Serendipity.

[rivka]

Every once in a while, I type the names "Lilo Raymond" and "Amagansett" into a search engine or an online posters/prints store. I'm looking for a poster of a particular photograph, with that artist and title. I've known that it exists, despite my inability to find a copy, because I have in one of my closets a wrinkled, stained, tattered exemplar. It belonged to Hilary.[1] She left it to me.

For a couple of years, I've wanted to replace the poster. It's in terrible shape, and it means more to me as an icon than as an artifact. Her fingers are the ones that left dark smudges in the corners, yes, but it's the image itself that truly brings her to my mind. But I've never been able to find a copy. Not of that print, and not of the other print she left me: an Edward Hopper painting of a girl sitting alone at a restaurant table. For years, it's been as though Hilary had the only copies of those prints ever sold.

Enter elynne, who made a reference in clairaide's journal to the journal of someone named brainpuberty. Whose reference to a Dali painting called Young Virgin Auto-Sodomized by Her Own Chastity led me to a site called barewalls.com. Where I typed the name "Lilo Raymond" once more into the search box, and immediately found my print.

This had never happened before. So I went back to Google and once again entered the words "Lilo Amagansett," and this time I discovered that the print could also be found here and here.

It's everywhere, apparently. You'd think I'd buy it right away, but suddenly I'm unsure.

For a long time I thought of this as a melancholy picture - the empty bed seemed to naturally speak of loss. It was years before I thought to ask someone else if the picture struck them as sad, before it even occurred to me that there might be alternative interpretations.

Now I look at the print and see it from multiple overlapping perspectives. It's the same picture I've always seen, all bittersweet memories and aching loss. It's the memory of a scene of passion, lovers too caught up in enjoying each other and the day to make the bed. It's just a picture of a piece of furniture, with some interesting interplay of light and shadow in the rumpled sheets.

In a weird way, it's no longer what I was looking for. I'm no longer sure what it would mean to hang it on my wall.



[1] I'm finding that I'm not up for an extended explanation of who Hilary was. She was my best friend, and then she was my girlfriend, and that ended because she killed herself when we were both nineteen. Obviously, there are enormous tracts of unsaid material here. If you realy want to know the details, try doing a Google Groups search for my name and hers.

Comments

[elynne.livejournal.com]

In a way, I'm honored to have been the hook of a train of serendipity and realization for you. I take synchronicity rather seriously, since it's always been an - indicator in my life.

The picture itself strikes me as a bit sad, but also warm and comforting. It's an empty place, but it's also so easy to imagine people there, tangled up in each other and dozing, or talking quietly. I see possibilities as well as memories.

But then, I know all too well how it is to have the memory of a loss change the way something looks, without changing that thing at all. :/ Take care of you, hon.

[kalmn.livejournal.com]

In a weird way, it's no longer what I was looking for. I'm no longer sure what it would mean to hang it on my wall.

an option, if you were looking for options, would be to get it and not hang it, whether that be not hang it now or not hang it ever.

[johnpalmer.livejournal.com]

Mode = philosopher with insufficient sleep

I dunno... the original print, that was part of Hilary, who also left the world too quickly, and unfinished. A new print might be as much, or more, a part of Lilo Raymond, and not have the same meaning.

And maybe the important thing was knowing that this link to a loved one was still there, that, in a sense, the world, and the universe itself, still remembers her, and mourns her. (And it does, you know... as do I, and so do many who love you.)

Herm. But keep in mind that meaning is what you make of it. If you acquire a new copy to honor and cherish your memories, that's what it'll mean, even if you now see more than you used to in it.

[therealjae.livejournal.com]

That's so wonderful that you tracked the picture down. I just love the research possibilities of the Internet. I recently tracked down something that I had been looking for for about ten years, myself, and had in fact paid money to find.

As for the rest: If it were me, I'd buy a copy, and then not put it on my wall, I think.

-J

Wow.

[trinker.livejournal.com]

For years, ever since you mentioned that print to me, I have wondered what that print looked like. And I've imagined all sorts of different beds with white rumpled sheets.

You seem to be having a bed-filled week, as well as a run of the past showing up in your present. I'd read into the portents, but it seems a bit presumptuous of me to go on at length about you. Especially here, where I'm not inclined to do so.

But...I have some long-cherished posters from my past, and I've been thinking of what to do with them, when I have the wall space to hang things. (Right now, every wall seems to be covered with either whiteboard/corkboard or bookcases.) I think rather than replacing them, I'm going to have them mounted, rips and smudges and all, in good frames, so that it's not just the content but the actual life of the poster that is viewed as art.

[rosefox]

My first thought is "Holy wow, that looks so much like my bedroom in the apartment I had in Jersey City". And because that bed, rumpled and unmade, has so many associations for me, I can't put a single adjective on the image. So for me, no, it isn't... melancholy, not exactly.

Though damn, now I really miss that apartment. And that bed.