Felix Gonzalez-Torres, "Untitled (Placebo-Landscape-for Roni)," 1993

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled (Placebo-Landscape-for Roni),” 1993

In the room where they used to meet there wasn’t any furniture. There were black cushions designed so that they folded in half and you could lean the top half against the wall and sit on the bottom half. Then there was an assortment of pillows, all covered with gold velour. When the room was set for a meeting the black cushion seats lined the walls and one of the gold pillows was placed on each. The golden pillowos had accumulated over time unlike the black ones, which were sort of institutional in their uniformity. The soft gold cotton velour varied slightly; they must have been found or made in batches, collected over many years and added to the hoard, subtle variations on a theme, different ratios of rectangle and texture. Between meetings, we children would pile all the cushions up in the middle of the room, throw ourselves on the pile laughing or stage wild pillow fights. Once we broke a window, the one that looked out on the path and the cherry tree, towards the lawn.

Over the years how many hours of meditation did those pillows witness? How many hours of pillow fights? After the last meditation, by which time I was no longer a child — the one where we were all told to go out into the grounds and “let go” of the place because they were selling it — I lost my shit I was so angry. I grabbed the golden cushion I was sitting near and cried hard into it. In the dark softness against the pillow, damp with tears, I formulated the only plan I could. I decided to do something.

But what I did is another story — as is the one explaining who “they” are and who “we” were. For now I only want to talk about this pillow.

Maybe that day or the next I snuck it, the pillow I had cried into, out of the meeting room and hid it under the dark of the yew tree at the back of the building. I took it home with me. I am hoarding it like a seed or a precious sourdough mother. I know that one day I will make more, that it has generative powers. I have been watering it with tears for nearly a decade now. Soon I will be ready to begin making more pillows. I imagine a pile of pillows, one for each of us, piled up into a cairn, like the artworks of Felix Gonzalez Torres, his fields of sweets in golden wrappers free for those viewing to take away, memorializing in generosity the weight his beloved lost to AIDS.

The velour seems fragile now, and grubby, like a cheek kissed by a lover at their leaving that you never want to wash again. The lines of the weft create striations in the gold. It is soft; you can fold it in half or scrunch it up. Sometimes I see it, lying on the seat in the room in the house in which I live now, in London, and I am compelled. I stop what I’m doing and I put my head down on it and close my eyes and let my senses tell me I am somewhere else. Nostalgia, literally the pain of missing home or homesickness, is like time travelling, and it is transformative. I found a way to literalize that cliché of being at home everywhere, and one day when I’m done grieving I have a hunch now that I will find that it kind of worked.

There is a cherry tree outside the window here, too, the biggest I have ever seen.

Hestia Peppe contributes a monthly column for Full Stop of still life writing concerning sugar givers, salt cellars, talismans, fetishes, and transitional objects; an experiment with vanitas not so much as momento mori but as animist memoir.


 
 
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