CHAPTER 1

BEGINNINGS

I am sitting in the kitchen of a borrowed home on West Walnut in Carbondale, Illinois. On the

nightstand that used to sit next to your bed when you used to live here is my laptop and this document

open. When the pandemic first began we needed to move into a larger space. The garage house we were

living in was no longer big enough to contain our lives. The garage where we once lived sits across the

alley from this house. The house where we used to live together. I am sitting in the kitchen writing

because I am sick of sitting in the office. Or maybe, I sit here because the further North I go into the

house the more objects I encounter from a three-year failed relationship. Objects left behind by you.

Much like this nightstand I have my laptop set on. Every morning I wake up on the bed you bought some

years ago with your first paycheck from the funeral home. We used grandpa’s truck to fetch the bed and

box frame. It was the largest you had ever made. I remember how stressed out you were about the whole

ordeal. We didn’t live in the same house then but that would soon change. And, as I go through my house

now, creeping from the bed into the kitchen I find inherited cooking tools — utensils and flatware you

grandmother bought us for our engagement. Your magnets left behind on the refrigerator door. Our

engagement photos and broken ring in a bag above the microwave. I move into what should be a dining

room and encounter the old cat tree I bought for our cats, our mannequin Christmas Lady, a table from the

house your dad bought in Galesburg, and paintings I painted before we ever lived together. In the room

where the cats poop, there’s a TV stand, the old cat carrier, your nightstand, and the street cone you stole

while I was in India. Through the door is the office where we were supposed to work together. Your desk

used to sit directly next to mine like some fantasy of two academics writing their way through the world

—changing it slowly one email at a time. Every day I am here I encounter these things you left behind. I

am not upset, or bitter, or resentful about any of this. I do not wake up in the night screaming your name

in shame, nor do I speak badly about you. But I do have to encounter these objects every single day. And I

am reminded of Rainer Marie Rilke (whose name I always mispronounce) and his poem Archaic Torso of Apollo .

I first encountered this poem at Knox College, in a translation course taught by the always

present and thoughtful Gina Franco. We were asked to take a poem in its original language and translate it

into English. Not as a task but as a function of art creation, of finding a way to encounter something and

retell it, to make it our own. To write a new poem based on a previous poem. In Archaic Torso of Apollo,

Rilke is encountering the torso of Apollo. He is imagining the missing ligaments of the body, he is finding

lost pieces of the body, now whole, inside his mind and that of those who find themselves before the

legless, armless, headless representation of the Greek god:

We cannot know his legendary head

with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso

is still suffused with brilliance from inside,

like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power.

Rilke goes further about this power that gleams for only a few more stanzas, or rooms. His idea is to

invoke through the poem itself the same feeling, or visually represent the body of Apollo within the

reader’s mind. He wants you to not only read the poem but encounter the statue and the fully body of

Apollo. This method works in a multi-modal function, one of creation, all on the basis of what is simply

not there.

When I see your objects in this house—the golden flatware, the spatulas, the toys for your cats

who are no longer here—I see your body in this house. I see you standing in the kitchen microwaving

dinners I made while you were at work. I see your body lying in the bed that you bought with the money

from the funeral home where you worked. I see you naked in the bathtub, giggling at videos on the

internet. I see your figure in the light, blocking out the shadows of this life. And much like Rilke when he

encounters Apollo, as I confront the random objects unable to fit in your Honda Civic when you left, I

find myself repeating the last lines of the poem: Would not, from the borders of itself / burst like a star:

for here there is no place / that does not see you. You must change your life.

I have had in intimate relationship with grief over the past few years of my life. I am not unique

in my journey, but the ability to lean into such feelings has granted me a pathway into expression, a

cavernous route not possible had I ignored the moments that pain me the most. Through photographs I

have found the past and the present and new discoveries by what is contained in this it’s vessel like

structure. Within Cinema I have found ways to put into motion the seemingly un-motionless like a

scattering of kicked rocks I can see the life of my life quickly disperse into anew. And here, with these

words I can maintain a place where I used to live and in a number of days, or years, you can comeback

and check this watermark. Although, it is maddening to encounter your objects every day that I live here

on West Walnut, I know that, much like grief, these feelings will never go away. They will lessen the

more I consider what it means to see your every day in objects, and in this house where we used to live

together.

This institutional academic document sounds more like a letter, but what is a thesis, if not a letter

to ourselves? A letter to the past, to loved ones, and to a future where we no longer live here. A letter like

the ways in which my short films often bargain with the dead and ask for them to speak again. Or the

letters that show textually within their image the past of our selves and where we used to sleep. The

places we will never be again are contained within these letters and these art pieces.

I know I cannot ignore the grief I feel in this house from our separation, from when grandma

died, or when you cremated my grandpa, from before we knew each other, when my father died much too

young. These moments still live with me every day. And with this collections of work I am representing

those loses. I am encountering my life through these works and allowing the audience to encounter

something possibly familiar or unfamiliar to them. I am making what we may choose to ignore but what

needs to be said for our selves in a the selfish act of remembrance.