This story has been excerpted and translated by Jamie Richards from Marosia Castaldi’s novel Per Quante Vite, first published in Italian by Feltrinelli in 1999. Printed with permission of the author’s estate.
●
A screen is not a wall. It’s only the shadow of a wall.
The screen is very tall. It can’t be passed over or under or around or beside, has no gaps or passageways. Beyond its walls the dead stop or circle round and round waiting for someone to notice them.
I set my empty shoes by it every evening and take it with me everywhere I live. Finding this house at Number 6 Pfeffingerstrasse was very difficult. I searched the city up and down and nothing was right until I found this house. I go up to the mirror and say to myself: you did it. I turn off the light and set my shoes by the screen.
In the morning I go out onto a long and narrow street. On one side it’s numbers two four six eight ten up to the last even number and on the other one three five seven up to the last uneven number. It contains the lives of all its inhabitants up to their last breath and it seems never-ending.
I go out to teach at the school next to my house. And so I feel like I never leave the house as if I was always at home and the shadow or the soul of the screen follows me everywhere. The screen is everything and nothing, and since it can’t be passed over or under or around or beside, it is to me like my life that I can’t pass over or under or around or beside. I limit myself to sticking around it or beside it. Approximately.
And every night I set my empty shoes by it the way you leave flowers on the graves of the dead not because you believe they can respond but to be around them a little more or beside them. Approximately. I’m one of the few who still brings flowers to the graves of the dead but since my dead are far away in fact it isn’t clear exactly where they are but regardless in another city in another place in another time I bring flowers to the graves of strangers like an offering to the unknown soldier.
I go in all directions: back and forth around beside either way you can’t pass through. I go in I go out I put my shoes on I take them off because I know I never leave I never cross any threshold precisely why I live with this one impassable threshold which in the street they say is all blue and that at night I talk to and that I’m very possessive of maybe out of an insuperable nostalgia for crossing thresholds for separating black and white for believing it’s possible to choose between life and death, and sometimes on my way to school I recite to myself “farewell the plumed troops…”
My life is slippery like the surface of an egg that no matter which way you try to grasp escapes your grip and slides away and the enormous screen catches softening the blow and restoring it whole the way it was received. My life absorbs everything omnivorous it devours all the joy and all the pain and I keep staying in it even though it accumulates with cracks and dents, I fill the cracks with strips of glass like they do to test the stability of a house’s foundation.
My house is full of scaffolds cracks glass but the house is still standing just like my legs that continue to cross the threshold and set my empty shoes next to the screen.
The screen is so big it can contain everything. But isn’t that how it is for everyone’s life where we think we’re dying every time our life can no longer be contained and yet we remain here saying we nearly died of joy or sadness unable to retrace our steps to know when we needed to be stronger to keep everything from falling apart and deep down wouldn’t have even cared except that life never listened to us to figure out whether to cease or continue pause or hold on and so the thing that belongs to us most belongs to us least and in no instance can be told what to do?
It was very difficult to find this house and now that I have it, I sit down at the mirror and say to myself: you did it. Because it took time desire glue and a huge space to fit the whole screen inside and to fit my whole life inside but finally we did it.
Dora sits down, takes off her shoes, sets them by the screen and says to me come Dora it’s time to sleep and to forget. She is the one who always remembers everything and always keeps her life in mind, whereas I don’t remember and try to forget, try not to always keep it in mind otherwise I would die every day. How can we go on anyway without forgetting a massive portion of our lives every day?
So she who remembers and I who forget go to bed and we leave our shoes by the screen which returns them to us the next day clean and shiny like a slippery egg whose shell cracks at the slightest impact. In fact every morning my shoes explode in my hands they can’t handle contact they couldn’t handle one more night.
So Dora picks up all the pieces of shoe and puts them on my feet. I grab the shoes and smack her upside the head with them and say don’t do that you’re acting like a drudge! And she whispers back the neighbors are going to hear us! But she knows she’s lying because in Pfeffingerstrasse no one is listening and no one listens to anyone and at this hour they’re all beating themselves up in the silence of their rooms forcing their feet into their shoes to go out and face once again the threshold the light the time past and to come. There, the time is gone. Was it a quarter-hour a century a minute? Have we put our shoes back on again? Yes. We’ve put on our shoes, we put on some clothes we fix our face, we look in the mirror and say to ourselves: you are you and you’re here and not somewhere else and you’re you and he’s him and he’s here and not somewhere else and he’s him and I’m me and I’m really here and not somewhere else and my name is Dora Spengel.
