The text for Housebound was put to paper over the course of six weeks’ service on a Grand Jury convened at the Special Drug Court in lower Manhattan.This was several springtimes ago.

The long afternoons in the courtroom there entailed much sitting around, a confinement completely negligible compared to what was in store for most of the accused, soon to join the truly staggering number of prisoners that the United States, alone in the world, has been busily putting behind bars for decades now (as I read again in the Times three days ago: see “Inmate Count in U.S. Dwarfs Other Nations’“).

Still, our confinement was boring enough, propelling many of us towards inward escapes: crossword puzzles for some, writing for me.

From time to time we’d stir to collective life long enough to follow and then to rubberstamp a prosecutor’s invariably unchallenged indictment of some small-time drug dealer or abuser. Various undercovers (as they were called) came to testify, and it was these faces of the War on Drugs that proved most surprising — had we been anywhere else, I’d have have never guessed they weren’t truly the college student or junkie or handyman that they impersonated so expertly (or were so close to actually being).

Looking out the windows of my apartment in the evenings afterwards, I’d wonder who in the parade of pedestrians on Amsterdam Avenue below were themselves undercovers — or, for that matter, the petty criminals they pursued (since not a few of the arrests chronicled downtown were made in or near our neighborhood, notwithstanding its accelerating gentrification).

I work at home, which all too often means that I pretend to work: idly looking out the streaked windows or gazing at the pockmarked walls — hoping that at least a few of my ideas actually take wing without immediately escaping me. Naturally it was this apartment — these surfaces, these spaces, these shadows, and these views — that I pictured when piecing together Housebound’s sentences and shot-list. Still, when I took out a camera and peered at the place through an actual viewfinder, I discovered its shortcomings. The shots I framed were inevitably too cluttered with family possessions, and no composition was quite clean enough, by which I mean emptied out.

An alternative location came to us almost immediately upon Shelley’s placing an ad on Craigslist — a nearly identical prewar apartment thirteen blocks north of mine, with the same southeastern exposure, but with more dramatic views over Broadway rather than Amsterdam. The family living there vacated the two front rooms for us, and this is where we performed our complicated stereoscopic shoot.

This location proved superior to my place in every respect but one: its walls, unlike mine, had been re-sanded, re-plastered, and re-painted in someone’s recent memory. Thus they lacked the singularity of the walls I am used to — walls that bear traces not only of the many lives lived within them over the years, but even (or so it seems to me) of the innumerable thoughts that have bounced off or been absorbed by them. In short, such walls as these are true the way that a man or woman’s wrinkles are.

 

trued

to true a wall, however, means quite the opposite of what it should.

I remember being struck by the phrase one night in the early 90s when I was still new to the city. Perched uncomfortably on a Frank Gehry cardboard chair, I was mutely following the dinner conversation of middling but affluent artists and their partners. We were gathered at a MacDougal Street townhouse bought by our host (a painter) in the flush of the 80s art market.

The talk was less of art than of home improvement, though the latter phrase was not one they’d have used — and in any case the two categories proved nearly interchangeable here. truing the walls and corners of any given room was evidently a near-sacred task, as were a host of other aesthetic interventions that I can no longer recall.

These artists aspired to live in a kind of spatial (and decidedly materialist) utopia, as if they might inhabit the stripped-down spaces of Minimalist sculpture (of Donald Judd’s, especially). One spouse summed up the whole evening with the glib remark that all artists, no matter how impoverished, instinctively master the art of fine and simple living.

trued walls, indeed.

(Note: compile a list of linguistic cousins: spun, finessed, and what others?)

 

Settling

This old building keeps settling into its foundation in much the same way that I keep settling into my chair, trying to find just the right position for my creaky skeleton, worn out from hours of reading and daydreaming.