Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through
Page 4
Where the gold sends you, I think,
is to a better version of the world you are in,
with a golden light to it.
Gonzalez-Torres and Ross continued, briefly, to live in Los
Angeles,
the city being the only place they cohabited, with Ross dying
about six months later.
After encountering the piece, they called every sunset they saw
“the Gold Field,”
Horn having, as Gonzalez-Torres said,
“named something that had always been there.”
Simon and I, hiking back from the waterfall, commit to visit
Iceland and Greenland together.
He will take photographs of the ice, and I will write of it,
we decide, although how we think we will pay for this trip, we
don’t say.
“You need that space, you need that lifting up, you need that
traveling in your mind that love brings, transgressing the limits
of your body and your imagination,”
Gonzalez-Torres said, explaining the import of love to art.
Which is true, although it is not clear to me, what it is that I
am imagining Simon and I are together, when I am imagining
we are together,
somewhere else.
I say,
“You know that I’m talking about you when I talk about
the ice,”
and he assures me that he understands, which I accept,
although this is the most directly we have spoken of ourselves
to date.
On this hike, we often must decide if we will step on a thin
sheet of ice, which might break and release us into the cold
and shallow creek water,
or slip across the ice-slicked shale and limestone.
Sometimes Simon reaches out and grabs my arm, so I don’t fall,
and when one of us does slip, we each break into laughter,
happy with the sun shining gray, or maybe silver, through the
bare branches of the trees.
But no matter how far away you manage to get, still you will
find yourself there.
The northernmost base of the United States Air Force is the
Thule Air Base, in Greenland, 750 miles north of the Arctic
Circle’s boundary,
its location decided by the U.S. and the Kingdom of Denmark.
Its closest neighboring village, across sixty-five miles of ice and
stone, is Qaanaaq,
home to the Inughuit population who were forcibly displaced
north when the base came;
in 1951, a group of hunters returned from an expedition to
find the American military there, raising buildings and preparing
for a potential nuclear escalation in the Korean War.
The Thule Air Base today fulfills a few functions, primarily
keeping watch for (and potentially shooting down) intercontinental
ballistic missiles headed to the United States,
its location being halfway between Moscow and Washington,
while assisting with the Global Positioning System, performing
satellite surveillance, and housing advanced weapons,
among whatever other secrets conspire there.
It is where, in 1968, a subsonic bomber crashed into ice, damaging
and nearly detonating four hydrogen bombs.
One bomb was lost forever, its twelve kilograms of plutonium
dispersed in the ecosystem, where furless seals now sometimes
roll on the glaciers.
What a pair—
that imagined perfect ice, so much of it that Simon’s imagistic
obsession and mine, twinned, might be united there,
and our militarized state, with its enduring aggressions, ensuring
that the ice will melt.
This is not a Thule imagined, not the place Christopher
Columbus claimed to have seen, but one made,
built on ruins over six centuries old, as soldiers communicate
with far-flung satellites and missiles.
It’s a place that is often accessible only by aircraft, where not
a single road leads.
It’s on a map, so even if you can’t go there, still, you can
find it.
Is beauty panacean, able always to instill in us moments of
transcendence?
Or does the sun just melt the ice,
beauty appreciated only when it is the constituent hum of a
thing that fades?
“When people ask me,
‘Who is your public?’
I say honestly, without skipping a beat,
‘Ross.’
The public was Ross,”
Gonzalez-Torres asserted.
And really, no matter how public the art, the speech act, no
matter how many people are gathered around the table, aren’t
we at our core just speaking to one person?
If today I spoke with one person,
and if we both heard one another,
there might be enough value in that.
It might even make things better, or start to change something
that needs to change, if we both rest, and pay attention to
one another.
Yet when pressed on his statement, asked later if his ideal
audience of Ross meant that he didn’t care about the public,
Gonzalez-Torres clarified:
“You know, I’ve said that sometimes as a joke, sometimes
seriously.…”
So yes, of course, both:
a thing conceived to be so confidential and amatory that only
one person can be in mind,
and then given again and again to someone else.
Because there are no limits to how much we can give each
other, when we recognize that none of this was ever ours to give,
and as we give each other the world.
Gold Field initiated a collaborative friendship between
Gonzalez-Torres and Horn.
First came a private gift, a square of gold foil sent from her to
him, after the two met in 1993.
Then, gifts that were shared with everyone—
by Gonzalez-Torres, a spread of gold-foiled candy and a curtain
of golden beads.
Horn returned to Gold Field later, but this time making two
sheets.
As Gonzalez-Torres described it,
“Two, a number of companionship, of doubled pleasure, a pair,
a couple, one on top of the other.
Mirroring and emanating light.
When Roni showed me this new work she said ‘there is sweat
in-between.’”
The gold candy, made shortly after their meeting, he called
“Untitled” (Placebo–Landscape for Roni).
It was an endless supply, the size and shape of which would
vary from gallery to gallery, depending on the space being
filled.
The candy works had what Gonzalez-Torres called an “ideal
weight.”