●
On a table there’s a cup a coffeepot. A red bed leans against a wall. A green rug lies under the shoes and on a small white table there are notebooks always open to the same page with diary dates going back a very long time.
Light enters through a window and stops entering. There are two chairs two chairs a table and not even one chair two chairs a table or a window for air. Four walls four walls and the corners between the walls curve squeeze surround the non-landscape of objects. There’s a mess on the floor and pots and books and piles of paper and diary pages always open to the same date.
I look around and take something from the ground from the sky from the floor I put things in order I create a landscape I look at it attached to the screen it runs down the backs of my hands. It sticks. I pick up the brush I glue photos tickets papers corks cards dedications notes all the things left to me by life: a card my brother wrote the day before the day he didn’t know he was dying letters from friends pictures of students restaurant flyers travel brochures leaves from the ground scraps of cloth a picture of my mother coming down a staircase one of my father walking down a street one of my brother hand in hand with my father on another street a creamer taken from a hotel in Prague two frogs caught in a river where we spent our childhood two school compositions newspaper clippings with the wars of the world a photograph of a little boy looking at me through a bullet-ridden window a stone angel’s wing and the angel’s hand coffee grounds empty sugar packets cake crumbs bird wings two plane tickets to Boston a postcard a poem from my youth half-burned candles a picture of the Gulf of Naples an address in Davidsrain where lived a man I loved long ago. Like an immense trash heap or an immense sky. Either way there’s no way through.
●
In Pfeffingerstrasse live Laurie Madansky and her mother who teaches at the same school where her daughter goes. They say that Laurie Madansky tried to poison her mother. It was a big scandal at the school and on the street. Apparently every once in a while the girl attempts some new criminal act against her without ever succeeding and then everything goes back to normal like in a prewritten script repeated every night on the stage of the same theater. There is a Chinese man living here who attempted to murder the owner of the restaurant where he works and, in prison, was overtaken by an irrepressible craving for watermelon. He ate so much of it that he vomited for hours as if he wanted to vomit up his soul every day but couldn’t, and so Pfeffingerstrasse seems to be the street of imperfect actions, which are never perfectly completed and always repeated in an attempt at completion yet seemingly destined never to be resolved, and so in Pfeffingerstrasse the same things happen over and over.
It’s an unquiet street where no one knows how to stay in place and they always need to exceed their limits step out of their roles to renounce their lives and start over again.
On a faded building there is a large sign saying Scuola Staeli. All the students at Scuola Staeli go on a field trip every year to the town of Wratislaw. I keep on the screen the photographs of the inscrutable images we’ve seen in the stone panels at the Wratislaw Cathedral: men beside bunches of grapes men beside bundles of wheat men beside ox carts men behind a counter men behind a table a woman with a child on her knees a woman next to a cross three crosses side by side a woman turned toward an angel.
They’re next to a photograph of my mother coming down a staircase of my father going down a street of my brother hand in hand with my father down another street a little creamer taken from a hotel in Prague two or three frogs taken from a river near where we spent summers as kids two or three notebooks with compositions from school newspaper clippings with reports about wars going on in the world a photograph of a little boy looking at me through a window with a bullet hole the wings of a stone angel and the angel’s hands coffee grounds empty sugar packets cake crumbs bird wings plane tickets a postcard a poem from my youth half-burned candles a picture of the Gulf of Naples an address in Davidsrain where lived a man I loved long ago.
In the evening I lay down my shoes begin the work of collage and it seems like an endeavor unbound to space or time that will last at least as long as my life and every evening I attach new things to my life.
I get into bed and all the things attached to the screen appear in my dreams, alive. They’re moving around and demanding something from me but I can’t tell what. I cover my ears and try to flee. The things chase me. They demand to be reckoned with as if they could no longer stand being left unfinished as if they no longer wanted to be fragments and so I fall face down in the water and die. Floating before my eyes I see so many little green leaves and I wonder: is this what death is like?
I try to reach the other side of the screen but I slip. I won’t give up and I fall again and start over again but the screen leaves me down at its feet next to my shoes and becomes a single blotch of color. My life dissolves in the water it runs down the walls and slips out between the seams of the walls.
I gather newspapers I spread them out on the ground I try to absorb the water I amass pails where I wring out the soaked paper but it gushes drops becomes slippery and there’s nothing more my hands can do. I wake up in a pool of sweat. I look up at the screen, I see its enormous unreachable blue and turn on my side for a while before getting up to go to school.
