the drive, the gallery, the night

My yin and I returned to Raleigh yesterday, embarking on another weekend with a friend of mine from high school. More than one year had passed since our last visit.

a window memory, reflection-inflected, an already fading past...

On the drive:

I think of the memories locked inside my bones. I remember the thoughts that once populated my mind with such consistency that they took on the quality of constancy: six forks, five fingers, four evers, three hours, two lovers, one cubic centimeter. I see snatches of glimpses, snatches of glimpses; a red door entrance to a second story bar where Nancy once bought stock in Merck Pharmaceuticals five milligrams at a time.

urban horizon blue meets brick red sky...

In the gallery:

I speak with a docent who has asked us to step away from the art. The exhibit is composed of recycled and repurposed and otherwise disposed of material. I ask her if she appreciates the irony of the situation, how her role as museum employee has interpellated her in a manner contradictory to the impetus underlying the art. She says she does understand, and in the conversation that follows I come to believe her.

I tell her that the museum itself, which is housed in what was once a warehouse, represents a curious phenomenon in post-industrial America. Warehouses – the cultural spaces and physical places of the working class – have grown dark and empty and abandoned over the past thirty years, mirroring the hollowing out of the working class by the creeds of free trade and global capitalism that have come to dominate our ever waking moment.

Once empty, these spaces are filled with art objects and shopping malls and luxury lofts – the symptoms of lopsided wealth and trappings of high culture coming to colonize spaces that were once considered not worth possessing.

tiny concrete death masks of Adam Smith and his progeny...

In the night:

I dream of Nancy. She is coming for a private session with my yin and I try to sneak out the door, knowing the trouble that will follow. Nancy sees me.

Irate.

Spiteful.

Odious.

She is Medusa without feminism

X without Haley

memory without the past.

My yin, though, possesses a strength that runs deeper than the simple violence of malice. She ejects Nancy from the domicile and physically pushes her accomplice out the door.

I wake in a gasp.

Thunder rumbles and I hold my yin closer. "I had a bad dream."

(i imagine)

"Come here," she says. "I'll make it better."

Already, she has.

to be continued...