02 May 2006 | Turnstile
I saw some photographs of New York City twenty-five years ago that evoked memories of that time—but more: they evoked a vast, overwhelming absence of memories. Not of New York necessarily, but of everything un-photographed, or un-photographable, which is nearly everything.
I sometimes think it all lives in me—everything I’ve seen and experienced, all the people I’ve known. When I think this way, I think of myself as a field in which things grow and die, one after another, each taking root in soil fed by each previous thing, leading all the way back to the first thing, which in a sense still remains. It remains in what remains.
Such are my lyrical moments. Other times, most times, I think of myself as a turnstile: each thing passes through me and is gone forever.