At school my students are waiting for me: Trotta Winkeler Busch Bosch Bischof Sutter Immendorf Federle Kupper Madansky.
On the way I run into little Madansky who turns aside and snickers. Then she recomposes herself. I offer her a caffé latte as if she were a regular girl and not a failed murderess and when we arrive at school I find her mother there smiling. I think of how many compromises we make in order to go on with our lives and we have another coffee before heading to class.
●
Yeronimus Muller didn’t choose teaching because he likes to teach. He has no particular talent for it although he is a very intelligent man. When he comes out of the classroom I go in. We barely have time to look each other in the eyes because if the students are left alone they’ll get into raging fights. Muller believes that it’s little Madansky who lights the fuse whereas I’m convinced that Madansky has become the scapegoat for every incident and I always stick up for her. After school on the way home the girl follows me silent and awkward it’s like she never wants to leave and in fact she wants to come to my house.
The house is practically empty but it is full of books. I sit down and put them in order. I apply glue to the spines, attach colored paper, reattach the detached pages and place them on a shelf. Then I add to the screen the remnants of my day: a sentence from a student a stone from the street the packet of sugar from my coffee with little Madansky.
Just when I got everything in order one day the landlady called to say she needs the place for her daughter who is getting married.
I go up and down countless flights of stairs in Pfeffingerstrasse and I find a house that’s all white with white walls white windows white ceilings. It’s only a little smaller than the previous place. I pack all the books in cardboard boxes as well as the red bed the green rug the blue table the pots the clothes the chairs and I move everything to the new house.
For a few days I camp out. Then I open the boxes and put the books on the shelves, but there are too many, not all of them fit. So I go around to the local libraries and then to the school libraries. But no one wants them: they have too many as is.
So I attach them to the walls of the screen and again I see rise the impassable wall that encloses my life, but lots of things got lost in the move the bird wings the angel hand the plane tickets. I cover all the empty spaces and gaps with book pages and newspaper articles which I collect by the thousands.
Under the weight of all that paper the screen risks collapsing and so many books have to be thrown in the garbage because nobody wants them, not even the screen; and in the act of throwing them away I see a stream of blood running down the gutter, I plug my ears, I hide my face, I try not to see everyone on the street who has come to take in the spectacle. Not a single one lifts a finger to prevent the books from dying. No one says I’ll take them, I have room at my house. No one says I can keep them at least for a while.
Without a word they head home and shut themselves in with a thunderous slam of the door.
At night I go back to the trash. I pull back out all the book pages all the newspaper pages, take them back home and spend the rest of the night gluing them and putting them in order.
The next day I arrive at school puffy eyed and pale faced. Yeronimus Muller stops and looks at me intently. He notices that I’m not too bad-looking even in these conditions and he starts inviting me to his house until finally I give in and go.
It’s a small place with a green bed a red rug a white table with a coffeepot on top. We get into bed and more and more often since that day we get into bed together while his hands squeeze like pincers and we fall into a stony sleep. We get up and drink everything in sight and go sit down.
One evening I let Yeronimus Muller come to my house. Right off he sees a red bed a green rug a blue table but not the enormous screen. We get into bed. While we’re in bed, I feel like the walls of the screen are pressing down on me and like I can’t breathe and a mortal fatigue looms over my life as Yeronimus’s hands squeeze me like pincers. I think with a sigh I can die now, I lift my hands to my face and say no, it’s not possible that time is really over that there’s not enough left to do anything.
I scramble to pick up Dora Spengel’s hands her face her feet but they keep scattering across the floor. I think of how many times I’ve died already but isn’t that how it is for everyone’s life where we think we’re dying every time because life can no longer be contained and yet we remain here saying we nearly died of joy or disappointment or exhaustion. We remain here unable to retrace our steps to know when we needed to be stronger to keep everything from falling apart and deep down wouldn’t have even cared except that life never listened to us to figure out whether to cease or continue pause or hold on and so the thing that belongs to us most belongs to us least and in no instance can be told what to do.
I try with all I’ve got to collect the pieces of body but they turn evanescent and attach to the screen, become absorbed by the immense blue. I can’t see my face and I realize how much work it is. Interminable. Like life.
Art credit: Rebecca Shore, Untitled (22-01), 2022. Acrylic on linen, 40×32 in. Photo by Nick Albertson. Courtesy of the artist and Corbett vs. Dempsey.
