In May, love was not exactly in the air. It was something else. A chance for a new beginning. But I didn’t know where it was to begin with. And when I read All the Things I Don’t Want to Know by Deborah Levy, I knew that more important than knowing where to start is knowing where to stop.
“That spring when life was very hard and I was at war with my lot and simply couldn’t see where there was to get to, I seemed to cry most on escalators at train stations. Going down them was fine but there was something about standing still and being carried upwards that did it. From apparently nowhere tears poured out of me and by the time I got to the top and felt the wind rushing in, it took all my effort to stop myself from sobbing. It was as if the momentum of the escalator carrying me forwards and upwards was a physical expression of a conversation I was having with myself.”
This spring, I feel at war with myself, with my lot too. On some days, I feel shattered, lost, and on other days powerful and beautiful. I feel happy and then I surprise myself when I hear weeping, because I think I hear someone else crying. And then I don’t know how to stop myself from weeping. I get home, run the key into the door, and my dog emerges from the dark, barking, and I slip into a deep slumber with only one sock on. When I woke up the next morning, I decided to go to Belvedere 21. That hot Saturday morning, no visitors were in the exhibition space. I was by myself, going from one installation to the next photograph, scanning the wall text. I looked out through the glass windows to the backyard. There was Hans Haacke’s giant dinosaur-like sculpture with neon lights and a live display of stock market data wrapped around its skeleton.
The title Geschenkter Gaul suggests that this is actually a horse skeleton. I looked it up later to understand the wordplay, “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth,” which means not to question the value of something that is given to you as a gift. But Hans Haacke wants you to inspect this public monumental gift, to question it and see what is inside it.
I was deep in my observation of this sculpture when, from the corner of my eye, I felt someone’s presence and cocked my head to my left. There it was, a photograph of a mynah bird on the wall, looking right back at me. I went closer and looked at the two-dimensional image of the bird. I unlocked my phone screen and typed in my notes: A MYNAH BIRD? It was during the time I was writing and thinking about Mona all day. I knew that there is a cost in knowing the truth of where you are in life, but what are you going to do with that knowing? Would you let it go? Would you pick up the phone and dial a random number and talk to a stranger about it? Or will you get a mynah bird confessor to accompany you as you lean into the romance of the everyday on autopilot? And when the mynah bird was placed into my novel’s world, I realized the bird refused to talk, but to listen, unlike anyone else in that city.