Among them, this gold candy was the heaviest, at twelve
hundred pounds—
a similar piece from 1991, also called “Placebo,” but with silver
wrappers, comes in a close second,
while the other candy piles are at most a fraction of that
weight, typically either the weight of Ross, or of the two of
them together.
It is quite big, after all, the way that a placebo does not work—
but also, by virtue of hope, or perhaps imagination, sometimes
does.
Roni Horn began to visit Iceland regularly years before this,
in 1975.
separate myself from,”
she explained.
“Any place you’re going to stand in, in any given moment,
is a complement to the rest of the world, historically and
empirically.”
As I discuss the trip north with Simon, to Horn’s Iceland and
the Thule of Greenland, I decide to keep these fantasies to
myself.
Instead, I show him how thin the gold is,
which is nice,
he says.
Simon and I still talk about going on vacations sometimes, usually about me going to visit him in Arizona, where he grew up, or him meeting me where I am. We used to mainly talk about going places we hadn’t been but now we talk about going where we are. One thing is that now if I go to Iceland, I’m going to Iceland without Simon. I am denied, and have denied myself, any possibility of touching the ice of Iceland (where yes, I know there’s not that much ice), or of there contemplating Roni Horn, without these experiences being formed in relation to a lack of Simon, as so many things seem to locate themselves in lack.
I’ve had the same stuffed animal since I was a child, and I have him here in Brooklyn, sometimes tucking him up in Jackson’s arms when I wake early and leave bed. He travels with me and his name is Bow Wow. What happened was my great-grandmother gave me a stuffed dog, which I named Bow Wow. Then, after she died, my grandmother gave me another stuffed dog, the Bow Wow we love today. Because there was already a Bow Wow, I named this new Bow Wow “Bow Wow 1.” I was then given another stuffed dog, by another old woman, and I named him “Bow Wow 2.” With Bow Wow 2 on board, our childhood hijinks (riding spaceships and hiding from goblins in a forest) were a bit crowded, so Bow Wow was retired to the closet. Around high school, I tired of Bow Wow 2, so he, too, was sent to the closet. When Bow Wow 1 was the only Bow Wow left, we dropped the honorific and he assumed the name Bow Wow, after the original.
Bow Wow has never been sexualized, but the love I feel for Bow Wow, and the pleasure I get from holding Bow Wow, and the comfort of knowing that Bow Wow will be there is a love, pleasure, and comfort not unlike what I used to feel from Simon. One thing about Simon is that, even if we rarely fucked, we almost always held each other in our sleep, and when we didn’t, I could just flip my back to him and pull Bow Wow close again. While Bow Wow has never been sexualized, then, he does come very close to sexuality. Holding and being held by Simon could sometimes verge into the sexual, like those early morning moments, waking to touch. Bow Wow is in a weird position now because I have similar feelings for Jackson (who is holding whom, and when), and there is always that question of whether we will fuck or not, a possibility even though it is almost always realized. Bow Wow has been there for all of this, my flipping back and forth between some guy and his stuffed plump, these libidinal undercurrents to it all. It’s a lot for the little fellow to take on.
After Jackson makes a little money one night, he and I take first the subway to Harlem, and then a train to a cavernous building on the Hudson River that was once a facility for printing the boxes of Nabisco products but is now a museum of modern and contemporary art. On the way, he reads the essay I wrote in verse about when the critic didn’t go on a second date with me and I watch the water and read some of Mausoleum of Lovers (the train being fairly empty, or empty enough to read). Inside the museum right away there is a room of Agnes Martin paintings. I first started to like Agnes Martin because of something my friend Kate said, although I can’t remember what that was—all I have left of Kate’s impression of Agnes Martin is Agnes Martin’s paintings. The painter didn’t talk much herself, which is good, that her work is kept a bit removed like that. “When you’re with other people, your mind isn’t your own,” she once said, and although she was talking about perception, and connecting to the realm of feeling, I think about language, too. Can you be alone with language? What a dream that would be, what a nightmare.
Jackson and I don’t say anything after entering the Agnes Martin room and we start to walk quickly. I’m surprised that I’m uncomfortable—how silent the Agnes Martin paintings are in the silent room. The loudest thing is probably the resonance of one pink, pale pink, or green past where its color ends, the line a small border but it changes everything, and even this is pretty quiet. I practice not making the silence or the quiet noise into metaphors but letting them be as they are. I can’t decide whether this means I should stop or start thinking about the years when Agnes Martin did not paint, so I try to do both to un-either them. One of the paintings is called Love, and one is called Perfect Happiness. It seems so exacting, to get a straight line like that, off of which to abstract. When we’re out of the room I say, “I like Agnes Martin, so does Kate,” and Jackson nods, and tells me that he doesn’t.