This story has been excerpted and translated by Jamie Richards from Marosia Castaldi’s novel Per Quante Vite, first published in Italian by Feltrinelli in 1999. Printed with permission of the author’s estate.
●
A screen is not a wall. It’s only the shadow of a wall.
The screen is very tall. It can’t be passed over or under or around or beside, has no gaps or passageways. Beyond its walls the dead stop or circle round and round waiting for someone to notice them.
I set my empty shoes by it every evening and take it with me everywhere I live. Finding this house at Number 6 Pfeffingerstrasse was very difficult. I searched the city up and down and nothing was right until I found this house. I go up to the mirror and say to myself: you did it. I turn off the light and set my shoes by the screen.
In the morning I go out onto a long and narrow street. On one side it’s numbers two four six eight ten up to the last even number and on the other one three five seven up to the last uneven number. It contains the lives of all its inhabitants up to their last breath and it seems never-ending.
I go out to teach at the school next to my house. And so I feel like I never leave the house as if I was always at home and the shadow or the soul of the screen follows me everywhere. The screen is everything and nothing, and since it can’t be passed over or under or around or beside, it is to me like my life that I can’t pass over or under or around or beside. I limit myself to sticking around it or beside it. Approximately.
And every night I set my empty shoes by it the way you leave flowers on the graves of the dead not because you believe they can respond but to be around them a little more or beside them. Approximately. I’m one of the few who still brings flowers to the graves of the dead but since my dead are far away in fact it isn’t clear exactly where they are but regardless in another city in another place in another time I bring flowers to the graves of strangers like an offering to the unknown soldier.
I go in all directions: back and forth around beside either way you can’t pass through. I go in I go out I put my shoes on I take them off because I know I never leave I never cross any threshold precisely why I live with this one impassable threshold which in the street they say is all blue and that at night I talk to and that I’m very possessive of maybe out of an insuperable nostalgia for crossing thresholds for separating black and white for believing it’s possible to choose between life and death, and sometimes on my way to school I recite to myself “farewell the plumed troops…”
My life is slippery like the surface of an egg that no matter which way you try to grasp escapes your grip and slides away and the enormous screen catches softening the blow and restoring it whole the way it was received. My life absorbs everything omnivorous it devours all the joy and all the pain and I keep staying in it even though it accumulates with cracks and dents, I fill the cracks with strips of glass like they do to test the stability of a house’s foundation.
My house is full of scaffolds cracks glass but the house is still standing just like my legs that continue to cross the threshold and set my empty shoes next to the screen.
The screen is so big it can contain everything. But isn’t that how it is for everyone’s life where we think we’re dying every time our life can no longer be contained and yet we remain here saying we nearly died of joy or sadness unable to retrace our steps to know when we needed to be stronger to keep everything from falling apart and deep down wouldn’t have even cared except that life never listened to us to figure out whether to cease or continue pause or hold on and so the thing that belongs to us most belongs to us least and in no instance can be told what to do?
It was very difficult to find this house and now that I have it, I sit down at the mirror and say to myself: you did it. Because it took time desire glue and a huge space to fit the whole screen inside and to fit my whole life inside but finally we did it.
Dora sits down, takes off her shoes, sets them by the screen and says to me come Dora it’s time to sleep and to forget. She is the one who always remembers everything and always keeps her life in mind, whereas I don’t remember and try to forget, try not to always keep it in mind otherwise I would die every day. How can we go on anyway without forgetting a massive portion of our lives every day?
So she who remembers and I who forget go to bed and we leave our shoes by the screen which returns them to us the next day clean and shiny like a slippery egg whose shell cracks at the slightest impact. In fact every morning my shoes explode in my hands they can’t handle contact they couldn’t handle one more night.
So Dora picks up all the pieces of shoe and puts them on my feet. I grab the shoes and smack her upside the head with them and say don’t do that you’re acting like a drudge! And she whispers back the neighbors are going to hear us! But she knows she’s lying because in Pfeffingerstrasse no one is listening and no one listens to anyone and at this hour they’re all beating themselves up in the silence of their rooms forcing their feet into their shoes to go out and face once again the threshold the light the time past and to come. There, the time is gone. Was it a quarter-hour a century a minute? Have we put our shoes back on again? Yes. We’ve put on our shoes, we put on some clothes we fix our face, we look in the mirror and say to ourselves: you are you and you’re here and not somewhere else and you’re you and he’s him and he’s here and not somewhere else and he’s him and I’m me and I’m really here and not somewhere else and my name is Dora Spengel.
