to bed, I went back to my room and I got out my paints. I got some canvas and I painted the backdrop a dismal gray. This was how I had always imagined the Jersey sky, gray and polluted, especially in the dead of winter when the sun seemed non-existent. I took all of my journals, my notes, and the first drafts of the transcribed interviews. I took some of my duplicate photos, some pages of the magazine that Hunter worked for, and anything else I could find. I painted the papers all the colors, I crumpled them up, I burned them, I marked everything with my presence. I cut it all up, into long strips, triangles, circles, and random masses. I then organized all of my refuse into a large tower that took up the entire middle of the canvas. This was my ivory tower. This contained all that I had learned and that I had colored with my own experience. I glued it all down and then I painted another layer over top in order to seal down all the edges. It was a terrible smell, and I had to crank open my bedroom window to ensure that I didn't pass out. I hoped the smell didn't permeate the rest of the house, and went to light incense that Alexa had given us as a present, to try and hide anything else. Back to work, and before the top layer of glue dried, I cut up individual letters and put those on top of the piece. Now this was The Tower of Babel, and nothing was making sense anymore. I retrieved the gold from Gerard's supplies that I had borrowed earlier that week, and I began to paint a lightning bolt right through the structure. This was my own burst of knowledge, the destruction of what I thought I knew. It was the diversity, the variety, and the ambiguity of everyday life. Although I knew I had based my design on Alexa's tarot card, this piece was distinctly my own. I had color as well as gray areas, I had knowledge and knew not a damn thing about some people and some topics, I was free but I was also irrevocably linked. This was how I put myself back together again, after all that had happened to us. This was it. I had my photos, I had my life, and we had all of our other art supplies together. We were all creating together again.

And we were all done for the show. All we had to do now was wait.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14