I had entered the partly bulldozed house by crawling through a window.
Being inside the house was profoundly disturbing. He must have died and the place he called home was being redeveloped into monster houses. I had only known him by sight as I drove by when he picked up his mail from the mailbox on the road. I once went into the half-razed house that had belonged to an old man. This ceaseless movement and change is the source of poignancy and beauty to which Shakespeare was alluding. All these things, large and small, are the churning wakes of human activity whose mundane nature transmutes into a mystery of untold tales before they disappear. The graffiti and shattered windows speak of another time. The factories lining the railroad tracks between Baltimore and New York fascinate me. On a larger scale, abandoned houses carrying the marks of lives once lived there. I am fond of discarded things that retain the traces of human use, such as anonymous penciled scribbling on an envelope addressed to an unknown individual. One of my constructions, “Revels Ended”, is a direct expression of this view of things. A bitter sweet remembrance of people and things long gone, and of a time now almost as foreign to me as to those who never watched “The Honeymooners” on Saturday nights, or who saw the first 1955 Chevy V8 sitting on the dealers linoleum floor. Prospero’s speech from “The Tempest” awakens feelings of unrequited love. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.”
Yea all which it inherit, shall dissolve And like the insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind.
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