●
On a table there’s a cup a coffeepot. A red bed leans against a wall. A green rug lies under the shoes and on a small white table there are notebooks always open to the same page with diary dates going back a very long time.
Light enters through a window and stops entering. There are two chairs two chairs a table and not even one chair two chairs a table or a window for air. Four walls four walls and the corners between the walls curve squeeze surround the non-landscape of objects. There’s a mess on the floor and pots and books and piles of paper and diary pages always open to the same date.
I look around and take something from the ground from the sky from the floor I put things in order I create a landscape I look at it attached to the screen it runs down the backs of my hands. It sticks. I pick up the brush I glue photos tickets papers corks cards dedications notes all the things left to me by life: a card my brother wrote the day before the day he didn’t know he was dying letters from friends pictures of students restaurant flyers travel brochures leaves from the ground scraps of cloth a picture of my mother coming down a staircase one of my father walking down a street one of my brother hand in hand with my father on another street a creamer taken from a hotel in Prague two frogs caught in a river where we spent our childhood two school compositions newspaper clippings with the wars of the world a photograph of a little boy looking at me through a bullet-ridden window a stone angel’s wing and the angel’s hand coffee grounds empty sugar packets cake crumbs bird wings two plane tickets to Boston a postcard a poem from my youth half-burned candles a picture of the Gulf of Naples an address in Davidsrain where lived a man I loved long ago. Like an immense trash heap or an immense sky. Either way there’s no way through.
●
In Pfeffingerstrasse live Laurie Madansky and her mother who teaches at the same school where her daughter goes. They say that Laurie Madansky tried to poison her mother. It was a big scandal at the school and on the street. Apparently every once in a while the girl attempts some new criminal act against her without ever succeeding and then everything goes back to normal like in a prewritten script repeated every night on the stage of the same theater. There is a Chinese man living here who attempted to murder the owner of the restaurant where he works and, in prison, was overtaken by an irrepressible craving for watermelon. He ate so much of it that he vomited for hours as if he wanted to vomit up his soul every day but couldn’t, and so Pfeffingerstrasse seems to be the street of imperfect actions, which are never perfectly completed and always repeated in an attempt at completion yet seemingly destined never to be resolved, and so in Pfeffingerstrasse the same things happen over and over.
It’s an unquiet street where no one knows how to stay in place and they always need to exceed their limits step out of their roles to renounce their lives and start over again.
On a faded building there is a large sign saying Scuola Staeli. All the students at Scuola Staeli go on a field trip every year to the town of Wratislaw. I keep on the screen the photographs of the inscrutable images we’ve seen in the stone panels at the Wratislaw Cathedral: men beside bunches of grapes men beside bundles of wheat men beside ox carts men behind a counter men behind a table a woman with a child on her knees a woman next to a cross three crosses side by side a woman turned toward an angel.
They’re next to a photograph of my mother coming down a staircase of my father going down a street of my brother hand in hand with my father down another street a little creamer taken from a hotel in Prague two or three frogs taken from a river near where we spent summers as kids two or three notebooks with compositions from school newspaper clippings with reports about wars going on in the world a photograph of a little boy looking at me through a window with a bullet hole the wings of a stone angel and the angel’s hands coffee grounds empty sugar packets cake crumbs bird wings plane tickets a postcard a poem from my youth half-burned candles a picture of the Gulf of Naples an address in Davidsrain where lived a man I loved long ago.
In the evening I lay down my shoes begin the work of collage and it seems like an endeavor unbound to space or time that will last at least as long as my life and every evening I attach new things to my life.
I get into bed and all the things attached to the screen appear in my dreams, alive. They’re moving around and demanding something from me but I can’t tell what. I cover my ears and try to flee. The things chase me. They demand to be reckoned with as if they could no longer stand being left unfinished as if they no longer wanted to be fragments and so I fall face down in the water and die. Floating before my eyes I see so many little green leaves and I wonder: is this what death is like?
I try to reach the other side of the screen but I slip. I won’t give up and I fall again and start over again but the screen leaves me down at its feet next to my shoes and becomes a single blotch of color. My life dissolves in the water it runs down the walls and slips out between the seams of the walls.
I gather newspapers I spread them out on the ground I try to absorb the water I amass pails where I wring out the soaked paper but it gushes drops becomes slippery and there’s nothing more my hands can do. I wake up in a pool of sweat. I look up at the screen, I see its enormous unreachable blue and turn on my side for a while before getting up to go to school.
