I live there now
Frank Rodick, 2014; revised 2024
I am in my mother’s room. It’s I who live there now.
– Samuel Beckett, Molloy
I live there now, no. 3, 2012
I took the photograph the Wednesday after the weekend my father died and I’d placed my mother, demented and newly crippled, in a geriatric institution. I mistrust my memory of those days, but I recall it was the last time I set foot in that house, which was full to bursting for decades though empty of warmth. The latter was our fault not that of the house, which over the years becomes only more beautiful, more noble even, in my memory.
Taken on that autumn day in 2004, my original photograph shows the corner of a living room where scant living was done ever, in the house my parents lived in for well over four decades and where I spent the first part of my life.
I’ve told the story elsewhere but if you’ve not heard it here’s the short version. My parents were children of difficult times, personal and historical. War and poverty. Homes and families without comfort. They survived, married, and survived some more, making a living as frugal booksellers. Late in life for such things, they had one child.
They were people who kept everything, and I do mean everything—on shelves and in cabinets, on ledges and floors, in stacks and piles, some like slum towers reaching to ceilings. Everywhere. Today we call such people hoarders, but my parents’ case that understates the existential quality of this disorder. My parents believed that the one thing you threw out might turn out to be much more than something you’d wish later on you’d kept; it might be the difference between destruction and survival, living and dying.
Fear was the temperature of that house.
In the I live there now images, which are constructed iterations from the original photo, you see stacks of books and papers, pictures hung on the wall, and, well, more stacks of things on the desk. Looking at it, I realize it’s not that bad; in fact, it’s one of the neatest, most orderly parts of the house that I can remember. Though they had some amazing things, it would be false and pretentious to call my parents collectors. They would buy books, other things too, almost always with the intent to sell later at a profit. And sometimes they did. But keeping things for the pleasure of it was foreign to them. More often what they bought and found just stayed, alongside everything else they accumulated, because of the above-mentioned fear as well as inertia.
That’s the way my parents’ house, the house of my childhood—I won’t call it my home, which is pointed and petulant—grew. From the inside: like a body filling with detritus and effluent, strange things swallowed whole, a few cells (those would be us) going mad.
I live there now, no. 2, 2012
About these photographs, I’ve been asked if I knew the identities of the people in those pictures on the wall. I have no idea. Which is part of the story, now that I think about it. The house was full of things with origins and details a mystery to me. I never asked—part of that same story.
So, that house—stacked (I’ll describe it some more) with books and magazines and pictures (tens of thousands I’d wager), pieces of utterly mismatched furniture including two chairs I learned much later were purchased from a shuttered brothel (I liked those, the chairs that is, more so after the story), medicines waiting to sicken or kill anyone mad enough to ingest something with an expiration date from decades past, a million odds and ends—all that made up what I now call my chaos rasa. As a child I deliberately missed a lot of school—being scared and lonely on my own was better than being scared and lonely with others—spending most that time wandering through this dark forest. I’d leaf through everything from art books to Holocaust photos (those my mother had already introduced me to, her version of home schooling) to, yes, pornography, some of which was clinical, some comic, some grim and insane. I was a guideless solo traveller—I kept my explorations secret, carefully putting each item back exactly as I found it, which preserved that secret and also allowed me to find again especially irresistible materials—so it was left to me to make sense of it all. As if such a thing were possible for a boy in elementary school.
That may be why I’d make pictures of my own. When you don’t believe in anything beyond this world, and the one you’ve been given is pretty much a shambolic mystery, well, there are lots of blanks to work with. Lots of holes to fill. And lots of things to fill them with.
I live there now, no. 1, 2012
The three versions of I live there now show some clutter and mess, but it’s really not that bad—compared to the rest of the house it’s actually tidy. There’s also this old lamp fitted with a bare light bulb, burning away. It's strangely placed. I know I didn't put it there. My parents must have left it like that when they abandoned the house a few years before I paid that final visit. Who knows, it might have been standing in exactly that spot for a decade or longer.
When I saw it—that bare lightbulb—I thought, that's just one more bit of strangeness in a strange place, this lucency in the corner of the room with its own little space cleared around it, placed on a desk that, like most everything else, wasn’t doing anything but being someplace you put other things. Looking at the photograph I had thoughts of the light as something that passed for a counterpoint to gloom, like a vein of optimism. “A light,” in other words, which sounds a little dramatic, romantic and kitschy.
When I look at the burning lightbulb now, I see it differently, especially since I can’t recall ever switching it on. It feels like a gentle haunting, as if that house—which, when I lived there, was my silent companion in observing and enduring—that house, my house, was letting me know that it was still watching, still living, even as I would be the next to abandon it.