Around one quiet corner are piles of rectangles and circles of felt and copper, and the rough sculptural material makes me think of a construction site, and the absence of other visitors makes that construction site into a cruising ground. I’m too nervous about getting caught to try to initiate anything with Jackson and can’t find a way to fake-initiate something without risking the loss of that desire, so I keep it to myself and feel blood rushing. I read on the wall that these piles are supposed to be batteries, moving and keeping energy, and that for some reason makes the want dissipate anyway. In the downstairs it’s again sexy, with Bruce Nauman hallway-tunnels and small televisions displaying our own selves elsewhere situated, but there are too many people here. We both take a large pink sheet with an essay on it. It tells us to press our bodies against a wall and imagine a double of our body pressing back on the other side of the wall, like the wall becomes your body, and it ends by saying this “may become a very erotic exercise.” The walk to exit the museum seems to cover more space than the walk into the museum, as though the architecture is requiring me to return to things I have already seen, navigate away from them, and find I have returned to them once more.
I tell Jackson that the essay where the critic doesn’t go on a second date with me is part of a book about Felix Gonzalez-Torres, ice, and sex. Its opening line is, “It is spring, and the season of ice has passed.” Although I am not writing this book at all, really, lately. What can move it forward if my feet touch his and that’s it? Instead what I’m really writing is a love letter to prose, a book that is slutty about it. Like how pleasure, written into the structural, open field of prose, is so lively—the first descriptions of green life and friendship in Century of Clouds, a pestle and mortar in Zami. When we at last reach the museum exit, the air outside is different than it had been when we entered, rewarding us, so we sit in the meditation and sculptural garden for a bit. We walk to the train when it starts to rain, go back to retrieve Jackson’s backpack he had checked and forgotten, and return to the train just after the sky opens into a downpour, soaking the pink sheets we then lay across the backs of empty seats. When they dry they are damaged but we still keep them. I realize as Jackson falls asleep against my arm that fooling around in the battery room and getting caught and kicked out would have improved this day and the story of this day both.
If the story of one of these days, a day this summer, had a title it might be “(with dancer),” or “Take Me Home,” or “My Body in a Doorway.” I might call one of these days “Gravity,” or “Endless Bottoms.” A summer like “They Do the Boyfriends in Different Genres,” or “Climate Change and the Extra-Estrogenized Body.” But anyway, who wants a title? So claustrophobic, when I’d rather just float away in the parenthetical, or jump right in.
There are still some porn shops with cinema booths in Manhattan, even if the theaters are gone, and we can get there without much effort; we just have to take the Q train and then wander. The first time I saw sex was in Emmanuelle in Space, which aired on Cinemax late at night in the mid-1990s, and somehow all non-internet porn, including the porn lining the shelves in 2015, seems to have a simila
r age to the age of Emmanuelle, oversized cases with covers where the words are so big they block out the bodies and the bodies are so big they block out the words. The show is a soft-core series where aliens come to observe Earth. The aliens’ leader, Haffron, meets a magnificent slut, Emmanuelle, who is described by the opening voice-over as “one of the most sensual and beautiful of all Earthlings.” Haffron and his extraterrestrial friends learn about sex from her, finding it both exciting and bewildering, as they don’t have sex on their planet, nor have they seen it anywhere else in the whole universe. For the remainder of the series, Haffron and Emmanuelle fuck all over the world, occasionally shape-shifting so they can fuck while inhabiting other bodies, too. I watched Emmanuelle in Space toward the end of junior high school, usually with one of the guys in my neighborhood. This was shortly after premium channels started showing up on our TV, a mistake on the part of a cable installer, I think.
Jackson and I find one East Village sex shop by again hiding from the rain, bouncing first into a corner store for candy, then back through the rain when we spot the porn signage across the street. We go into a cinema booth and I immediately reach my hand down the front of his shorts where he’s wet, but a man pulls the curtain back and interrupts us: “One at a time,” he scolds. The characters in Emmanuelle have this kind of sex, too, where the camera cuts away every few seconds, where penetration is suggested and elided. Watching the show, I also looked and looked away, changed channels and changed back. In most episodes, the cutaways are cuts to the landscapes of the earth or cuts to the aliens, hooked up to virtual headsets and caressing the air. The closest I had come to seeing a visual depiction of sex before this was on a condom box I found at a playground, the instructions inside of which showed a hand and an erect shaft, or something like a shaft. Emmanuelle couldn’t show this image, which would have been too explicit for Cinemax. Instead, viewers received the landscapes of the earth, sometimes one of those New Yorks that has alleys. That is, I received everywhere that I was not, the places I am now.
Around the time I watched Emmanuelle, I was also starting to fool around with guys my age and a bit older. These were moments of convoluted exposure (clothes lost in bets or games), occasionally verging into contact, a friend closing his eyes or touching himself to signal to me. The town was very small, fifteen hundred people or so, nearly everyone white and working class. There was an old abandoned hotel at its center, from when loggers passed through a century ago, and I would sometimes bring a friend to fool around there, a place that felt both vulnerable and private. When I started high school, the chances to fool around disappeared, the reality and implications of what we did lowering down. Senior year someone lit fire to the hotel. That evening, one of the guys down the road knocked on my window, woke me, and together we watched it burn to the ground.