At school my students are waiting for me: Trotta Winkeler Busch Bosch Bischof Sutter Immendorf Federle Kupper Madansky.
On the way I run into little Madansky who turns aside and snickers. Then she recomposes herself. I offer her a caffé latte as if she were a regular girl and not a failed murderess and when we arrive at school I find her mother there smiling. I think of how many compromises we make in order to go on with our lives and we have another coffee before heading to class.
●
Yeronimus Muller didn’t choose teaching because he likes to teach. He has no particular talent for it although he is a very intelligent man. When he comes out of the classroom I go in. We barely have time to look each other in the eyes because if the students are left alone they’ll get into raging fights. Muller believes that it’s little Madansky who lights the fuse whereas I’m convinced that Madansky has become the scapegoat for every incident and I always stick up for her. After school on the way home the girl follows me silent and awkward it’s like she never wants to leave and in fact she wants to come to my house.
The house is practically empty but it is full of books. I sit down and put them in order. I apply glue to the spines, attach colored paper, reattach the detached pages and place them on a shelf. Then I add to the screen the remnants of my day: a sentence from a student a stone from the street the packet of sugar from my coffee with little Madansky.
Just when I got everything in order one day the landlady called to say she needs the place for her daughter who is getting married.
I go up and down countless flights of stairs in Pfeffingerstrasse and I find a house that’s all white with white walls white windows white ceilings. It’s only a little smaller than the previous place. I pack all the books in cardboard boxes as well as the red bed the green rug the blue table the pots the clothes the chairs and I move everything to the new house.
For a few days I camp out. Then I open the boxes and put the books on the shelves, but there are too many, not all of them fit. So I go around to the local libraries and then to the school libraries. But no one wants them: they have too many as is.
So I attach them to the walls of the screen and again I see rise the impassable wall that encloses my life, but lots of things got lost in the move the bird wings the angel hand the plane tickets. I cover all the empty spaces and gaps with book pages and newspaper articles which I collect by the thousands.
Under the weight of all that paper the screen risks collapsing and so many books have to be thrown in the garbage because nobody wants them, not even the screen; and in the act of throwing them away I see a stream of blood running down the gutter, I plug my ears, I hide my face, I try not to see everyone on the street who has come to take in the spectacle. Not a single one lifts a finger to prevent the books from dying. No one says I’ll take them, I have room at my house. No one says I can keep them at least for a while.
Without a word they head home and shut themselves in with a thunderous slam of the door.
At night I go back to the trash. I pull back out all the book pages all the newspaper pages, take them back home and spend the rest of the night gluing them and putting them in order.
The next day I arrive at school puffy eyed and pale faced. Yeronimus Muller stops and looks at me intently. He notices that I’m not too bad-looking even in these conditions and he starts inviting me to his house until finally I give in and go.
It’s a small place with a green bed a red rug a white table with a coffeepot on top. We get into bed and more and more often since that day we get into bed together while his hands squeeze like pincers and we fall into a stony sleep. We get up and drink everything in sight and go sit down.
One evening I let Yeronimus Muller come to my house. Right off he sees a red bed a green rug a blue table but not the enormous screen. We get into bed. While we’re in bed, I feel like the walls of the screen are pressing down on me and like I can’t breathe and a mortal fatigue looms over my life as Yeronimus’s hands squeeze me like pincers. I think with a sigh I can die now, I lift my hands to my face and say no, it’s not possible that time is really over that there’s not enough left to do anything.
I scramble to pick up Dora Spengel’s hands her face her feet but they keep scattering across the floor. I think of how many times I’ve died already but isn’t that how it is for everyone’s life where we think we’re dying every time because life can no longer be contained and yet we remain here saying we nearly died of joy or disappointment or exhaustion. We remain here unable to retrace our steps to know when we needed to be stronger to keep everything from falling apart and deep down wouldn’t have even cared except that life never listened to us to figure out whether to cease or continue pause or hold on and so the thing that belongs to us most belongs to us least and in no instance can be told what to do.
I try with all I’ve got to collect the pieces of body but they turn evanescent and attach to the screen, become absorbed by the immense blue. I can’t see my face and I realize how much work it is. Interminable. Like life.
Art credit: Rebecca Shore, Untitled (22-01), 2022. Acrylic on linen, 40×32 in. Photo by Nick Albertson. Courtesy of the artist and Corbett vs. Dempsey.
If You Liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.