Story for performance #72
webcast from Paris at 08:37PM, 31 Aug 05

a frozen smile
Source: Robert F. Worth, ‘U.S. jets strike targets near Syria border’, New York Times in International Herald Tribune online, 31/08/05.
Writer/s: Ian Reilly

A frozen smile and broken teeth. A picture of my dead grandmother in the warm embrace of our Victorian den. Ezra Pound’s petals littered on beaten-up hardwood floors that creak and croak and cry with every marginal step. The snoring of senile men in segregated housing and sex on rooftops in Savannah. These are broken images of you and your family and you’ve left me here in this (now) carnivalesque parlour to piece them together. I’ve seen Buñuel films in abandoned cinemas and Dali paintings in decrepit galleries—you brought me to these places, one foot placed meticulously in front of the other—and yet I never liked them. I liked the milieus, not the material. Maybe that’s the best way to define my feelings toward you: liking the milieu, not the material. Liking the idea of love, not the actual thing. There’s no place for you here in the active imagination of my eccentric mind. All that’s left of you here—in this room, in this mind—is a frozen smile and broken teeth.

We left the gallery in search of pizza on a cold December evening. The moon waning, with its pregnant pause we both stole glances from other twenty-somethings exiting and entering that lounge we would frequent on weekends and holidays. Tuesdays were days of reading and writing, sketching and painting. At night, street sadness and the lull of melancholic masses drew us out of our fortress into the dimly lit back pages of the sprawling downtown.

You wore shawls and I experimented with bowties. We weren’t ever dandy or hipster: we were about as fashionable as the elderly exiting a bingo. Somehow that didn’t matter because I could never remember what you looked like; even when you were next to me. You could only ever remember the colour of my eyes. I thanked you from time to time because I was always uncertain. Green, you would remind me, and I felt relieved having forgotten the colour of my mother’s eyes, the eyes she gave me.

That night I saw a warmth in the way you wore your smock sweater, a sensuality in the way you gently swayed your hips at the pizzeria counter, and a playful quality in the way your fingers climbed the impregnable wall of my neck. My sanity has always been called into question but you assured me that sanity, or its quarrelling cousin, insanity, was relative. So long as you could negotiate your way through the chaos of modern life, you were sane. These were your words, not mine. You could always win me over with words and poetry, even though I earned my keep through the publication of poetry journals and political manifestoes. Every night you would paint my body with your now forgotten eyes and every morning I would wake to find a freshly painted canvas, outlining the tired body I had lost to grief and sorrow. But my green eyes captured a new sense of lasting vision, of looking outward, of prophetic achievement. In the full realization of those finely-measured circles of green, the green of a spear of summer grass, an image was projected with haunting clarity, with craft-like precision: a frozen smile and broken teeth.

Only one question remains fixed in the labyrinth of my mind: Am I responsible for that frozen smile, so pregnant and self-sustaining, or am I the author of those broken teeth, the site of discarded dreams and unspeakable disease?

Adapted for performance by Barbara Campbell from a story by Ian Reilly.