Chalk by Joshua Rivkin

Author:Joshua Rivkin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2018-10-15T16:00:00+00:00

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In the late summer of 2012, more than five years since I lived in Houston and taught at the Menil, I returned. The sky was washed-out peach and pink, ribbons of chemical light reflected on the cars lurching slowly forward on I-45. A clichéd entrance to the city. I wished it was raining or snowing, something less expected, less predictable than this familiar collision of glimmering cars and tinted sky. The nature of the city is the nature of the city. I felt the familiar rush of nostalgia and anxiety, a return to a city of ghosts and lost loves.

The fantasy of the archive is the secret hope that one might find the lost document that rewrites history: the unpublished novel in the bottom of a drawer, the reclusive poet’s letters to her lover, the play never produced, the opera unsung. I wanted to find an answer to an unknown question. Or maybe, I was just there to see the shape of his handwriting.

The next morning, the head archivist, Geri, an older woman, her small face dominated by eyeglasses wide as ripe grapefruits, met me in the back atrium of the Menil. A Warhol portrait of the museum’s founder, Dominique de Menil, florid and playful, hung behind her.

Geri led me down several flights of stairs into a lower basement, storage for rolled canvases, works leaving or returning, as well as the museum’s archive. It was a section of the Menil I’d never seen before, not part of any tour. I felt like a conspirator, a secret knowledge of this underworld unknown to the visitors who strolled the galleries above.

“Everything you might need is here for you,” she said when we arrived through the maze at a small metal desk with boxes of files, each neatly ordered and labeled. I hoped she was right.

I thought of the writers who would come after me. How they’d sit at this same metal desk with its small reading light opening boxes and files. We all want the same thing, some abstract intimacy and connection, some claim against forgetting, against error. I was there to find something: a starting point, a way in, some deeper sense of the works and the person who made them—not just the how or the when, but the why, the impossible who. I’m reminded of what James Baldwin wrote, “The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions hidden by the answers.”3

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