morningtomorning.net 

Mr. Bond walks into the room. Impeccable as always, my dear Mr. Bond, where have you been? how many drinks have your had? Please, have a seat, you don´t look too well, for even though your shoes are polished, your cuffs clean, your forehead is covered with the slightest layer of sweat. I suspect you patted your face lightly with your hankerchief before you walked in. I can tell because it hangs loose out of your jacket´s front pocket, as if folded hastily. I know you can´t help it. Sweating profusely. Who is it Mr. Bond? What troubles your mind? Is it that woman with the semi-oriental eyes, or that semi-naked blonde that surged from the water with shells in her hands. James, I haven't seen you in almost three years, I wonder who tailored your suit, who fashioned your drink, who was the last person you ejected from your car, what terrorist organization you last dismantled? Tell me Mr Bond, how does a man walk into a room, how does he treat a woman, how does he order his drinks? What kind of car do I want? When did you start going to the gym? Is that why you quit smoking?  When did your manners change, and why? Was it that trip you took to the moon? or was it the end of the cold war when you took your most deserved vacation? where did you go? The Bahamas? Honolulu?  James, the world revolves around you, it goes through crisis after crisis, wars are fought, peace is made, generations die, generations are born, yet you remain impeccable as always. Double O seven, a code name moving just as delicately as time moves. 

And if by any chance you find yourself in another time, in another place, or in another place but at the same time, or on another time in a similar place but in a different space and yet the air resembles that smell, you might think, for a quick second, it is 6:37 and you are sitting in that room looking out the window at the traffic on Avenue Nevski. There, in that moment you realized your life would never be the same, but soon after you forgot, in that moment when your life could have turned a different corner but instead you remained sitting there. Not out of fear or laziness or any reason in particular, you just remained sitting there because you thought the moment lasted longer than it did, so you thought you could indulge in it for a little bit longer, you thought you could leave your thoughts for a short time and they would still be there. But as you sat there, your head empty of thought, the thought quickly faded and the moment of revelation melted into the sunny afternoon blended with the crowd walking outside your window, between their hats and coats and slowly walked down Avenue Nevski unrecognizable. 

Still in this other time in this other place, or in this other place at the same time, or in this place that is a different space at another time of day when you smell that smell you ask yourself: what was it? 

But you cannot remember. So you stay sitting there in another time, in another space wondering if next time you smell that smell, in a different time, in a different place, you will finally remember and maybe stand up and turn that dusty corner into a different life, or if perhaps, and even more likely, you'll remember what it was, the content of you restlessness, of your unease, and imagine yourself sitting there watching it leave letting it walk away down another street at a different time. 

I've still kept your martini cold in Tokyo, St. Petersburg, Istanbul or the sunny beaches of Jamaica, Miami and the Bahamas. But you are a different man, no wonder a different man.

But safe here, in this collection of lost and burnt, these are images you have never seen. Not in New York, not in Tokyo or Paris. Not in any catalogue of art history, or any text book. Museums will never show them in an exhibition, not only because they don't have them and not because they are not worth their money, it's just because for some reason or other they got lost, burnt, destroyed. Yet. Do you remember them? These images, for example, this one: It's a rather obscure painting, from far away it looks like another abstract painting on the gray scale, but walking closer to it you realize it looks like a cave of sorts, with all these crevasses, a light shining on it, a light of a small radius, a flashlight perhaps, lighting only small pieces of an angled surface that mean nothing by themselves. Of course inside you know it goes in deep, it might be the deepest cave you've ever stood in front of, and it reminds you of your insides and it makes you think of all the spaces of your childhood, nearly forgotten; the drawers, the shelves in the kitchen, the dusty surfaces inside decorative furniture, the compartment underneath the bed where you stored the plastic train and the plastic train tracks, the big drawer in your desk where you kept the pencils and the glue, and old notebooks and magazines and coins and drawings of superheroes, and you figure you can't remember what else went in there but you do remember the cavity configuration and what kind of things you expected to find inside, the drawers in the closet, underneath the sink inside, the crate, behind, the linens, and it looks like your insides perhaps and you think of how time has made this cave even deeper, and how the light will never touch these spaces, contained in bigger ones, that hide in the darkness, out of the sight and out of the  reach of this small radius of light that reminds you of a flashlight. 

There are other paintings that you might or might not remember. For example, there is this other painting by another artist from another time period, it is this fast sailing vessel in the middle of a colossal storm. I hope you remember this one, this might be my favorite one: No where to go, no land in sight, the waves curve the horizon and wrap it around you leaving you with nothing to hold but the mast of the ship. The wood bends. There is no escape. The water, malleable, at times solid as a mountain, at times particularized into drops thinner than air, surround you, you, in the middle of kilometers deep and wide of it. No how now. Quiet down! you can ask over and over but it is inevitable, the waves rise hundreds of feet above your head, waters sink and pull you beneath, waves crash against the bulwarks, another breaking the mast, the same one tipping us over. But you see it from inland. You've painted it before. You remember it. 

By the way, Jarvis awoke at night and found himself sleeping next to Ms. Brown. His tough hands resting on her naked skin, and moving just as delicately as time moves he slipped his hand, originally resting on her hip, down her under belly to her crotch. Mysteriously he was not surprised by the flacid penis he found and held in his hand, or that as time snuck quietly it grew harder against his fingers. 

In this still life, a life still, Life still offers you a gap a door. 

I wound up in front of a painting, one you love so well. A still life of five objects that just happened to end up on a table; because the artist maybe thought about them all and collected them in order to paint them, or because he had just left a pen on the table the week before and it happened to lay right next to the glass of water he forgot to drink that morning, and underneath the wrinkled wrapping paper left over from that christmas gift that happened to be the book laying a few inches to the left of the glass of water and the wrapping paper. He probably did have to bring the skull that usually rested on his bedside table to make the composition more interesting or something. Now in front of your eyes. Quite helpless. Inevitable. Because only in the peace and quiet of a simple life can the mind focus on it's own ramblings. In a life still thoughts carry their accustomed pace and trace their habitual patterns and  then a 91 degree angle is different from a right one.