Happy Birthday Stackie

Today you are two years old.

Photograph by Suzy Kunz of buildings as a birthday cake.

Here we are, two years later, you and me. We’re at a bar in Catskill called Hemlock. You’re licking salt on your glass. It’s raining. A soft summer rain it’s okay to get caught in. We are celebrating another day. Everyone here looks prettier. I’m taking hits of air. I’m microdosing hope and thinking how I can apply it to my life.

The excitement is you, leaving messages in the cracks of walls and coming to Zoom conversations. Everything is framed with purpose in a rearview mirror. We share a love of words. We love the nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. Every time I write, I’m doing the best I can. So are you.

When I was two years old, I don’t know what I was doing. Richard says he can remember looking at the sky in his pram, wheeled along the street by his mum. You know how dogs and parrots learn tricks no one taught them? When I see the word lesson, I think there’s no such thing. When I was six, I memorized the words to the songs on the Hans Christian Anderson album. You can test me.

A little while ago, Richard said, “Archaeology is the art of finding a small difference and making a large point of it.” I said, “Who said that?” He said, “I did.” I had been talking with him about a remark attributed to Margaret Mead that may or may not be factual and that has been circulating for years because it makes people like themselves for being human. No one else really likes humans except dogs with tender hearts who feel sorry for them.

According to the story, a student asked Mead what the hallmark of civilization was and instead of saying it was a piece of pottery or the invention of perfume (my guess), she said the healed femur bone of an adult. For the bone to have healed, it meant other individuals had cared for the injured one instead of leaving them to die alone or be eaten. You know and I know that the temperament of humans has more in common with rip-your-head-off chimpanzees than with let’s just have sex bonobos—chimps, bonobos, and humans shared a common primate ancestor around six million years ago.

Mead was saying—or people want to think she was saying—that helping someone else through difficulty is where civilization starts. Freud would say, not so fast, Margaret, civilization starts with repression and conformity—the basis of our inexorable discontent. I don’t really care where civilization starts, but I like the story of the femur bone, because it makes you stretch you mind back to a time and place you can’t really know. At the cross roads of myth and history, you go left instead of straight ahead.

Or you walk on Warren Street in the rain, as Richard and I did today. I remember the first time we walked there together. It was in 2008, a few years after we’d started out. We were driving around in the Berkshires, visiting people I knew. Did I have it in my mind we’d one day move here?

I thought Warren Street would remind Richard of high streets in English villages, like ones where he grew up. On those kinds of streets, you might see a row of 19^th Century buildings with a butcher, a grocer, and a chemist, followed by a church, a library, and a bank. Warren Street kinda looked that way with its restored Federal and colonial buildings, but the ground floors that had once been the front rooms of homes or practical businesses had been converted into antique stores, galleries, restaurants, and coffee shops, leaving the higher floors to rise, as Richard said, “like architectural afterthoughts or extra layers on a cake.” To Richard, Warren Street gave the impression of a town concocted to seem like a town rather than one tied to its historic origins. It’s exciting to walk anywhere with Richard because he will destroy whatever pleasure you are feeling based on your ignorance and inattentiveness.

After our visit to Hudson, Richard researched the city and shared his findings with me—like there’s any way we’re not going to talk about what we’re thinking. He wrote a piece about this visit and the way a place that attracts tourists is both a location where people live and a place that stands for a set of values. A few years later, Richard and I co-wrote a piece for the journal Int-AR, about the “adaptive reuse” of formerly industrial sites for use as cultural spaces—think Dia Beacon, for example, a museum for giant contemporary art installations in a former printing plant for Nabisco, or Tate Modern in London, converted from a power station in Southwark.

Hudson, too, has long ago traded its industrial past—as well as its history as a whaling village and for a hundred years the healthy beating heart of prostitution and gambling—for a tourist present tense without reminders of poverty and pain. The stuff in the shops was expensive on our first visit there and still is. Who can afford to buy it? Visitors and transplants from New York City but not many of the people who’ve lived in the region for generations, who’ve lost jobs as manufacture here has dried up, and whose ancestors built the city.

The Hudson we first visited and the Hudson where we walk now, is both a place where people mail packages and see the dentist, and a place that stands for architectural preservation, organic food, art and culture, sustainability, and local ownership. A place that is itself and also itself on acid.

If you hang out with Richard long enough, you become aware there is no real place that is not also, at least in part, a symbol of itself. You become a postmodern flanneur and in a sense a permanent tourist who wants to slip past the velvet ropes of front rooms and discover what’s going on upstairs.

All forms of adaptive reuse in architecture are conversations between the present and the past and between the activities of building up and tearing down. We feel in these structures the simultaneity of different time periods and processes of change. What varies is the degree of conscious dialogue between present and past and how much of the past’s reality is invited—as a form of pentimento—to glint through. Another way to pose this question is: How much has been removed from the history of a site in order to preserve it?

You know I’m not only talking about architecture and cities. The stack is the adaptive reuse of memory. All writing is, if looked at a certain way. I mean a dialogue the narrator is having between a memory that has been carried forward—a memory that is a healed femur bone—and the thoughts the healed femur bone arouses now, in the moment I am talking to you in the bar.

In 2008, on a visit to Tate Modern, Richard and I saw a show about Dada artists highlighting their friendships and collaborations. When Picabia was dying, Man Ray made a little painting and wrote on it that the show was not cancelled. It was merely an entr’acte. Duchamp sent a telegram saying he would soon see Picabia again.

We cannot say goodbye, and that is part of the feeling stirred by the adaptive reuse of buildings and of memory in writing. In architecture, the question is whether the past is merely an instrument for today’s purposes or whether it’s allowed, in some capacity, to speak to us about itself. In writing, every word is a living ghost.

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On Warren Street 2009 petting a small horse.

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