I opened the door to my old room that night, turned on the lights, and my heart cringed at what lay in front of my eyes. It wasn’t that everything had been covered up with sheets to ward off dust that affected me (although I did get an eerie feeling of musty, stagnant death) so much as the fact that everything was still in their proper place, everything looked exactly the same, as if I had never left it before, as if my life had not in any way been changed by these years. I lay down in my bed, with my old pillows and sheets, that same creaky metal bed frame, and I found that I could not bring myself to sleep here anymore. The same decorations on those white walls, bright and obnoxious, that hideous red carpet stained with hair dye and spilled drinks, that bare light bulb emitting that horrid presence I used to know so well, the knowledge of that eerie dark hallway beyond that door; it all disgusted me so much, a past sucking me away from myself. I had to spend the night there though – where else could I go? Home seemed so far away…besides; my apartment in Brooklyn wasn’t home to me anyway. I had no trouble falling asleep there, this was true; yet who couldn’t if they were supposed to stay awake all the time?
I realized that night, and in my future visits to my "former" home, that what I had considered home had changed for me, and that seeing my original home, in its unaltered state, had changed me. This same room, that I had called home for most of my life, with objects I knew as well as my own body, ceased to be of any comfort, any meaning. I remembered the fights I used to have when I was young, slamming my door shut and holding it closed with all of my might, stomping on my floor and banging on the walls as hard as I possibly could, and I wished more than ever that I had indeed destroyed it back then, that I had made a hole on the floor swallowing my carpet, my desk, my chair, everything in the way of my eyes that night. I wanted to destroy everything in front of me, these objects of mine that would never talk to me again, to knock down my room, my house.
I’m not bothered by my memories; I can still recall myself as a child in this room and smile inside. But to have my memories exist quite ostentatiously in my current presence, to see my past existing so happily right in front of me, unmarred, unruined, was too disturbing for me to comprehend.
This then, was my new home, this feeling of the absence of memory’s truth in the reality of physical existence. I suppose a home that dwells in my mind could, then, be comfortable anywhere in the world, but there I was, this house of mine in College Point, I had to deal with its presence. Time echoes, grows all the time, yet the physicality of certain spaces and objects remain, relics in another world, offering only an image of what I once needed. How does one break out of this repetitive infinity, to live by an ever-changing definition of oneself in the machine?


Precis: Infinity Scaffold for a Mechanical Echo Field

With the physical persistence of artifacts of ritual in one’s memory fading to an absence in the development of the ritual, a synaesthetic removal necessitates from the repetition of a mechanical world through an echo machine specifically created by an infinity scaffold. The ritual, although an act of repetition, inherently develops through its retracing an echo of absence from its own permanence. These permanent remnants of an act that repeats itself so infinitely that its identity grows past recognition are themselves an impermanent resonance. One dwells in the present image of the past that is contrary to a spontaneous mobility drawn from the echo. Echo, never precisely reproduced, is a screen between transition and inertia of ritual. The image is sustainable through the infinity scaffold, a construction of temporal nature that succeeds permanence in its mutability, collapsibility and growth. The scaffold exists always for the construction of permanence; it lives to sustain another being. Yet its constitution also recognizes permanence as owning a lifespan, a decaying body that it must revive, infinitely. The building supported by the scaffold suffers many continuous deaths, yet the scaffold, as a mechanism of temporal parts, lives and breathes forever. The many reincarnations of the building as evidence of the existence of ritual become a temporal absence to its own ritual, whose voice is always echoing.
The infinity scaffold, as an apparition of ritual, is the basis of the echo. In its permutations a synaesthetic language is possible, derived from an assemblage of materials that permeate sound in this field of reincarnation, an act of cleansing, washing. Movement inspired through stagnation, stagnation derived through movement. The echo screen asks, what ceases to live and what is to live forever?

So she was turned away
To hide her face, her lips, her guilt among the trees,
Even their leaves, to haunt caves of the forest,
To feed her love on melancholy sorrow
Which, sleepless, turned her body to a shade,
First pale and wrinkled, then a sheet of air,
Then bones, which some say turned to thin-worn rocks;
And last her voice remained. Vanished in forest,
Far from her usual walks on hills and valleys,
She’s heard by all who call; her voice has life.
-The Metamorphoses, Ovid