INFLATED
All the same on our first day I insisted on going to the museum.
We had read in the newspapers that the place was bankrupt, totally bust. I guess the idea was that we wanted to see for ourselves, we wanted to get ourselves there. We were full of want. Deep into the winter, we hopped into Sally’s car and drove out a whole afternoon. Talking about murk and buoys, we quenched our fancies hopping by beads of Americana off the highway, enabling ice cream floats and double-decker burgers and lofty sceneries, and sure, we were having visions, but driving towards the future is so freeing.
At night the highway turned into an arched boulevard and skirted around a snowbound downtown area with overblown, deserted avenues. Driving slow as twelve miles per hour Sally even said, Look, I am driving through the red lights. We slid our windows open to the fog, even as our necks nearly froze, and I became wordless, making out some blare in the distance. We curbed by exhausted concrete buildings, just the shells, no glazing. In case we were tempted to overlook that this was real life we reached Michigan Central Station. August, entirely see-through even at night. You soon pick up enough to fully register that this is not a spectacle, this is serious.
All the same on our first day I insisted on going to the museum. The art collection, for sale? We later drove again, further out, into largeness. Word was that the metropolis was derelict. We visited McDougall-Hunt neighborhood, Brightsmoor, Obsburn, and Fitzgerald. Slid into perspective, adjusted our likelihoods and inflated tendencies. But it wasn’t about utopias or entertaining fictions either. The city seemed to be sustaining only the brave; not a sleepwalker to be seen. There were witnesses aplenty, and the youth was confident. Not greedy. Rather a free-for-all for anyone willing. There was in truth little action, but I can honestly say that we met zero detractors in the dilapidated city. Each night we ended up at a different bar, and I remember lighting the color of dusk and inky blue, the color of lapis lazuli, the color of Nüt.
The photos in my camera are Xeroxes of our food, too much street art, and of our little rental, cute, above a thrift shop. These do not count. If anything mercantile I brought back a vinyl that I purchased at People’s Records and that I still have. From the museum, I remember a couple dancing*, the bust of a gamin*, and a wishbone*— a precious Pyrex furcula that I thought could easily contain the whole world. I’m not sure why the media and the fearful associate broken-down with fatalism as though we are not involved in the grand scheme of things, the making and the unmaking. Right then when all was hovering, when we were neither indifferent nor complacent, we were in the hourglass, we slid in its neck and it looked like leaving the century of the future, behind. Our bodies were all that allowed our attendance, we were all that we had brought here with us, we were all that we needed to see us through the future, and it felt really possible that.
Roy DeCarava, Couple Dancing, New York, 1956, printed 1990, photogravure print on white wove paper, DIA collection, Museum Purchase, Ernest & Rosemarie Kanzler Foundation Fund.
Augusta Savage, Gamin, ca. 1930, painted plaster, DIA collection, Founders Society Purchase with funds from Gilbert and Lila Silverman.
Lorna Simpson, Act Up Art Box: Untitled, 1994, lampworked Pyrex, DIA collection, Founders Society Purchase, Friends of Modern Art Fund.