We lived on Rue d’Enfer, a fact I hope you find wonderful.
We lived near the Hospital of Found Children and Orphans and the site of the famous guillotine. In the Place de la Concorde, a pillar had been erected — a statue made as a gift from Egypt to Paris. The obelisk erected itself inside my imagination as well. I began to dream of Egypt without knowing more of that ancient land than I learned in history books and lessons. You will no doubt accuse me of exoticizing. I confess immediately. I request punishment.
I attended school at the same institution as Molière, Voltaire, and Victor Hugo. I interacted with Chopin, Liszt. There is a dreamy haze to this part of my life, the times before Napoleon III’s rise to power and his declaration as emperor.
On the outside, as you know, I am a man with a success story. A prominent artist, sought-after, world-renowned. But my memories arrange themselves differently from what my lineage and pedigree might suggest. If anything, I would say I was carried to success on a wave of infamy. But even that seems too simple. My memories do not hold still inside a story.
When I worked on the now universally despised Rapp statue — even now I can hear my critics asking about the confounding position of the arm — I fell from the highest point of the scaffolding, near his head. I lay on the floor at the statue’s feet for an entire hour, or so my mother told me later. My brother tried to revive me. I don’t remember much about being unconscious there at the feet of the statue. I do remember that, when I regained consciousness, I saw my brother’s face first. I was covered in leeches.
Sometimes, if I close my eyes, I can still feel the leeches on my chest.
Perhaps that is why I was attracted so to the Room of Burning Cups. Or is that room perhaps a throwback to your nun desires?
Here is an admission that would end my career if anyone but you knew it: I have since then suffered from episodes of amnesia, sometimes including seizures. The seizures feel uncannily like a departure from reality, like traveling to some other time and place. The colors of life turn washed out or muted. People I know to be dead and gone reappear. Sometimes, fragments of previous experience play out before me, as if memories could be acted out on the stage of the brain. The seizures also give me gifts, Aurora — images and ideas to last a lifetime — or maybe time itself cleaving open enough for me to gently pull imagination forth from the slit before it sutures shut.
The seizures, Aurora. No one knows. Should anyone find out, my life’s work would be over. I tell you this as a traded intimacy. The sustaining thrill of knowing you deeply is worth the risk. I tell you this as a spell, in the hope of conjuring you back.
My memories live scattered all over my body, in a way that my knowledge and training do not. I remember, for instance, the first time I made a small model out of wet bread. Before I learned how to use clay. To this day, when I cannot sleep, I will procure bread and knead it with water, using it to create small models — usually of breasts or cocks — in my off hours. It brings me a kind of calm.
But sometimes the forms that emerge from the bread are different: not lovers, but a boy and a girl. Lost, penniless, huddled together.
I am haunted by the dead boy who came before me, inside of whose name I stand.
I am haunted by the girl who lived so briefly.
Sometimes I call the colossus my Big Daughter.
Sometimes I call out to you across time and water. Sometimes I think of following you, stepping off the edge, going to water.
Yours eternally, into the abyss,
My Dawn,
The sun is setting and the water is blue and orange-yellow, with little caps of white diamonds.
The hole you have left in my life is an unsuturable wound.
Inside this last bottle, I will let go of my letter of goodbye, Aurora.
I am leaving this strange and beautiful place called a country. My Big Daughter is done. The colossus is erected. She seems to grow from the very water itself, in certain light. I have a cough I cannot master either, and thus I return by ship tomorrow.
I hope against hope that my daughter, my brainchild, inspires this young nation to think of freedom as alive. Freedom is a living organism, the statue a symbol to carry the life forward. Perhaps presidents will speak at her feet and inspire the people. Perhaps the masses will gather courage from her. Perhaps she may be a beacon for those caught inside tempests.
But I also hope that this country respects and honors that the whole project of constructing and erecting this statue has been one of enormous generosity and self-sacrifice. Time, work, and money have been sacrificed. At risk of immodesty, I believe the colossus to be the most important statue in the world — and I am her father, her existence born of the toil of my imagination and the countless hands of laborers. Are you laughing yet?
I can hear you. “Ah, the male genius. Always spraying itself about.”
I remember well the raps you so devotedly gave my cock in an effort to reroute both my blood and my imagination.
I meant to make you laugh — or to inspire one of your barbed retorts. Now I just feel ridiculous.
I miss you.
Aurora, if you ever meet Liberty, if you are out there somewhere and you have occasion to visit her, to enter her, please know: I have tried to infuse her form with a kind of power — that is, your power, your erotic power, recognized by Plato as the fundamental creative impulse, with its sensual element. Or, to put it differently — for you would never put it the way Plato did, would you; no, you’d call him someone who sublimated sensation so that he might ejaculate intellect — I have tried to invest Liberty with that profound power and unrelenting bliss you carry inside yourself. Your joy. Your command of pure sensation. Your ever-devouring and ever-generating body. The pure rush of you. If only a woman could be that: ungendered into her power. This is why I have rendered Liberty’s masculine and feminine face and body as one. It is my understanding of you, beloved. No other woman like you exists, except in the form of Liberty. No virgin, no mother, no sister, daughter, wife, or whore. Only Liberty.
I can see your face in youth, bleeding and laughing, sutures ripped open, a bloody apple on the floor.
How we picked the apple back up and ate it with zeal. How you birthed desire and imagination in a boy forever.
My loss is eternal.
My love is likely lost with you — my deepest love — although, you are right, in the end you are always right, we need another word for it.
—
The bottle I pitch into the water is blue this time. A current catches the object, and then all is writ in water.
Ethnography 6
Underneath the massive Capitol building — with its external layers of pomp and authority, with its internal ceremonies and work conducted by elected officials as busy as bees, with its mighty facade of security and order, with its countless portals of ingress and egress, a whole underground city of laborers keeps things running. There are hundreds of us hidden in the bowels of the buildings. Painters and cleaners and plumbers and electricians, mechanics and sanitation workers and food preparation workers. Our bodies carry a different story from those that make the news. The mopping and waxing have given many of us — at least those of us who have worked more than thirty years — arthritis. The marble dusters sometimes break down. I dust the woodwork and clean the cigarette and cigar ash. There are thirty-nine buildings to clean and an underground subway and 1,400 restrooms. There are graveyard-shift architectural and engineering employees, as busy as invisible night creatures.