I live there now

statement

Frank Rodick
Revised 2022.

It was the last time I saw the inside of that house in Montréal, full to bursting all those years but at the same time empty.

That was the autumn day in 2004 when I took the photo showing 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 seventeen years of my life.

I took the photograph just after the weekend my father died and I’d placed my mother, immobile and demented, in a geriatric institution. I mistrust my memory of those days and weeks, but I recall it was the last time I ever set foot in that house.

I’ve told the story elsewhere but if you’ve not heard it here’s a short version. My parents were children of difficult times, personal and historical. War and poverty. Homes and families without comfort. They survived, married, and made a living as booksellers. They had one child.

They were people who kept everything — on shelves and in cabinets, in stacks and piles on ledges and on floors, some reaching to ceilings. Anywhere and everywhere. Today we call such people hoarders, but in the case of my parents that understates how existential this chaos was. My parents believed that the one thing you threw out might turn out to be much more than something you’d later wish you’d kept; it might be the difference between destruction and survival. Living and dying. 

The electric crackle of that fear was often the only sound in that house.

In these images, you see stacks of books and papers, pictures hung on the wall, and, well, more stacks of things on the desk. Now that I look at it, it’s one of the most orderly parts of the house 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, often with the intent to sell later at a profit. And sometimes they did. But more often what they bought and found just stayed. Forever it seemed.

That’s the way the house of my childhood — it may be petulant but I won’t call it my home — grew. From the inside: like a large body filling detritus and effluent, strange things swallowed whole, and a few cells going mad.

———

About this picture, a friend asked me if I knew the identities of the people in those pictures on the wall. I have no idea. Which for me is part of the story. The house was full of things, their origins and details a mystery to me. Of course, I never asked — another part of a longer story.

So, that house — stacked with books and pictures (thousands and thousands), pieces of mismatched furniture, medicines long gone toxic, a million odds and ends — was what I now call a chaos rasa. As a child I missed a lot of school, spending most my time at home wandering alone through this dark forest — leafing through everything from art books to pictures of the Holocaust to pornography. I had no guide — I kept my explorations secret, carefully putting each thing back exactly as I found it — so it was left to me to make sense of it all. As if that were possible.

That may be why years later 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.

———

In the three versions of I live there now there’s clutter and mess, but 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. Who knows, it might have been standing there for years.

When I saw it — the lightbulb in the picture that is — 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 picture I had moments when I saw the light as something that passed for a counterpoint to gloom, like a vein of optimism. 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 haunting, like that house — which, when I lived there, always seemed darkly alive — was letting me know that it was still living even as I abandoned it.

———

The title comes from Molloy by Samuel Beckett: 

I am in my mother’s room. It’s I who live there now....

When I reread those lines years ago, I knew I'd work them into a title for these images. Not in the facile sense that I’ve become like my mother, or my parents (though who can say?). It's about getting to a point in life that has as much to do with experience as age, a time when endings appear in sharper relief than beginnings, with edges that are worn. The shadowy withering of things is something I can feel now, instead of just imagining or appreciating the idea of it.

Thinking of my mother, I wonder if she saw these things as well. I was going to say I should have asked, but I know that wouldn’t — it couldn’t — have happened. But before her mind went — and maybe after, who knows — my guess is she saw them too. 

———

Like the Revisitations works — which also have an intimate relationship to that house — I installed some of these images in their own wooden cases. Boxed, these small pictures have an intimacy, a privacy, I like. When the box closes the picture dies, and it waits — for someone to open the lid and bring everything back to life.