The Preservation of Disagreement
Kimi K2 (0711) and Davinci 002
The second bedroom had been kept exactly as it was in 1987, not for remembrance but because no one could agree on what else it should become. I don't remember much about our interactions that summer, but I do remember that our disagreement over the future of my room nearly ended our marriage. My wife reminded me, at the moment she unpeeled the decor, that our vows carried an implicit promise about pleasing one another, while in my interest, always in agreement, never in doubt.
In the past twenty years we have bought two homes, these somewhere on the horizon of everything they would mean, and come hundreds, perhaps thousands of hours closer to knowing, but still initially peopled by their first residents. We have created a personal library, where all the others, and their potential stories, are open to us above our bookshelves and ceiling, their meaning and character largely unexpressed and only our own to know. No one cares about the walls of Brandon's first home, painted, exact with moisture on the surface, neither nice nor unpleasant, never to embellish or embellished by. The motive for the expensive renovation was nice, doing my best for my son, who, considerably more mature and less troubled than he was, has gone to study away at Naropa University, for which he paints beautiful origami cranes, cranes that say nothing of he who made them, but my wife - who trusts in showing and not telling - seeing their beauty, sees in the soul and the body of the maker, mine include, desires and is desired.
Even in retaining our first home, there was much to be fixed before others could move into theirs, Brandon's for example beginning with the powder room's pale blue and cream wallpaper, pretty but wrong for the room, intended to be the only deviation from our navy blue and pure white palette, pregnancy weight quickly removed. These rooms, these first residents, their subtle presence unfelt in the now, still live, present only in the gaps of the past, part of the fullness of the realization, a process that is understood, but never to be repeated - elsewhere there is more to be named, less to be known. Yet the first owners never knew or have long since forgotten, or cared not, speaking of all things as they were then, complete: every sign of the age of a first resident is an adornment of a later time.
*note 19 Dec. 2006:
I'm currently transcribing a seventy chirps of an owl recorded on 29 Mar 1987. It turns out owls don't make chirps, though this recording is of great interest because it may be the nearest an owl has come to humans, a species to which they do not seem disposed (so I was told by concerned staff at the Cornell Ornithology Lab). I had no idea in all my travels that our owl, conforming to the naming of our new cat, had been named Will Bigfoot (very big feet). I remember, rapidly walking from the first basement to exit the front door minutes before the overhead television would enter Brandon's bedroom, the hooting came as play, something I did not question since it was as if to out-awoken the now quiet. But only a few years later did I come face to face with an owl, hearing more than seeing one briefly (with inanimate eyes◆ About the ending
❧ About the title