oil street project

what I was working on today...



In the days before I died, I felt the gravity of the future pressing into my soul. This unbearable heaviness, I was sure, was the cause of my death. It started with an intense recognition of the men and women who would be dying here and how the shape of the land would be changing and how the things I thought were beautiful would no longer be. But to have such a picture of the future weigh inside of me so heavily as to have it devour my young and unaccomplished life was nonsense, for who in history had not lived into his future without the slightest longing for the simpler past? But let me tell you, my dread was of a different type. When I thought about the wear and tear that was to happen to this house in the coming years and years, I felt all the clamoring and battering that it was to endure, happening, inside of me, in an accelerated manner. In a day, I felt I aged a year. In a month, I had aged decades. But it was all happening internally. My physical appearance held up. I passed off as a very eligible, if not coveted, bachelor. I was something of a fashion connoisseur in those days, and today is no different, especially when I see I have guests. I intend to make myself presentable in case I happen to be captured on your cameras. But this weight, this dread, you would never understand.




1)

You have come at last, to see my home, this estate where I lived my final days. What brings you here? What brings you to open my doors and put my lights on and off and take pictures and examine the shapes of my windows? I am not upset. Feel free. Roam around. I have already let go, even of this house, even of the very room where I stayed through my dying days, I have let go.

I was very sick in the days leading up to my death, even though my appearance assumed nothing of that weathered look of the ill. I was, in their view, every bit normal. A thoughtful, well-mannered gentleman, they had often said. I never told anyone of my condition, and even if I did, no one would believe me, and I would have to convince them, somehow, of something they could not see with their eyes. This unbearable gravity of the near future, I would have to tell them, as though it was an object I could pull out of my pocket, hold in my palm, like a piece of crystal, “Don’t be deceived,” I wanted to tell them. “See how venomous it is?”

Of my grave condition, those who noticed merely said my decisions had taken on something of a quirky quality. I started to keep myself in that room, the tower, as they called it. Go ahead. Walk right in. If anything, you must understand, I had chosen to put myself there. They did not put it upon me. No. I chose to have that room all along. For someone so dreaded by the passivity of my condition and the sense of helplessness bestowed upon me by the sudden and intense recognition of the inevitable decay that was to come, choosing the place for my final retreat was the last bit of self-direction I could muster.

Notice, the neatly assembled terracotta plates that pave a road for me over the roof, giving me access, should my spontaneity take over in any unforgiving minute, I decide to skip out and venture across the fields and up the hills where I would evaporate and be read about in the morning paper. That was their wish. I did not grant them this pleasure. The tower, with its thick, hefty beams and acrid fragrance, still breathes an austere resilience.