This Old House

8 June 2022

Happy Death Day box. No inside or outside: the door was open. Ford a stream of kids’ clothes, shoes, toys, boxes where presents were, two small four-wheeled vehicles embraced by vines, spider webs. We enter the living room and get no farther. A kind of reverence fills me when I trespass. Past this room a kitchen, from which light streams, then fades. Lilith perches on an old mattress by the front door. She’s a bit skittish, too. Outside (truly outside) is the car cemetery, each a museum. On the driver’s seat in one, an Oysterizer blender, or at least its base. From the mirror hangs an old air freshener, which reads “leather.” Windshield leathery with mildew or moss. The plastic gargoyle that holds a sign “How Much I Love You” had a twin inside the house by the far window, beneath a fly’s eye chandelier. We’re past story, inside of consequence but lacking awareness of cause. A family lived here, and they left. As Lilith and I begin our walk back, I spot a child’s jacket twisted in a bush, arms akimbo, old zipper undone.

A concept like “emptiness” doesn’t work. The house is empty of people, but full of what is now called “junk.” The clutter inside of emptiness reduces its charm. It’s a mind on meditation that swims against a current of plastic gnomes and broken forks, break-ups and break-downs. The show poses the question of what to do once you’ve abandoned family for career. Your only permanence, the hours you work. They prop you up like a two by four a fern trunk. You’re post-personal life, but not yet post-ambition. “What’s the use of this?” my aunt said of the lava fields. They put us in our place, then take that place away.